FOOTNOTES
FOOTNOTES
PREFACE
1 From an unpublished letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B. (c. 1933).
2 Graham Hough, ‘The Screwtape Letters’, The Times (10 Feb. 1966), p. 15.
3 W. W. Robson, ‘C. S. Lewis’, The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. I (Summer, 1966), p. 253.
4 The Screwtape Letters, London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd. (1942), pp. 64–5.
5 The Problem of Pain, London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd. (1940), p. 106.
6 Perelandra, London: The Bodley Head (1943), p. 126, (tenses altered).
7 ‘The Weight of Glory’, Theology, vol. XLIII (Nov. 1941), pp. 273–74.
8 ‘Transposition’, Transposition and Other Addresses, London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd. (1949), p. 20. An expanded version of this essay appears in Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, London: Fontana Books (1965).
CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
[1 Cf. Lewis’s ‘How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music’ in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 17–18: ‘The Teddy-bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi-social relationship with it. That is what “playing with it” means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter. Too close or prolonged attention to its changeless and expressionless face impedes the play. A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest icon. The emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the material image and go beyond.’]
[2 The Recluse, Part I, Book I 11. 772–74, from Appendix A in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. V, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1949).]
[3 ‘Mix’ is, I think, a scribal error for Wordsworth’s ‘blend’ as given in the de Selincourt and Darbishire edition.]
[4 op. cit., 11. 829–34.]
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE
1 I take Scrutiny throughout as it is represented in Brother Every’s article. An independent criticism of that periodical is no part of my purpose.
2 We should be cautious of assuming that we know what their most banal expressions actually stand for in the minds of uneducated, holy persons. Of a saint’s conversation Patmore says: ‘He will most likely dwell with reiteration on commonplaces with which you were perfectly acquainted before you were twelve years old; but you must . . . remember that the knowledge which is to you a superficies is to him a solid’ (Rod, Root and Flower, Magna Moralia, xiv).
3 On a possible deeper significance in this miracle, see F. Mauriac, Vie de Jésus, cap. 5, ad fin.
4 Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 69.
5 Scope and Nature of University Education. Discourse 8.
6 Op. cit., VIII, p. 227, in Everyman Edition.
7 VII, p. 184, 5.
8 IV, p. 112.
9 IV, p. 111.
10 VII, p. 180.
11 IV, p. 100.
12 IV, p. 113.
13 IV, p. 114.
14 If this is true, as I should gladly believe but have never seen proved.
15 See Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven.
16 I am quite ready to describe Sehnsucht as ‘spilled religion’, provided it is not forgotten that the spilled drops may be full of blessing to the unconverted man who licks them up, and therefore begins to search for the cup whence they were spilled. For the drops will be taken by some whose stomachs are not yet sound enough for the full draught.
17 Pomp is at times a literary virtue. Pomposity (the unsuccessful attempt at pomp) may, of course, spring from an evil (pride); it may also be the maladroit effort of a humble writer to ‘rise’ to a subject which he honestly feels to be great.
18 For example, God forbid that when Mr Bethell (May, 1940, p. 361) uses ‘old-fashioned’ as a dyslogistic term we should immediately conclude that he really had the garage or dressmaking philosophy (Madam would like the latest model) which his words suggest. We know it slipped out by a sort of accident, for which veniam petimus damusque vicissim.
19 This applies also to ‘bad language’ in the popular sense, obscenity or profanity. The custom of such language has its origin in sin, but to the individual speaker it may be mere meaningless noise.
ON ETHICS
[1 See Lewis’s essay on ‘Historicism’, pp. 100ff.]
[2 Readers will have already recognized themes in this paper which recall the main argument of Lewis’s Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943; Bles, 1946)—a book which is, in my opinion, an all but indispensable introduction to the entire corpus of Lewisiana. Though I am unable to establish a date for this paper, my guess is that it anticipates the Abolition by a year or so.
On the similarities in various ethical systems, see his ‘Illustrations of the Tao’ (= The Way, or the Natural Law) which forms the Appendix to The Abolition of Man.]
DE FUTILITATE
[1 Lewis’s best and fullest treatment on the validity of human reasoning appears in the first six chapters of this book Miracles: A Preliminary Study (Bles, 1947), especially Chapter III, ‘The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist’. He later felt that he had in chapter III confused two senses of irrational; this chapter was rewritten and appears in its corrected form in the paper-backed edition of Miracles (Fontana Books, 1960).]
[2 No doubt Lewis is referring to many of the poems in his first book, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (Heinemann, 1919) which he published under the pseudonym, Clive Hamilton. One of the best examples in the collection is the following lines from ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’:
. . . Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear.
Yet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining
And lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear
The curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead.
But lo! I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts
Have made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped
Over a little planet . . .
. . . . . .
Ah, sweet, if a man could cheat him! If you could flee away
Into some other country beyond the rosy West,
To hide in the deep forests and be for ever at rest
From the rankling hate of God and the outworn world’s decay!]
THE FUNERAL OF A GREAT MYTH
1 ‘Darwinism Today’, Possible Worlds, p. 28.
[2 In a paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club on ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, Lewis admits that if Christian Theology were only a myth he would not find even it as attractive as the Myth considered in this paper: ‘Christianity offers the attraction neither of optimism nor of pessimism. It represents the life of the universe as being very like the mortal life of men on this planet—“of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” ’ The Socratic Digest (1945).]
ON CHURCH MUSIC
[1 Before this article was written, Lewis was invited by the Rev Mr Erik Routley to become a member of the panel of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland to whom new hymns are submitted in order that their merit might be assessed. As could be expected, Lewis refused. However, his answers to the request are published (with Mr Routley’s letters) as ‘Correspondence with an Anglican who Dislikes Hymns’, The Presbyter, VI, No. 2 (1948) pp. 15–20. (The two letters from Lewis, dated 16 July 1946 and 21 September 1946, are printed over the initials ‘A.B.’)]
HISTORICISM
[1 ‘Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic’, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1942), pp. 32ff.]
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
[1 Apparently referring to an enumeration of points Lewis made in the missing pages.]
[2 I cannot find this in the Paradiso. It may be, however, a conflation of several passages. See Paradiso viii, 13; x, 35; and xiv, 85.]
[3 Lewis is referring, I believe, to the Rev Canon Andrew Young, whose poems, he felt, were something like a combination of Wordsworth and Marvell. An interesting reference to ‘weirs’ is found in Young’s poem, ‘The Slow Race’. For discussion on other possibilities see my letter, ‘A C. S. Lewis Mystery’, The Spectator (28 October 1966), p. 546.]
[4 ‘Excerpts from a Report to the Galactic Council’, The Listener, vol. LII (14 October 1954), p. 612.]
5 Looking towards is neither more nor less metaphorical than attending to.
[6 An interesting variation of this same theme is found in Lewis’s poem, ‘The Country of the Blind’, Poems, ed. Walter Hooper, (Bles, 1964), pp. 33–34.]
PETITIONARY PRAYER: A PROBLEM WITHOUT AN ANSWER
[1 Matt. xxi, 22: ‘And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.’]
[2 Mark xi, 23–4: ‘Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea”, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will.’]
[3 James i, 6–8: ‘But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways, will receive anything from the Lord.’]
MODERN THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL CRITICISM
[1 The Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, now the Bishop of Edinburgh (The Rt Rev Kenneth Carey).]
[2 While the Bishop was out of the room, Lewis read ‘The Sign at Cana’ in Alec Vidler’s Windsor Sermons (S.C.M. Press, 1958). The Bishop recalls that when he asked him what he thought about it, Lewis ‘expressed himself very freely about the sermon and said that he thought that it was quite incredible that we should have had to wait nearly 2,000 years to be told by a theologian called Vidler that what the Church has always regarded as a miracle was, in fact, a parable!’]
[3 Lewis is quoting from an article, ‘The Gospel According to St. John’, by Walter Lock in A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, including the Apocrypha, ed. by Charles Gore, Henry Leighton Goudge, Alfred Guillaume (S.P.C.K., 1928), p. 241. Lock, in turn, is quoting from James Drummond’s An Inquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (Williams and Norgate, 1903).]
[4 Lewis means, I think, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Williard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953).]
[5 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, translated by Kendrick Grobel, vol. 1 (S.C.M. Press, 1952), p. 30.]
[6 Op. cit., p. 35.]
[7 Lewis’s essay on ‘William Morris’ appears in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford, 1939).]
[8 Lewis corrected this error in the following letter, ‘Books for Children’, in The Times Literary Supplement (28 November 1958), p. 689: ‘Sir,—A review of Mr R. L. Green’s Land of the Lord High Tiger in your issue of 21 November spoke of myself (in passing) with so much kindness that I am reluctant to cavil at anything it contained: but in justice to Mr Green I must. The critic suggested that Mr Green’s Tiger owed something to my fairy-tales. In reality this is not so and is chronologically impossible. The Tiger was an old inhabitant, and his land a familiar haunt, of Mr Green’s imagination long before I began writing. There is a moral here for all of us as critics. I wonder how much Quellenforschung in our studies of older literature seems solid only because those who knew the facts are dead and cannot contradict it?’]
[9 For a fuller treatment on book-reviewing, see Lewis’s essay ‘On Criticism’ in his Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper, (Bles, 1966), pp. 43–58.]
[10 George Tyrrell, ‘The Apocalyptic Vision of Christ’ in Christianity at the Cross-Roads (Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), p. 125.]
THE SEEING EYE
[1 The reference is to Lewis’s interplanetary novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. He was probably the first writer to introduce the idea of having fallen terrestrial invaders discover on other planets—in his own books, Mars (Out of the Silent Planet) and Venus (Perelandra)—unfallen rational beings who were in no need of redemption and with nothing to learn from us. See also his essay, ‘Will We Lose God in Outer Space?’ Christian Herald, vol. LXXXI (April, 1958), pp. 19, 74–6.]