Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

73 (#ulink_4e1b6c6f-ef2a-5bd5-bbb7-90e2ababe26c) Bodleian Library.

74 (#ulink_ea57c798-d83a-5d5c-8737-83e0d58aded6) Jane (‘Janie’) Agnes McNeill (1889-1959) was a close friend from Strandtown. See her biography in CL I, p. 117n.

75 (#ulink_da5d9da2-fd44-51d9-a4e7-54378072a04d) In his letter of 16 March 1953 Bles said: ‘With some trepidation I venture to address you again on the gender of mythological creatures…On returning to the galleys of “The Silver Chair”…I find the same thing has happened again, not only with the Dwarf but with that curious creature, the Marsh-wiggle…It looks to me as though the discrepancies are due to the fact that, although, for some philological reason, you try to keep Dwarf and Marsh-wiggle neuter, you naturally think of them as persons–as indeed most readers would. If I may say so, this neuter business seems strained and artificial, and in places reminds me of Mark Twain’s joke about the German language, “The girl took the spoon and fork. It laid him and her on the table’” (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 20).

76 (#ulink_af313e38-517d-5971-a0d4-d3761c19569e) Bles replied on 18 March 1953: ‘I am so glad that you agree to a “he” for the Dwarf and the Marshwiggle. I would suggest this Rule: when mythological creatures speak like human beings, masculine/feminine gender; when they are personae mutai [silent characters] neuter’ (ibid., fol. 22).

77 (#ulink_1903ccc0-6afb-5ecf-840f-802e7f6022bf) Lewis probably had in mind the following three statements regarding natural law. The classical definition is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation’ (Collationes in decent praeceptis, 1). Cicero (51 BC) said in De Republica, 11:33: ‘There is in fact a true law–namely, right reason–which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal.’ The chief New Testament text on which natural law is based is Romans 2:14-15: ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.’ Lewis’s writings on natural law include the first book of Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, and ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ and ‘On Ethics’ in Christian Reflections.

78 (#ulink_13dadc26-8ba5-57c8-b192-48531cb34458) These reflections were to be repeated the following year in Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge, ‘De Descriptione Temporum: ‘It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past’ (SLE, p. 10). See ‘A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage’, CP, p. 17, which begins: ‘You said “The world is going back to Paganism”. Oh bright Vision!’

79 (#ulink_cb9418d2-21dc-5056-97d5-d672548b9409) i.e., the tale which was eventually to be titled The Horse and His Boy.

80 (#ulink_1a3f99e0-0692-54a7-87fd-64b8384c7e5c)P. Vergili Maronis: Opera, ed. Frederick Arthur Hirtzel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. [iii]: ‘Eager to correct what they consider errors, they more often trample upon the most delicate flowers of the Muses.’

81 (#ulink_0524b422-af2b-56b0-bbfe-424ce6106d18) Delirium tremens.

82 (#ulink_0524b422-af2b-56b0-bbfe-424ce6106d18) Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iv, 140: ‘My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.’

83 (#ulink_c557a3ff-6d04-5133-9500-a5c701e29a10) Michael was an American schoolboy.

84 (#ulink_6863f855-0ba4-59c7-9260-f0909325377f) In her letter to Lewis of 18 March, Gebbert wrote: ‘A physical condition…caused my mind to wander and speculate for too long now, and recently drove me to a doctor. He told me in no uncertain terms that my husband and I can expect an heir or heiress in a month or two! And all along I had been blaming everything on seasickness!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

85 (#ulink_6863f855-0ba4-59c7-9260-f0909325377f) Lewis ends SBJ, ch. 12, ‘Guns and Good Company’ with these same words.

86 (#ulink_0cefde73-8eb6-5702-914c-f334196d736c) In her letter of 18 March Gebbert continued: ‘I was so dismayed at the doctor’s diagnosis that, for a moment, I wished it had not happened–that I was not going to have a child. I know I was guilty of the lowest form of ignorance: fear, and that night, as I was dining alone in my library, my eyes fell upon the Bible I keep open on the table. It had been open to Psalms for several days-1 had been reading them off and on and had not turned or disturbed the pages in any way. Nor had anyone else. This night, then, as I glanced from the food to the Book, I saw and read the verse: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.” Isaiah, Chap. 66, Verse 9. How did the pages get turned from Psalms? And by whom? In such ways, at times, do we receive the miracle of His rebuke, His admonition, His comfort, and the workings of His plan? Am I wrong to take the words I read as a rebuke? Am I wrong in assuming my eye fell on the chapter and verse it was supposed to?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

87 (#ulink_0cefde73-8eb6-5702-914c-f334196d736c) Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.’

88 (#ulink_0cefde73-8eb6-5702-914c-f334196d736c)The Screwtape Letters (London: Bles, 1942; Fount, 1998), Letter 27, pp. 106-7: ‘If you tried to explain to [the Patient] that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy [God] harmonizes the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so…What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events.’

89 (#ulink_9f21b2f0-2fda-55a0-892e-3d6538131291) Chang had sent Lewis his translation of a Chinese allegory to read.

90 (#ulink_09210cc1-840d-51dc-ab05-9b8ff3d11b02) ‘model of Christ’.

91 (#ulink_09210cc1-840d-51dc-ab05-9b8ff3d11b02)The Great Divorce, Preface, p. 5: ‘It was a wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light, heraldically coloured. The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive with. The other he waved before his face as if to fan away the greasy steam of the rain.’ Cf. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cántica I Hell L’Inferno, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), IX, 82: ‘His left hand, moving, fanned away the gross/Air from his face, nor elsewise did he seem/At all to find the way laborious.’

92 (#ulink_09210cc1-840d-51dc-ab05-9b8ff3d11b02)The Great Divorce, ch. 12, cf. Dante, Purgatorio, XXX.

93 (#ulink_c85041a9-f4a6-5ebb-90ad-ef78e020c21c) i.e., Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso.

94 (#ulink_c85041a9-f4a6-5ebb-90ad-ef78e020c21c) See the discussion of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in CL II, pp. 440, 541, 630, 753.

95 (#ulink_a22f80d1-185a-50cd-ae8a-dad258be70a0) A vast French prose romance of the fourteenth century, in which the anonymous author sought to link the legends of Alexander the Great and King Arthur.

96 (#ulink_a22f80d1-185a-50cd-ae8a-dad258be70a0) Old French.

97 (#ulink_a22f80d1-185a-50cd-ae8a-dad258be70a0) The story of Balin, or Balain, is recounted in the Old French Suite du Merlin and in Malory’s Morte dArthur. Balin and Balan are tragic brothers who, despite their nobility, wind up killing each other.

98 (#ulink_356dced4-2f59-561b-8b02-0d78a107dcaa) John Francis Gilfedder (1925-), musician, was born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 January 1925. After studying medicine, he began composing music in 1948. In 1951-2 he studied composition with Benjamin Frankel and Raymond Jones in England, and it was in 1952 that he met Lewis. On returning to Australia, he studied at the University of Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1958. This was followed by a Dip. Ed. in 1959, and a B. Ed. in 1962, also from the University of Melbourne. Gilfedder was employed by the Victorian Education Department, 1953-69, before taking up a position at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in 1970. His works include The Timeless Land Symphony, which had its premiere in 2002.

99 (#ulink_e51e24d8-6ffe-5ce8-939f-781e9e83d46c) Gilfedder suggested Lewis provide a glossary of obscure terms to go with the Arthurian poems of Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars.

100 (#ulink_ee8fca2d-65f6-5997-9172-57aa139a7ee7) A Religious of CSMV (Sister Penelope), The Coming of the Lord: A Study in the Creed (London: Mowbray, 1953; 2nd impression, 1954).

101 (#ulink_5692eafd-5c64-552c-8af6-20278c7d0fd6) Lewis was reading the typescript of the book; the page numbers of the typescript differ from those in the published book which are the ones given below.

102 (#ulink_5692eafd-5c64-552c-8af6-20278c7d0fd6) ibid., ch. 8, p. 48: ‘When a smith says of a sword, “It is finished,” he means that it is ready to be used. Only when it has served its purpose and has no longer any raison d’être, does the end of a thing mean its ceasing to exist. The two Ends that our Lord is seeing in St. Mark xiii exactly illustrate this difference. The End of the Temple was the destruction of the Temple, because the type was no longer needed when the thing typified, the New Humanity, had come. But when Man comes to his End, he will be finished in the sense of being ready, at last, for the purpose for which he was made.’

103 (#ulink_5692eafd-5c64-552c-8af6-20278c7d0fd6) ibid., ch. 6, pp. 34-5: ‘Except for the saying of John the Baptist, “He that hath the bride is the bridegroom,” the bride is never mentioned in the Gospels. Why? Surely because she did not yet exist, because the New Eve had yet to be created, as the Fathers loved to say, out of the pierced side of the Second Adam on the Cross. Later in the New Testament St. Paul, in Ephesians v.22 ff., uses the husband and wife analogy for the relation between Christ and His Church, but does not expressly name her either wife or bride. In the Apocalypse, however, right to the end she is only the bride, the wife to be. For the Church is not yet wholly one with Christ, as man was one with God before the Fall; and the consummation of “the marriage of the Lamb” with the bride of His own redeeming and remaking is itself the consummation for which the whole creation waits.’

104 (#ulink_5692eafd-5c64-552c-8af6-20278c7d0fd6) ibid., pp. 37-8: ‘There is so much that is obvious about Palm Sunday, our Lord’s deliberate and literal fulfilment of Zechariah’s prophecy about the peaceful king, the bitter contrast between that triumph and the Passion following, that other things no less significant often get overlooked…That impromptu procession of the Passover pilgrims on the first Palm Sunday combined the themes and types of both those two great Feasts. But over and above all that, the festal coming of Christ to Jerusalem was a symbol of His final, finished Coming to the Father as the Son of Man. That, at least, is how St. Bernard sees it. The liturgical palm procession, he says, which re-enacts that entry, represents the glory of our heavenly fatherland.’

105 (#ulink_5692eafd-5c64-552c-8af6-20278c7d0fd6) ibid., ch. 9, pp. 58-9: ‘The Greek says, “He was metamorphosed before them,” He changed His form. Metamorphosis, change of form at different stages on the way to perfection, is common in the natural world, the most familiar instance being that of the creature which ends up as a butterfly, after being successively an egg, a caterpillar, and a chrysalis. The Transfiguration of Christ suggests that Man also is a metamorphic creature…After death [Christ] passed again to His perfection, this time finally. In that perfected body, that yet bore the marks of what its larval form had borne on Calvary, He was touched and handled, as well as seen and heard, by many of His friends during the Great Forty Days.’

106 (#ulink_e649270e-3d66-543f-9c0e-aff2f88f71e6) ibid., ch. 2, p. 9.

107 (#ulink_e649270e-3d66-543f-9c0e-aff2f88f71e6) ‘waiting for’.

108 (#ulink_ec3e45b0-790e-539a-988c-da22c1ec307b) Sister Penelope removed this word from the book.

109 (#ulink_d569e949-6f87-5589-992b-4a6d9d6f989e) The word ‘neo-Paganism’ was also removed from the book.

110 (#ulink_d569e949-6f87-5589-992b-4a6d9d6f989e) ‘respect’.

111 (#ulink_d569e949-6f87-5589-992b-4a6d9d6f989e) ‘fear of the gods’.

112 (#ulink_8c733f7a-4b3d-59a9-a101-88fa249ebb73) ‘world’ as in John 9:39: ‘For judgement I am come into this world.’

113 (#ulink_24c4798d-7a29-555c-9e1f-8259b6fd6452) Corbin Scott Carnell (1929-) was born in Ormond, Florida, on 7 July 1929, the son of Stanley and Doris (Scott) Carnell. He received a BA from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 1952, and an MA from Columbia University in New York, 1953. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 1960 where his dissertation topic was ‘The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis’ Interpretation of “Sehnsucht” ‘. Carnell was, successively, Teaching Associate, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College, West Virginia, 1953-76. He served as Professor of English at the University of Florida, 1976-2000. His thesis was published as Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Reeling Intellect (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).

114 (#ulink_189cea5b-3cbe-5d4a-86a4-e075c7dcc4a5) Carnell said of this letter: ‘I inquired about the lengthy footnote in Miracles which asserts that some Biblical miracles are to be understood rather literally, others not.’ The footnote he was inquiring about is a reference to the book of Jonah in Miracles, ch. 15, note 1: ‘A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this book and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view…would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History…The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology–the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical…I take it that the Memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end.’

115 (#ulink_2ba42e05-5539-5e5f-bdfb-e717bbbcb227) On Lewis’s first confession see his letters to Sister Penelope of 24 October and 4 November 1942 (CL II, pp. 450-2, 453-4).

116 (#ulink_414d1fad-9fc7-59d0-8732-9ea17f4b1ef8) President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a speech of 16 April 1953, reported in The Times (17 April 1953), p. 8, under the title ‘President Eisenhower’s Appeal to Russia’: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’

117 (#ulink_7b38b0e2-07e1-5eef-9ac9-78cfe1a88965) See the biography of Margaret Deneke attached to letter of 3 October 1944 in supplement. Deneke was making plans to produce a volume of reminiscences about her kinsman, P. V. M. Benecke. The book was published as Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868-1944) (Oxford: A. T. Broome & Son, 1954), and Lewis’s contributions are found on pp. 3, 31-4.

118 (#ulink_2ebcf4aa-27ba-5d92-b2c6-ac74e7b45b0c) Philemon 10: ‘I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds.’

119 (#ulink_2ebcf4aa-27ba-5d92-b2c6-ac74e7b45b0c) Matthew 12:37.

120 (#ulink_19c1cd45-0a91-54d9-bea0-888a6f3abd33) Professor Masato Hori was a teacher at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan.

121 (#ulink_88de10bf-2a51-5e12-aaa2-15a9a0379439) Joseph A. Breig, The Devil You Say: Report from Hell (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co, 1952).

122 (#ulink_a5442538-0cc6-5d81-b954-cceb13fd7f58) Ruth Pitter, The Ermine: Poems 1942-1952 (1953).