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PREFACE

We were talking one day in 1963, C. S. Lewis and I, about the ‘resurrection’ of literary works. He mentioned Sir Walter Scott as one of his favourite authors whose books had gone out of fashion, but which appeared to be undergoing just such a resurrection. When I predicted that his own books would suffer no decline, he cautioned me against putting too high a value on them. Indeed, he tried to modulate my enthusiasm by pointing out that after an author’s death the general ‘rule’ is that the sales of his books fall drastically and eventually dry up altogether. ‘But sometimes – not by any means always –’, he said, ‘an author’s works undergo a kind of “resurrection”. But that is something no author, alive or dead, can count on.’

A literary historian, Lewis was naturally familiar with this phenomenon. He cherished no undue optimism as to what would happen to his books, and thus his frequent but gentle admonitions when I praised them more than he felt they deserved, and certainly more than made him comfortable. The truth is that Lewis was almost without opinions regarding the value of his writings. In so far as he was ‘worried’ about their future, it was simply that if the sales of his books stopped, and he died first, his elder brother Warren might find it difficult to survive.

A man of such remarkable astuteness, it must seem to many a wonder that C. S. Lewis could have been so unprophetic about the enduring success of his own books – such a glaring exception to the ‘rule’ he spoke of. But those familiar with his life will recall that Lewis was always more interested in writing and arguing for truth, whatever his subject, than in what he might become as a result of it. In this sense, he perfectly fulfilled what, in his essay on ‘Christianity and Literature’, he believed to be the proper attitude of a Christian author towards his own works: ‘Of every idea and of every method he will ask not “Is it mine?” but “Is it good?”’

While he seemed oblivious to the good he had himself given the world, he was by no means oblivious of the harm which has resulted from the widespread apostasy of the clergy, the cant and slush talked by the liberalizing ‘intelligentsia’ and the general lunacy of the world. Lewis certainly knew his place in all this, seeing himself as a Christian layman committed to explaining and defending what he called that ‘enormous common ground’ of belief which, by God’s mercy, exists at the centre of most Christian communions.

Talking about the spiritual bankruptcy we saw around us, Lewis said to me, ‘Our civilization was built upon Christian morals and nourished by the Faith of the Apostles. It was rather like a huge bank account to which many contributed and which everyone has drawn upon. Now, we know that you cannot go on writing cheques on an account unless you continue to add to its capital. The trouble is that, without adding to that capital, we continue to write cheques. One day that capital will run out.’ An apt analogy, it was nevertheless an unusual one coming from a man who was so extraordinarily free with his time and who regularly gave away more than two-thirds of his income to charity.

But be that as it may. Looking back, I realize that while I have always taken seriously Lewis’s fear of our spiritual ‘capital’ running out, nothing he said about the possibility of the demise of his books ever made much of an impression on me. Working in team with my fellow-trustee of the Estate, Owen Barfield, we have sought to make everything Lewis published or left unpublished available to as wide a public as possible. A public, incidentally, which has made itself known to us by the many thousands of letters of gratitude and encouragement we have received over the last sixteen years since Lewis died. What would have happened if Mr Barfield and I had not persevered we shall never know with any exactness.

What we are in no doubt about is that Lewis’s achievements, judging from the rapidly increasing sales of his books, have been spectacular. So spectacular that it has amounted to, if not a ‘resurrection’, at least a renaissance of Christian thought.

This volume of Christian ‘Reflections’ was first published in 1967 during a temporary lull in the sales of Lewis’s theological works when the modernist theologians were trotting out innumerable books on ‘situation ethics’ and the ‘new morality’, books which anyone familiar with the New Testament as well as the past will instantly recognize as the old immorality in a new dress. The ruinous effects of their works we already know, but the ‘innovators’ – as Lewis called them – have now gone even further in seeking to provide for individual and universal ‘happiness’ by the dethronement of traditional values, jettisoning truth and reality from their vocabulary and philosophy.

Lewis had long ago seen it coming. And now, over against the innovators stands the monumental achievement of C. S. Lewis which has been able not only to withstand everything thrown against it, but to instruct and steady those who seek the truth. The purveyors of the new ‘happiness’ and ‘liberation’, unable to ignore Lewis’s supreme intelligence and a precision of language which enabled him to say exactly what he meant, claim that he belonged to the traditions of an earlier century. This, to Lewis, was a very old dodge and his name for it was ‘chronological snobbery’ which is the uncritical acceptance of almost anything merely because it is ‘modern’. The truth is that it is our century which has gone badly wrong, and is itself very much an ‘exception’. Indeed, if one read nothing other than Lewis’s essay on ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ he would see how well Lewis understood that little portion of human history called ‘the present age’ and how much he did to correct its faults.

But Lewis’s defence of that ‘enormous common ground’ – what he called ‘mere Christianity’ – was colourfully varied, depending on the audience he was addressing. This collection is, therefore, of necessity somewhat heterogeneous. However, as most readers have come to appreciate, it was to a large extent this talent of approaching the truth from such a variety of angles which has made him such an interesting and valuable writer.

It is surely ironical that Lewis, who never sought or wanted to be ‘original’, has been found to be one of the most truly original writers most of us will ever see. The colossal intellect was there all the time, but by forgetting himself he was free to lay the vast treasures of his mind at the Master’s feet. And it is clear from the essays in this book that Lewis understood what diet Our Lord intended when He commanded the Apostle ‘Feed my sheep’.

I am grateful to all those who have permitted me to reprint some of the papers in this book. (1) ‘Christianity and Literature’ was read to a religious society in Oxford and is reprinted from Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford, 1939). (2) The three papers which I have collected under the title ‘Christianity and Culture’ include only Lewis’s part in a controversy which first appeared in the columns of Theology. The entire controversy is composed of the following papers:

1 C. S. Lewis, ‘Christianity and Culture’, Theology, Vol. XL (March 1940), pp. 166–79.

2 S. L. Bethell and E. F. Carritt, ‘Christianity and Culture: Replies to Mr Lewis’, ibid, Vol. XL (May 1940), pp. 356–66.

3 C. S. Lewis, ‘Christianity and Culture’ (a letter), ibid, Vol. XL (June 1940), pp. 475–7.

4 George Every, ‘In Defence of Criticism’, ibid, Vol. XLI (September 1940), pp. 159–65.

5 C. S. Lewis, ‘Peace Proposals for Brother Every and Mr Bethell’, ibid, Vol. XLI (December 1940), pp. 339–48.

I beg the reader to note that ‘Christianity and Culture’ came fairly early in Lewis’s theological corpus. It might best be considered an early step in his spiritual pilgrimage – but certainly not his arrival. Here, instead of spirit progressively irradiating and transforming soul, he seems to envisage a relation between them in strict terms of ‘either-or’, with soul as Calvin’s ‘nature’ and spirit as his ‘grace’, and spirit beginning exactly where soul leaves off. Later on he dealt much more profoundly with the relation between soul and spirit in such things as the essay on ‘Transposition’ and The Four Loves. He says, for instance, in ‘Transposition’:

May we not … suppose … that there is no experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level? Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding of those very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation, of which we have here no faintest guess? *

(3) ‘Religion: Reality or Substitute?’ is reprinted from the now extinct World Dominion, Vol. xix (Sept.–Oct. 1943), except for the autobiographical paragraph 4 and part of paragraph 9 which were added a few years later. (4) The essay ‘On Ethics’ was published here for the first time, and my guess is that it anticipates by a few years Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943). (5) ‘De Futilitate’ is an address given at Magdalen College, Oxford, during the Second World War, at the invitation of Sir Henry Tizard (then President of Magdalen College). It, too, was published for the first time in this book. (6) ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ is reprinted from Religion in Life, Vol. xii (Summer 1943). I regard this as one of Lewis’s most valuable pieces of writing. This is because The Abolition of Man is perhaps the most important book Lewis ever wrote and almost certainly the finest defence of the Moral Law there is. But, whereas The Abolition of Man has been found a little too difficult for the majority of Lewis’s readers, they will find the essence of his argument, not watered down, but compressed into the more easily readable but equally hard-hitting ‘Poison of Subjectivism’.

(7) ‘The Funeral of a Great Myth’, published for the first time in this book, may appear an intruder on theological premises. I have included it here because the ‘myth’ discussed in this essay seems quite obviously to be an out-growth and development of one of the myths compared to the Christian Faith in Lewis’s ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ (The Socratic Digest, No. 3 (1945), pp. 25–35). Its close connection with the Digest essay caused me to feel it deserved a place here; it is, also, relevant to the idea of Theism. (8) ‘On Church Music’ is reprinted from English Church Music, Vol. xix (April 1949). Lewis did not himself like hymns and the existence of this paper is entirely owing to the special invitation of his friend Leonard Blake, who was editor of English Church Music at the time. (9) ‘Historicism’ originally appeared in The Month, Vol. iv (October 1950).

(10) The two-part essay on ‘The Psalms’ was published here for the first time. Judging from the handwriting (Lewis wrote all his works with a nib pen) it would appear to have been composed shortly before his book Reflections on the Psalms (1958). By the by, their mutual friend Charles Williams brought Lewis and T. S. Eliot together for the first time in 1945, at what proved to be a disastrous tea party, Mr Eliot’s opening gambit having been ‘Mr Lewis, you are a much older man than you appear in photographs.’ But their distrust of one another disappeared completely and they became fast friends when they met again in 1959 to serve for several years as literary advisers to the committee whose aim was the revision of the Prayer Book Psalter. The new text, entitled The Revised Psalter, was published by SPCK in 1963.

(11) Although two pages of the manuscript of ‘The Language of Religion’ are lost, the omission, fortunately, does not seriously affect the main argument of the paper. I have only recently discovered that Lewis intended reading it at the Twelfth Symposium of the Colston Research Society held at the University of Bristol in March 1960, but illness prevented him from attending the Symposium and the paper was published here for the first time. (12) ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem without an Answer’ was read to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953 and it, too, was published for the first time in this book. (13) The numerous admirers of ‘Fernseed and Elephants’ may recall that it was originally published in this volume as ‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism’, and I have to admit to altering my original title as I didn’t think it did justice to this superb essay, which Lewis read at Westcott House, Cambridge, on 11 May 1959. (14) ‘The Seeing Eye’ was originally published in the American periodical, Show, Vol. iii (February 1963) under the title ‘Onward, Christian Spacemen’. Lewis so heartily disliked the title which the editors of Show gave this piece that I felt justified in re-naming it.

While most of these essays were never prepared for publication, even those which originally appeared in periodicals were sent to the publishers in Lewis’s own hand. The result was that a good many errors slipped in, and remained, as Lewis was generally rather cavalier about proof-reading. It has fallen to me as his editor to correct such errors as I found, and, because it seemed called for, I have ventured to add footnotes where they were needed. In order to distinguish who wrote which notes, it is, I think, sufficient to point out that all the footnotes are mine except those Lewis appended to the essay on ‘Christianity and Culture’ and two others that are designated by the initials ‘C.S.L.’

Walter Hooper

Oxford, 24 June 1979