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TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

Jan 8th 1936

My dear Griffiths,

Thank you for your kind and interesting letter. It must be nice to know some Aristotle, and it is a relief to hear that kind of philosophy praised by you who have a right to judge: for in the Oxford world ‘Neo-Scholasticism’ has become such a fashion among ignorant undergrads. that I am sick of the sound of it. A man who was an atheist two terms ago, and admitted into your Church last term, and who had never read a word of philosophy, comes to me urging me to read the Summa¹ and offering to lend me a copy!

By the way, I hope that the great religious revival now going on will not get itself too mixed up with Scholasticism, for I am sure that the revival of the latter, however salutary, must be as temporary as any other movement in philosophy. Of things on the natural level, now one, now another, is the ally or the enemy of Faith. The scientists have got us in such a muddle that at present rationalism is on our side, and enthusiasm is an enemy: the opposite was true in the 19th century and will be true again. I mean, we have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes, except the Word.

I should be interested to see your Review of my little book.² I am afraid it will have misled you into thinking my position more catholic than it really is, and that not for a spiritual reason but a merely literary one. I did not want to keep introducing the Lord Himself, and ‘Christianity’ is not a plausible name for a character. Hence the name, and some of the functions, of my Mother Kirk—adopted clumsily for convenience, without my realising till I began to read my reviewers, that I had given a much more ecclesiastical bent to the whole thing than I had intended. You may say ‘All the better’; but I tell you the facts to defend my honesty.³ And by the same token, I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!

Thank you for your prayers: you know mine too, little worth as they are. Have you found, or is it peculiar to me, that it is much easier to pray for others than for oneself. Doubtless because every return to ones own situation involves action: or to speak more plainly, obedience. That appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one. Did you ever notice a beautiful touch in the Faerie Queene

‘a groom them laid at rest in easie bedd, His name was meek Obedience.’⁴

What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason.

Remember me to the Prior. Did I tell you that I have met both Waterman⁵ & Skinner⁶ and liked them v. much.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 20th 1936

Dear Griffiths

Thanks very much for the copy of Pax and the too kind review of my little book.

One sentence in your letter has kept me chuckling ever since: ‘you have no reason to fear that anything you say can have any serious effect on me’. The underlying assumption that anyone who knew you would feel such a fear is not only funny but excruciatingly funny…ask the Prior if he sees the joke: I rather think he will.

As to the main issue I can only repeat what I have said before. One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You, in your charity, are anxious to convert me: but I am not in the least anxious to convert you. You think my specifically Protestant beliefs a tissue of damnable errors: I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions, but which I think suitable for you. I therefore feel no duty to attack you: and I certainly feel no inclination to add to my other works an epistolary controversy with one of the toughest dialecticians of my acquaintance, to which he can devote as much time and reading as he likes and I can devote very little. As well—who wants to debate with a man who begins by saying that no argument can possibly move him? Talk sense, man! With other Catholics I find no difficulty in deriving much edification from religious talk on the common ground: but you refuse to show any interest except in differences.

It was a great shock to learn that Thomism is now de fide for your Church—if that is what you mean. But is that really so? I should welcome a letter clearing the matter up—I don’t mean clearing up the content of Thomism but the degree to which it has been made necessary to salvation.⁷

With continued good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 26th 1936

My dear Arthur,

I see to my consternation that it is over a month since your letter came. It certainly deserved an earlier answer but you must forgive me.

I was very sorry indeed to hear about ‘Tommy’. I am particularly sorry for John.⁸ You know I crossed with the pair of them last time I left home: and I should like to say as impressively as I can—and you to take note—that I was very much impressed by seeing them together and by the fine, almost the spiritual atmosphere of their whole world of mountain climbing. It gave me a new and most favourable sidelight on John: and I am afraid it is most unlikely that he will find any one to take Tommy’s place. I am very sorry for him. Try to be as nice to him as you can—but I have no doubt you are doing that already.

For yourself I expect days are pretty dim at present. Do you hear good news of the boy? As I said before, I am sure you have done the right thing, and I’m afraid that is all the comfort I can offer.

I quite understand what you say about the comfort derived from all a dog’s ‘little affairs’, and enjoyed reading that passage as much as any in your letter. They are a busy folk. And talking of dogs, poor old Mr Papworth has been gathered to his fathers. He had been ailing for some time and finally got a bad ulcer on his chin. He was given a strong sleeping draught. When I went to bed he was asleep in his basket and breathing as gently as a child: in the morning he was dead. Minto has been very badly upset—almost as if for a human being. I don’t feel it as badly as that myself and would discourage the feeling (I think) if I had it. But it is a parting, and one sometimes remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache.

I have just read what I think a really great book, ‘The Place of the Lion’ by Charles Williams.⁹ It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archtypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archtypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archtypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them.

It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.

My own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term.¹⁰

Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill.

We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather.

Most of Sibelius’ symphonies are recorded and are glorious. I agree with you about the Old Curiosity Shop¹¹—one of the most homely and friendly of all Dickens. With love to you all.

Yours

Jack

Since the early 1930s a group of Christian friends had been meeting in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms every Thursday evening to talk and usually to read aloud whatever they might be writing. The group had its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s weekly visits to Lewis’s rooms in 1929 where he read aloud his stories of Middle-Earth. Shortly afterwards, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74),¹² a brilliant young student and one of Lewis’s pupils, founded a society of undergraduates and dons who met in his rooms to read unpublished manuscripts aloud, after which there would be comments and criticism. Lewis and Tolkien both became members. Lean christened the group ‘The Inklings’—suggesting someone who dabbles in ink. The club founded by Lean died when he took his degree and left Oxford. But, wrote Professor Tolkien,

Its name was transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into bang at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.¹³

By 1936 this informal group included Lewis, Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil,¹⁴ Dr Robert E. Havard¹⁵ and Charles Wrenn.¹⁶ Besides the Thursday meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub. Lewis’s next letter was to a man he was keen to introduce to these friends.

TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): ¹⁷

[Magdalen College]

March 11th 1936

[Dear Mr Williams,]

I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.

A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification.

I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl…I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it.

Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book: I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks.

[C. S. Lewis]

On 12 March Charles Williams wrote to Lewis from Oxford University Press, Amen House, London:

My dear Mr Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.

To be exact, i finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first…I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology, which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So Amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced.

After vacillating a good deal I permit myself to believe in your letter and in the interests of the subject so far as to send you a copy of one of my early books of verse,¹⁸ because the Poems from page 42—page 81 may interest you…

You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner…I should like very much to come to Oxford as you suggest; the only thing is that I am a little uncertain about next term because I may be at Canterbury off and on to see the rehearsals of the Play¹⁹ I have written for the Friends of the Cathedral to do in June…You will conceive Cranmer as coming under a similar danger to that from which Damaris was saved by the Mercy. Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs…P.S.2. And I am 49-so you can decide whether that is too old or too young.²⁰

TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):

[Magdalen College]

March 23rd 1936

[Dear Williams,]

This is going to be a complicated matter. To make a clean breast of it, that particular species of romanticism which you found in my book and which is expressed in the poems²¹ you send me, is not my kind at all. I see quite clearly why you think it is—the subject of the book, the at any rate respectful treatment of the sentiment, the apparently tell-tale familiarity with Coventry Patmore—it all fits in perfectly and must seem to you almost like a trap: while it shows me for the first time how paradoxical it is that I, of all men, should have elected, or been elected, to treat such a subject. I trust, however, that there has been no writing with (horror of horrors!) my tongue in my cheek. I think you will find that I nowhere commit myself to a definite approval of this blend of erotic and religious feeling. I treat it with respect: I display: I don’t venture very far. And this is perhaps what one ought to expect from a man who is native in a quite distinct, though neighbouring, province of the Romantic country, and who willingly believes well of all her provinces, for love of the country herself, though he dare not affirm except about his own.

I hope you will find that where I talk of the value of the gods and, above all, of their death and resurrection, I speak much more confidently than I ever do of the Celestial and Terrestrial Cupids: there I am on my own ground. That’s where I live.

I don’t know how far I am making myself clear…the matter, at this stage in our knowledge of each other, is not easy. Put briefly, there is a romanticism which finds its revelation in love, which is yours, and another which finds it in mythology (and nature mythically apprehended) which is mine. Ladies, in the one: gods in the other—the bridal chamber, or the wood beyond the world—a service incensed with rich erotic perfume, a service smelling of heather, salt water etc.

But this distinction is a little complicated by two facts. 1. While writing about Courtly Love I have been so long a student of your province that I think, in a humble way, I am nearly naturalised. 2. In the book I am sending you (don’t read it unless it interests) you will find lots about the frontier between sexual and religious experience.²² But look to your feet, here. It really has nothing to do with your province: it is simply about desire, longing, the impersonal tiling: which oddly enough can be diverted from the wood beyond the world (are you still following me?) into lust just as quickly as ‘love’ can. We shall have a great deal to talk about when we meet.

After this you will not be surprised to learn that I found your poems excessively difficult. I think I have followed Ascension.²³ I take it this deals with the death of passion into matrimonial routine and the discovery that this death is also a birth—the birth of something which is to passion as the Church is to the earthly life of Our Lord. Am I right? If so it is because we touch here: the death and re-birth motive being of the very essence of my kind of romanticism. If so, it is a good poem, specially stanzas 2 and 7. The Christian Year²⁴ I take to be on the same theme, but there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. What I liked best was the bit about the Shepherds at the top of page 73. This may quite possibly be even a great poem—I’ll tell you in a year or so, if I find out. (And talking of years, I’m 37.) Churches I didn’t like, except that dear duplicity of love and Love—which I suppose is the thing we’re talking about. Presentation I liked, and the bit in Gratia Plena about the provincial dialect. Orthodoxy and Ecclesia Docens I definitely disliked. (I embrace the opportunity of establishing the precedent of brutal frankness, without which our acquaintance begun like this would easily be a mere butter bath!) But the thing I liked best of all came outside the ‘pages prescribed for special study’-notably Endings, The Clerk, and Ballade of a Street Door (tho’ I can’t construe line 2).

I have read Many Dimensions²⁵ with an enormous enjoyment—not that it’s as good as the Lion, but then in a sense it hardly means to be. By Jove, it is an experience when this time-travelling business is done by a man who really thinks it out. I believe all your conclusions do really follow—and I never thought of being caught in that perpetual to-and-fro. The effect which that first idea of a really possible hell has on Lord Thingummy is excellent.

I shouldn’t dream of coming to London without visiting you, but I can and do dream of not being in London for a long time. But Canterbury can’t claim you all the time, and there are others besides me who want to meet you. The fourth week of next term (May 18th-May 22nd) would be a good time. Could we nail you now for a week day night between those dates? Of course, I realise that this letter, for more than one cause, may have quenched all wish for a meeting: but acting on the pleasanter hypothesis—

[C. S. Lewis]

P.S. Thanks for the very kind and intelligent blurb²⁶-a relief, after the nonsensical one put out from Walton Street! But not a word, he²⁷ may have been doing his best.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

[Magdalen College]

April 24th [1936]

My dear Griffiths—

I was more than usually glad to hear from you this time because I had been feeling that my last letter was somewhat ill tempered. If so, forgive me. The truth is that I have a constant temptation to over asperity as soon as I get a pen in my hand, even when there is no subjective anger to prompt me: it comes, I think, simply from the pleasure of using the English language forcibly—i.e. is not a species of Ira but of Sapientia.²⁸ This problem of the pleasure in what Aristotle called an ‘unimpeded activity’ is one that exercises me very much—not of course in an instance like the one I have just been discussing where it is plainly abused, but when the work done is a duty, or at least innocent.

On the one hand, Nature, whether we will or know [not], attaches pleasure to doing as well as we can something we can do fairly well: and as it is a clear duty to practise all virtuous activities until we can do them well—possess the Habit of doing them—it is a sort of duty to increase such pleasures. On the other hand, they are pleasures of a particularly urgent, absorbing sort, very apt to become idols, and very closely allied to Pride. I heard it recently said in a Lenten sermon that even self-denial can become a kind of hobby—and in a way it is true.

Put in another form, the question is how you decide whether an ability and strong propensity for some activity is a temptation or a vocation. You will answer that it all depends whether we can and do offer it to God. But frankly—and I want your answer very much—have you made any approaches to a state in which the conscious offering to God can be maintained concurrently with the actual donkey work of doing the job? I find that I can do those things (even) which I believe that God wills me to do (such as writing this letter) by forgetting God while I do them. I don’t mean forgetting intellectually (which wd. be absurd in the present instance) but turning away—not offering. Is this due to sin or to the very nature of human consciousness?

About the Scholastics, I must have expressed myself very badly if you thought I held that one system of philosophy was as good as another or that pure reason was mutable. All I meant was that no philosophy is perfect: nor can be, since, whatever is true of Reason herself, in the human process of reasoning there is always error and even what is right, in solving one problem, always poses another. I therefore reject the idea of any real philosophia perennis.²⁹ The dominance (and revival) of particular philosophy does seem to me to have historical causes. In any age, foolish men want that philosophy whose truths they least need and whose errors are most dangerous to them: and wise men want the opposite. In the next age neither fools nor wise want the same.

My original point was that Scholasticism could hardly have had its present prestige in an age like the 19th century when hard thinking seemed to be on the side of materialism: then the business of Christian philosophy was to remind people that there is something which escapes discursive thought. For the moment, the collapse of scientific dogmatism and the growth of a kind of spurious mysticism among anti-Christian thinkers (Heavens! you ought to know all about it) has reversed the situation. But don’t think this state of affairs will be more permanent than any other. Reason, no doubt, is always on the side of Christianity: but that amount and kind of human reasoning which gives an age its dominant intellectual tone, is surely sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other.

Again, we must believe that there is no real conflict between the Rational and the Mystical: but in a given period now one, now the other, will be what the world actually needs to be most reminded of—I mean the unbelieving world: and one or the other will usually be the bridge to faith. Thus you and I came to it chiefly by Reason (I don’t mean, of course, that any one comes at all but by God’s grace—I am talking about the route not the motive power) but dozens of other converts, beginning with St. Paul, did not.

I have often wished I had time to learn Hebrew, but I think it would be for me more an indulgence than a duty. I should like to hear more about your doctrine of sophistication: I am inclined to think you may be right, but one would have to define ‘sophistication’ carefully. I certainly suppose (but this may be ignorance) that the Hebrew scriptures are the only document of religion carried to the very highest sub-Christian height, while remaining as anthropomorphic as primitive polytheism…What a bugbear ‘anthropomorphism’ used to be! How long it repelled me from the truth! Yet now that one has submitted to it how easy is the burden, how light the yoke.³⁰ Odd too, that the very things we thought proofs of our humility while we were philosophers, now turn out to be forms of pride.

Sayer—pray for Sayer.³¹ He is just what I was at a slightly earlier age than his: at the mercy of something which is innocent in itself (the desire to be liked) but which, unresisted, leads to ludicrous vanity, pretentiousness, and direct, pitiful lying. Yet he is likable because of the one redeeming trait that he really knows himself to be (at present) rather a little tick: oh, and the good side of his ruling passion, which is a peculiar accessibility to shame. All this, of course, is very much in confidence.

I re-read St. Augustine’s Confessions during Lent, and found it better than I remember, tho’ still it is the explicitly devotional parts that edify me least. I’ll see if I can let you have a copy of my book if you want it. But the main subject is the rise of a romantic conception of sexual love and the transition from adultery to marriage as the normal channel for it: i.e. it would be an odd book to find in a monastery.

Write again. Write at the end of every term when I shall have a bright new Vac. to answer in.

Yours,

C.S.L.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 1st 1936

My dear Arthur,

I must confess it would not have been a good time for you to turn up. Why will you insist on coming to England in vacations and summers? If you would only come in the Autumn term (Oct 11th-Dec. 5th) I would try to make you comfortable in college: and I don’t need to breakfast so early now. About the Kilns, I am sorry: I know that for many reasons it can never be a comfortable house for you to stay in.

I shall be free on and after June 27th and would come any time you suggested. I look forward to it with enormous pleasure—tho’ rather ashamed that I can make so little return. I trust you won’t be packing all the time I’m with you!

Oddly enough I read Aerial³² too, and in the same edition a few weeks ago—good fun. I don’t know how far it is reliable.

No time to write now. Please let me have a line saying which dates after the 27th wd. suit you. Is the enclosed good?—I can’t help hoping not. I shall be sending you my book in a week or so. Love to all

Yours,

Jack

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford on 21 May 1936.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

[Magdalen College]

May 23rd 1936

Dear Griffiths

I am very surprised that your old anti-intellectual ism should be so active—and yet perhaps I should not be since it is often said that conversion alters only the direction not the character of our minds. (This, by the bye, is very important and explains how personal and affectional relations between human souls can recognisably survive even in the full blaze of the beatific vision: and that if we are both saved I shall find you to all eternity in one sense still the same old Griffiths—indeed more the same than ever).

I don’t agree. In the first place, I question your account of Our Lord, when you say ‘He is essentially a poet and not at all a philosopher.’ Surely the ‘type of mind’ represented in the human nature of Christ (and in virtue of His humanity we may, I suppose, neither irreverently nor absurdly speak of it as a ‘type of mind’) stands at just about the same distance from the poetic as from the philosopher. The overwhelming majority of His utterances are in fact addressed neither to thought nor to the imagination, but to the ‘heart’—i.e. to the will and the affections: that is, the type is that of the ³³ (as opposed to the ),³⁴ the hortatory and advisory practical moralist. I shudder to use so bleak a word as ‘moralist’, but I think it less untrue than ‘poet’ or ‘philosopher’.

You will say that it approaches the poetic in the parables. But this is only an approach: it would (on my view) be an entirely misdirected reverence that would on that basis call him a poet. The parables approach poetry just about as much [as] His argumentative utterances approach philosophy. And it is easy to make too little of these latter. After all, how full of argument, of repartee, even of irony, He is. The passage about the denarius (‘whose image and superscription’);³⁵ the dilemma about John’s baptism;³⁶ the argument against the Sadducees from the words ‘I am the God of Jacob etc’;³⁷ the terrible, yet almost humorous, trap laid for his Pharisaic host (‘Simon, I have something to say to you’);³⁸ the repeated use of the â fortiori (‘If…, how much more’);³⁹ and the appeals to our reason (‘Why do not ye of yourselves judge what is right?’)⁴⁰—surely in all these we recognise as the human and natural vehicle of the Word’s incarnation a mental complexion in which a keen-eyed peasant shrewdness is just as noticeable as an imaginative quality—something in other words quite as close (on the natural level) to Socrates as to Aeschylus.

Even about the parables I want to make a point. It is a commonplace that Our Lord, in them, often paradoxically chooses to illustrate the ways of God by the acts not of good men, but of bad men. But surely this means that the mode in which the fable represents its truth is intellectual rather than imaginative—like a philosopher’s illustration rather than a poet’s simile. The unjust judge,⁴¹ to the imagination, presents no likeness of God—carries into the story no divine flavour or colour (as the Father of the Prodigal Son,⁴² for instance, does). His likeness to God is purely for the intellect. It is a kind of proportion sum—A:B::C:D.

I therefore on the whole reject any divine authority which your anti-intellectualism seems to draw from the person of Our Lord. I also deny that the ordinary man, with his mind full of images and poor in concepts, is really any nearer to the poet than to the philosopher. For the poet uses images as such, because they are images: the ordinary man (that is, all of us from most of our waking hours) uses them faute de mieux⁴³ to attain knowledge, i.e. his end is the same as the philosopher’s. What is functional in the poet is merely an accidental imperfection in the plain man. Surely the process of mistaking an image for a concept is quite different from that of using images for their proper purposes: processes are distinguished teleologically. Should I be a surgeon because, lacking a knife, I one day used a lancet to cut up my dinner? To be a surgeon means to use a surgeon’s tools not anyhow but surgically—you can find all this in Aristotle.

Nor does any sane man, however ‘plain’, use images for thought quite as much as you suggest. His thought is accompanied by images but he is quite well aware that it is not about them he thinks—e.g. he knows perfectly well that the things he believes about London are not true of his image of London, which may be a mere huddle of roofs.

Again, if you are suggesting that the Hebrew consciousness was just right and the Greek just wrong, this seems to me to be quite foreign to the tenor of St. Paul’s teaching. He seems to hold quite definitely (a) That Our Lord has ‘broken down the middle wall of partition and made one Man’,⁴⁴ wh. is quite different from simply bringing errant Hellenism back to Hebraic rectitude (b) That the ‘reasonings’ of the Pagans (see Romans) are related to the new Faith much as the Jewish Law is.⁴⁵ In Galatians he even seems to equate the Pagan bondage to the with Jewish bondage to the Law.⁴⁶

I know they dispute what : means, whether elemental powers (gods, angels) or ‘rudiments’ in the educational sense: but surely it is clear that it means both, that St. Paul is using a double entendre. For the ‘rudiments’ meaning is demanded by III 25, IV 1–3: and the other by IV 3 () and 8. In fact the whole relation between Paganism and Judaism wh. I hinted [at] in my Regress is quite Pauline—more so than I really knew at the time.⁴⁷ The great thing is to stick to the ‘one Man’. That is why I have a great objection to any theory that would set parts of us at loggerheads with one another. It is a kind of .⁴⁸ The Pagans, by their lights, may wisely have constructed a hierarchical scheme of Man, Reason ruling Passion politically and Soul ruling body despotically. But in Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free.⁴⁹ If the whole man is offered to God, all disputes about the value of this or that faculty are, as it were, henceforward out of date.

You said in your letter (going further than some would go) that every natural desire per se shd. be regarded as an attraction of grace. But if so, how much more every natural faculty!

This view of yours about desire is, I suppose, Augustinian. Habe caritatem et fac quod vis.⁵⁰ This is certainly sound, but not perhaps very practical: for it implies Donec caritatem habens, noli facere quod vis.⁵¹ I wholly agree with what you say about escaping from the circle of morality into the love of God: in fact you have written an excellent commentary on St. Paul’s view of the ‘Law’. But in the meantime?

This letter is getting too long: the subject has endless ramifications, but I will wait for your next. Rejoice with me—timidly, for it is only the first streak of dawn and may be false dawn-there are faint signs of a movement away from Anthroposophy in Barfield.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO LEO BAKER (BOD):

Magdalen College

June 24th /36

My dear Baker

I should have hesitated to send you the book⁵² if I had known that it would find you in pain and by the need to acknowledge it lay a new burden on you. The book itself, I fear, is more than a grasshopper—as I find from this dialogue between myself and the Merton Professor of English⁵³—more or less my ‘chief’ as they would say in the disciplined professions.

P. Well, Lewis, you’ve certainly gone beyond the whole English school with your new book. L. (Blushing at the supposed extremity of the compliment) Oh, really- P. Oh clearly. Much the longest book any of us has written. L. (With ghastly laughter) Oh surely not. I can understand it seeming the longest. P. No, no, there’s no seeming about it. It is a very long book. (Pause) A very long book indeed. L. Come, it’s not as long as X. P. X? It’s half as long again. Far longer than X. Far longer. (And so on)

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering. Is it possible that the doctors can have a man so long in their hands and find out so little about him. It is indeed a comfort that the number of serious diseases which you know you have not got must be higher—far higher than anything the ordinary person in health could boast of. I take it, if the arthritis diagnosis is correct, the pain is the main thing i.e. that it hurts out of all proportion to the harm it will do. Am I right?

I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too—nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’,⁵⁴ it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.

I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain—I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.

You were talking about Peele⁵⁵ when you last wrote. Personally I find Renaissance poetry on the whole less and less attractive as time goes on. When it succeeds (‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’—‘Take but thy lute and make the mountains dance’)⁵⁶ it has a wonderful gloss on; but even then I prefer the dull finish—something either humbler or harder. When it fails-! Did you notice how Peele allows Venus to describe Helen in the Arraignement of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one).⁵⁷

I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this:

Wildest brunt of winter Woke amidst the oak-wood

(This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e.

Wildest broth of weather

would be unmetrical. This sounds mere puzzle poetry. In fact it works up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos-‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek.’⁵⁸ W. H. Auden (one of the few good young poets) has caught something of it in places. You might try hammering one out some night when sleep is denied: but the thing is so difficult to our metrical habits, that you won’t finish it by morning.

But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and Many Dimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment.

I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health,

Yours truly,

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[The Kilns]

June 28th 1936

My dear Barfield

1. I lent The Silver Trumpet⁵⁹ to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’

All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit.

2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry.

3. I wish I could Christianise the Summa⁶⁰ for you—but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment—one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I’ll try

4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates.

5. Cecil now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me. And read The Castle by Kafka⁶¹ (Seeker).

Yours

The Alligator of Love⁶²

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

[? July 1936]

My dear Harwood

How nice to get poems again! It was a bit of a shock to find you writing vers libre just as if you were beardless and modern, but that poem is the best of the three all the same: specially the second stanza (‘there is no rainbow’⁶³ ‘light like fine sand’⁶⁴ are lovely[)]. The first doesn’t work with me because I never have resisting lids nor close them consciously and my eyes at bedtime are hungry for darkness not light.⁶⁵

The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course.

There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em ‘Old Lewis is dyin’ For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’

Have a heart!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Ubi est leonis locus? Caecilii lar et focus? ⁶⁶

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

[Magdalen College

28 July 1936]

My dear Griffiths

First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture.

Surely the truth is that poetry is simply a special kind of speech, a way of saying things, and one can no more talk about poetry in the abstract than about ‘saying’. When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association etc, one is beginning to use ‘poetry’: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element but a mode. Of course poetry falls out of sight in the highest levels of devotion; but only in the same way in which other forms of expression (work, gestures etc) also fall out of sight. Most people who talk about Poetry in the abstract are, I think, .⁶⁷

I have not made up my mind about Mysticism. Two things give me pause. 1. That the similarity between Christian and non Christian mysticism is so strong. I by no means conclude from this that it is un-Christian in the sense of being incompatible with Christianity; but I am inclined to think that it is not specifically Christian—that it is simply one of those neutral things which the Spirit utilises in a given man when it happens to be there. I.e. it may be a given man’s vocation to approach God mystically because he has the mystical faculty, but only in the same way as it is another man’s duty to serve God by driving a plough because he is a good ploughman. And if any one tried to impose mysticism as the norm of Christian life I suspect he would be making the same mistake as one who said we ought all to be fishermen because some of the apostles were.

2. I am struck by the absence of much mysticism from the New Testament. I am not, I hope, forgetting which is the first and great commandment—but you would probably agree that the mystic’s way of obeying it is not the only way.

I quite agree with you that the change which even the greatest saint must undergo (how much more, we) in being redeemed is beyond all imagination: I take ⁶⁸ in as serious sense as I am able. But 1. the new man must still be in some sense the same, or else salvation has no meaning. The very ideas of conversion and regeneration are essentially different from the idea of substitution. Also, don’t we actually see it beginning in this life—I mean the turning round of the very same aptitudes which previously determined the kind of sin.

2. I object to your saying ‘What is of real value in us is that which is hidden from each other and even from ourselves’. I would have said ‘From ourselves and even from each other’. That is, I think that when A loves B, tho’ A’s picture of B is doubtless very unlike the redeemed B, I suppose it to be much less unlike than B’s picture of himself. For we have often agreed, haven’t we, that one can love nothing but good—sin consisting in the love of the inferior good at the expense of the superior. And if so, what we really love in our friend (in so far as we do love him, not the pleasure he gives us) must be the good in him. Would it not follow that the redeemed B will differ from B as we now know him not by being simply strange but by being that of which we should say ‘Ah—he is himself at last’?

By the way (tho’ it is a little irrelevant), I am astonished at the reward in knowledge given here and now to even very feeble attempts at obedience. I have found once or twice lately that whenever I succeed in beating down my selfish point of view and make an approach to charity, the motives and feelings of all the other people concerned become transparent: and things about them which one didn’t know a moment before, stare one in the face. Is this self deception? If not, I would put it this way. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is a false maxim with a strong tendency to promote the wrong kind of forgiveness: the really true and fruitful maxim is the converse—tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre.⁶⁹

I can’t go into your questions about prayer. I don’t find that thinking about prayer (I mean in that introspective way) helps me to pray. Of course philosophical thought about it with a view to answering the common objections is another matter. On the whole, you know, I feel that self-examination should be confined to examining one’s conduct. One’s state in general I don’t think one knows much about. But this is all very tentative.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. I had a long talk with Barfield who admits that his views are in ‘a very liquid condition’. Perhaps our wish is going to be granted.

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (T):⁷⁰

[The Kilns]

Aug 20th 1936

My dear Chapman

Thanks for both letters. After wondering whether the best reply to the ‘pinpricks’ would not be ‘Ah yes—that’s the worst of depending on these local printers!’, I accept them all except sheows⁷¹ which is Spenser’s own spelling. I will also add two more, worse, p 96 quotation 15. for ye read He. p 331 5 lines before the first quotation for pictures read pictured.

Yes—Cissie and Flossie do appear in Tasso and I trust it doesn’t matter though I’d just as soon they didn’t.⁷² But I don’t mind about the lovely lay—it is just the sort of enervating Omar Khyyam stuff you ought to find there.

‘Puryfying complexities’—the next time you come across a real commercial pornogram in a French bookshop read a page or two and note how it all depends on isolating one nerve in a way quite impossible in real life—in fact is just as conventional (tho’ for a worse purpose) as roaring farce.

Smoky rain is alright seasoned with sufficient usquebaugh—see Waverley!⁷³

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Congratulations to the ‘local printer’ on giving us a translation of Otto’s Das Heilige at 3/6—very nice.⁷⁴

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

[Magdalen College]

Postmark: 14 September 1936

My dear Griffiths—

Excuse me for having left your letter so long unanswered. One thing that delayed it was the more imperative task of answering an other ex-pupil (much junior to you) who is trying to convert me to Hindooism, or at least has sent me three long books by a Frenchman called Guénon⁷⁵—as obvious a quack as ever I smelled out. My wretched man, mark you, is embarking on this without having given the least attention to Christianity or even to secular European philosophy: consequently to write to him is a double battle against the man and against my own impatience. However, since he was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism is a step upwards (at least if it is better to worship false gods than not even to care whether gods exist or not) and—who knows—by some long way round he may be led home in the end. The more one sees the confusion in which young men’s minds grow up now-a-days, the more cause we have to be thankful on our own part. Now for our affair—

1. I am sorry we should have been fogged by what is really a purely linguistic difficulty about rationalism and intellectualism. Surely I drew your attention in the old days, to the fact that these two words have swapped meanings, so that ‘intellect’ in mod. English means the lower faculty (ratio) and ‘reason’ the higher (intellectus). An exactly similar change has effected fancy and imagination: and both are due to Coleridge.⁷⁶ Don’t let us allow this to confuse us again.

2. I never meant to give you the idea that I would rule a book out because it was scholastic. I denied your view that scholasticism is the philosophia perennis and I expressed distrust of many moderns who call themselves scholastics: quite a different thing.

2. [sic] Before going on to consider the higher mode of knowledge in the Thomist system, I want to ask you does Aquinas himself connect it with poetry? Is there any reason to suppose that he would have allowed us to do so? Does the word poetria⁷⁷ occur anywhere in the Summa?⁷⁸ I ask this because one of my objections to some ‘neo-scholastics’ is that they often pick out Thomist texts and string them together with little regard to their real position in Aquinas’ thought, thus producing an account of ‘Thomist aesthetics’, ‘St. Thomas on representative government’ etc etc which really corresponds to nothing their master ever thought or could have thought. If you could give me a few references (I now have both Summae) I could look up the passages in situ: but till then I cannot judge their real significance. I have a strong suspicion that if I did look them up I should find they had nothing to do with poetry, and we could then be clear which we were discussing—the nature of intellectus or the nature of poetry. If one had asked the Doctor to define poetria, do you suppose he wd. have said any more than p. est ars dictandi in versibus. Quaest I. Utrum rhythmus sit versus modus⁷⁹—or something of that sort.

3. Prior to all discussion about the form of knowledge you describe, I must make a logical point. Since this knowledge is admittedly prayer and love, and could be shown, from what you say, to be also painting and music, I do not see what is gained by calling it poetry or ‘poetic experience’: for it clearly covers two things higher than poetry, and two things different. At best it would be one of the pre-conditions of poetry. And other conditions which you have left out (e.g. one of language) are surely the differentia of poetry?

4. The various things said about this higher knowledge rather puzzle me. Thus the criteria since discursu, per contactum, quasi ex habitu⁸⁰ seem to me to apply to a great many experiences of what I would call sensuous acquaintance (by acquaintance I mean the French connaitre as opp. to savoir)—e.g. my ‘knowledge’ of toothache or cheese. On this level I would agree that all the arts depend on turning savoir into connaitre as far as possible. But the same criteria also apply to something quite different—knowledge of axioms. As to per viam voluntatis⁸¹—when you say ‘The will (in mystical prayer) goes out beyond all abstract and conceptual knowledge’, would the proposition remain equally true, or not, if for ‘mystical prayer’ we substituted (a) prayer, (b) every attempt however rudimentary to do the will of God (c) every action of whatever kind (d) every moment of consciousness (e) error.

I am afraid this will sound like carping, but do you see my real difficulty? I can’t feel sure from your account whether we are dealing with a special kind of experience or with one aspect of nearly all experience—in fact of all except thought made deliberately abstract for scientific purposes. All day long my experience is going outside ratio in directions wh. cd. quite well be described in the words you quote. And, of course, poetry is nearly always based on that normal experience rather than on the specially and artificially purified moments of ratio. But that is a very different thing from a special ‘poetic experience’. It is rather that there is a special unpoetic experience.

5. When we come to the religious life it seems that we are still, up to a point, in the realm of this normal (and if you will ‘poetic’, but only in the sense ‘not antipoetic’) experience. Thus the soul is not ‘content with an external and superficial knowledge or attachment’. True: but the soul is equally discontent with these in its sensual and affectional life. So far, have we not merely the normal experience, exercised on a much higher object? ‘Love takes up where knowledge leaves off’⁸²—is not this true of my knowledge of a friend, an animal, a garden—nay even of a sensual pleasure. E.g. surely my liking for sleep goes far beyond my knowledge of it.

At this point it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps we are really in agreement: that while you are saying ‘As above, so below’ I am replying ‘As below, so above’. And if you say that the former is to be preferred since the higher explains the lower and not vice-versa, I agree with you. The points I want to make clear are

a. That I don’t wish to deny (how could I) that really supernatural experience can be and is conferred on the soul—some souls—by God even in this life. But,

b. That most of the descriptions you give seem to me to refer to an essentially normal experience, which is not specifically religious or poetic or anything but concrete and human.

6. I hope the discussion about primitive man will go on though I cannot do more than make a few comments here—or ask a few questions.

a. By primitive do you mean unfallen man or early fallen man?

b. If he was ‘unable to distinguish between God and Nature and himself’ he was a Pantheist. Therefore fallen? You can’t mean God created Adam heretical? For God and Nature and Man are distincts (as you and I believe), and not to feel the distinction is a defect. Mind you, I don’t say they are necessarily distinct to just the degree and in just the way the modern mind instinctively assumes.

c. Surely the mystic’s inability to recall or distinguish is not per se good. It may be a price well worth paying for supernatural experiences: but it is the defect of the patient not the excellence of the grace that produces the unconsciousness etc. It would be better still to have these experiences and not to lose the power of distinguishing etc. That is, if there are distinctions in the Object. If not, of course, our distinguishing would be disease. But we believe that the real is full of distinctions. To begin with it is not the blank One of Pantheists, but One in Three—distinction straight away. To go on with it is not, but creates nature—a nature not consubstantial with itself. We are not even allowed to say that human souls are naturally sons of God, but ‘to as many as believe He gave power to become sons of God’.⁸³

But I can’t go on: I have a headache and am tired. I will try another time.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

As usual, discussion obliterates the elements of agreement. I should have agreed with nearly all you say if you hadn’t brought in Poetry. What you call Poetry I call simply ‘life’ or ‘concrete experience’. In fact I think you give poetry too high a place, in a sense.

1 The Summa Theologica, the chief dogmatic work of St Thomas Aquinas. See also note 7 to the letter to Griffiths of 4 April 1934.

2 Dom Bede’s review of The Pilgrim’s Regress is found in Pax: The Monthly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash, Glos., no. 172 (February 1936), pp. 262–3.

3 Lewis did not know it at the time but Dom Bede criticized his use of ‘Mother Kirk’ in his review; ‘unhappily his Mother Kirk is not in fact the true Mother Church. If we may be allowed to adopt his own allegory we would say that his Mother Kirk is an elder daughter of the old Mother Kirk, who ran away from her mother and eloped with one of the sons of Mammon nearly 400 years ago now, and though she fortunately retained many things with her which she took from Mother Kirk’s household, and has since shown many signs of repentance and some desire to return, yet she still remains unreconciled and in bondage to the Spirit of the Age’ (ibid.).

4 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1, x, 17, adapted from lines 6–9.

5 Hugh Waterman (1906-), who had been to Marlborough, matriculated al Magdalen in 1925 and, with Martyn Skinner, was Griffiths’s closest friend at Oxford. After taking his BA in 1928 he spent his life as a farmer. For more about this charming man see Dom Bede Griffiths, The Golden Siring (1954).

6 Martyn Skinner (1906–93) and Lewis were to become friends a few years later. See Lewis’s letter to Skinner of 23 April 1942.

7 Lewis had misunderstood. In Catholic theology a proposition is said to be de fide (‘of faith’) if it has been expressly declared and defined by the Church to be true; there are, however, different degrees of certainty in Catholic theology. The highest order of certainty, de fide catholica, appertains to those truths, such as the inerrancy of the Bible, that are revealed by God and taught by the Church. When such a truth is solemnly defined by the pope or by a council it may also take the notation de fide definita, an example of this being the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Lewis had in mind Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). However, one cannot apply ‘de fide’ certainty to every word contained in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas: rather, it was the wisdom of St Thomas that Leo XIII wished to restore, as he said in Aeterni Patris, paragraph 31: ‘We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas…The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say; for if anything is taken up with too great subtlety by the Scholastic doctors, or too carelessly stated—if there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever way—it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age.’

8 Tommy and John were Arthur’s dogs.

9 Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (1931).

10 Lewis’s ‘own book’ was The Allegory of Love.

11 Charles Dickens. The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

12 See the biography of Edward Tangye Lean in CG.

13 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter to William Luther White of 11 September 1967, p. 388.

14 Lord David Cecil (1902–86), second son of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, taught Modern History and English Literature at Wadham College, 1924–30, leaving Oxford in 1930 to pursue literary work in London. He returned in 1939 to become Fellow of English at New College, a position he held until he became Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature in 1949. His numerous writings include a biography of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929), as well as biographies of Lord Melbourne and lane Austen. See his biography in CG.

15 Dr Robert Emlyn Havard (1901–85) took a First in Chemistry at Keble College in 1921. He became a Catholic shortly afterwards, and because of Keble’s ban on Catholics, moved to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he received a degree of Bachelor of Medicine. He practised at London Hospital and the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, and then taught in the Biochemistry Department of Leeds University. He returned to Oxford in 1934 to take over a surgery in Headington and St Giles. Lewis became his patient in 1934 and soon afterwards Havard joined the Inklings. Lewis gave him the nickname ‘Humphrey’ after the doctor in Perelandra. See his biography in CG.

16 Charles Leslie Wrenn (1895–1969) became a lecturer in English Language at Oxford in 1930, where he helped J. R. R. Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. In 1939 he was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of London, where he remained until 1946. When Tolkien became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Wrenn returned to Oxford to replace him as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, a post he held until his retirement in 1963. His writings include an edition of Beowulf (1940), The Poetry of Caedmon (1947) and A Study of Old English Literature (1967). See his biography in CG.

17 See Charles Williams in the Biographical Appendix. Williams, the author of seven ‘supernatural thrillers’ and numerous other works, was an employee of the Oxford University Press in London. All Lewis’s letters to Charles Williams, with the exception of the one dated 22 February 1939, are transcripts believed to have been made by Williams from the originals, which are lost. These transcripts, as well as Williams’s letter to Lewis of 12 March 1936, appear to have been typed on the same typewriter.

18 Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity (1917).

19 Charles Williams. Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, acting edn (Canterbury: H. J. Goulden, 1936).

20 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols. 48–9.

21 i.e. Williams’s Poems of Conformity.

22 It was probably The Pilgrim’s Regress.

23 Williams, Poems of Conformity, p. 78.

24 ibid.

25 Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (1931).

26 On the cover of The Allegory of Love.

27 Sir Humphrey Milford.

28 Ira is the Latin word for anger or wrath, one of the seven deadly sins; Sapientia is the Latin word for wisdom.

29 ‘enduring’ or ‘perennial philosophy’. The expression comes from the sixteenth-century theologian, Augustine Steuch (1497–1548), and was popularized by the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

30 Matthew 11:29–30: ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

31 George Sayer (1914-) read English with Lewis, and took his BA from Magdalen in 1938. He served in the Army during the Second World War, and in 1949 became the senior English master at Malvern College. He retired in 1974. Over the years he became a close friend of Lewis, and is the author of Jack: C. S. Lewis and his Times (1988). See his biography in CG.

32 John H. Bone, The Aerial: A Comedy in One Act (1932).

33 ‘prudent’.

34 ‘clever’.

35 Matthew 22:20.

36 ibid., 21:25: ‘The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men?’

37 ibid., 22:32.

38 Luke 7:40.

39 Matthew 6:30, Luke 12:28.

40 Luke 12:56–7: ‘Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’

41 ibid., 18:2–6.

42 ibid., 15:11–32.

43 ‘for want of any better alternative’,

44 Ephesians 2:14–15.

45 Romans 2.

46 Galatians 4.

47 The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933; Fount, 1998), book 8, ch. 8, pp. 191–2. ‘The Pagans couldn’t read…but they had pictures…And then the Pagans made mistakes. They would keep on trying to get the same picture again: and if it didn’t come, they would make copies of it for themselves…They went on malting up more and more stories for themselves about the pictures, and then pretending the stories were true…The Shepherds could read: that is the thing to remember about them. And because they could read, they had from the Landlord, not pictures but Rules.’

48 ‘respect of persons’.

49 Galatians 3:28.

50 ‘Have charity, and do as you will.’ St Augustine nowhere uses this sentence in precisely these words. The words Habe caritatem are taken from his Sermon 78, ch. 6, The phrase et fac quod vis seems to be a conflation taken from Augustine’s Commentary en the First Letter of John, Book 10, ch. 8, where he writes, ‘dilige et quod vis fac’-‘Cherish, and do as you will.’ The conflation of these two components is probably the product of St Thomas Aquinas’s faulty memory, since he says precisely what Lewis quotes and attributes this to Augustine in his sermon on the Beatitudes. Lewis may have been remembering a quotation from St Thomas, who, in turn, had misquoted Augustine.

51 ‘Until you have charity, do not do as you will.’ This is Lewis’s gloss and expansion of the Augustinian phrase.

52 Lewis had sent Baker a copy of The Allegory of Love.

53 David Nichol Smith (1875–1962) was educated at the University of Edinburgh. He was appointed to a readership at Oxford in 1908 where he gave valuable help in organizing the English School. In 1921 he became a Fellow of Merton College and was Merton Professor of English Literature, 1929–46. Much of his work was turned towards the eighteenth century, and included Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (1928) and Some Observations on Eighteenth Century Poetry (1937).

54 John Keats, Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (1931; 4th edn 1952), Letter 123 to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 Febniary-3 May 1819, pp. 334–5: ‘Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world…There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions—but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.’

55 George Peele (1556–961 of London was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He wrote pageants, plays and verse. His Life and Works were edited by C. T. Prouty (3 vols., 1952–70).

56 George Peele, David and Bethsabe (1599), 1169, 1648.

57 The Allegory of Love, pp. 318–19: ‘[Spenser] wrote in an age when English poetry had reached its stylistic nadir, the age of “hunting the letter”, of violent over-emphasis and exquisitely bad taste, the age in which that most ignoble metre, the Poulter’s measure, was popular… It was an age in which even Peele could make Venus speak thus to Paris in description of Helen; “A gallant girl, a lusty minion trull,/That can give sport to thee thy bellyful.”’

58 John Milton, Il Penseroso (1645), 105.

59 Owen Barfield’s fairy tale, The Silver Trumpet, was published in 1925.

60 i.e. Lewis’s unpublished ‘Great War’ document. See note 35 to the letter to Barfield of 16 March 1932.

61 Franz Kafka, The Castle (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1926).

62 Playing on the title of The Allegory of Love, which is dedicated to Barfield, this signature is accompanied by the drawing of an alligator serenading a young lady in a castle. The word-play is based on the malapropism ‘allegories in the Nile’.

63 The Voice of Cecil Harwood: A Miscellany, ed. Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), ‘Day and Night’, stanza 2, 2.

64 ibid., 6.

65 ibid., stanza 1, 4–6: ‘I shut consciously the lids of my eyes,/I spiritually close the gates of the sense of hearing,/I forget all touch and taste and the intake of breath and I wait.’

66 ‘Where is “The Place of the Lion”? The home and hearth of Cecil!’

67 ‘saying nothing’. The phrase is a catch-phrase in Plato, as in Apology 18, b, 2.

68 ‘a new foundation’. The reference is to 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Galatians 6:15.

69 In his letter to Arthur Greeves of 14 February 1920 (CL I, p. 475), Lewis wrote: ‘When a thing is explained it loses half its nastiness, “tout comprende [sic] c’est tout pardonner.”’ The expression comes from Madame de Staël (1766–1817), who said in Corinne (1807), book 18, ch, 5, ‘Tout comprendre rend très indulgen’ (‘To understand everything makes one very indulgent’). The first expression used by Lewis, ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ (‘to understand everything is to forgive everything’) is also attributed to Madame de Staël, while ‘tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre’ means ‘to forgive everything is to understand everything’.

70 Robert William Chapman (1881–1960), secretary to the delegates of Oxford University Press, 1920–42, was the editor of The Allegory of Love. He took a First in Literae Humaniores from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1906, after which he began working for the Clarendon Press. He was the editor of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, and his many distinguished books include Jane Austen—A Critical Bibliography (1953) and an edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson with Mrs Thrale’s Genuine Letters to Him, 3 vols. (1952).

71 The Allegory of Love, p. 336. The reference is to Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III, vii, 29.

72 ibid., p. 331: ‘Acrasia’s two young women (their names are obviously Cissie and Flossie) are ducking and giggling in a bathing-pool for the benefit of a passer-by: one does not need to go to fairy land to meet them.’

73 Scott, Waverley. ch. 6: ‘The laird was only rejoiced that his worthy friend, Sir Everard Waverley of Waverley-Honour, was reimbursed of the expenditure which he had outlaid on account of the house of Bradwardine…A yearly intercourse took place, of a short letter and a hamper or a cask or two, between Waverley-Honour and Tully-Veolan, the English exports consisting of mighty cheeses and mightier ale, pheasants, and venison, and the Scottish returns being vested in grouse, white hares, pickled salmon, and usquebaugh.’

74 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; 7th impression, 1936).

75 René Guénon (1886–1950), Sufi and founder of the Traditionalist School. The ‘ex-pupil’ was Martin Lings, a member of Guénon’s household in Egypt and a convert to Traditionalism. See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix, and Lings’ essay, ‘René Guénon’, Sophia: The journal of the Traditional Studies, I, no. 1 (Summer 1995).

76 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825), Aphorism VIIIb: ‘Understanding is discursive; Reason is fixed. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority; The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth.

Understanding is the faculty of reflection; Reason [the faculty] of contemplation.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 13: ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of Its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation…Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice’.

77 The medieval term for ‘poetry’.

78 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 1, Article 9, ‘Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors’: Objection 1. ‘It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is nut fitting that this science should make use of such similitudes.’ Reply: ‘Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful.’ ibid., Part I, Question 115, Article 5: ‘We know by experience that many things are done by demons, for which the power of heavenly bodies would in no way suffice: for instance, that a man in a state of delirium should speak an unknown tongue, recite poetry and authors of whom he has no previous knowledge.’

79 ‘poetry is the art of speaking in verses. Question 1: Whether rhythm is a type of verse.’

80 ‘by its activity, through contact, as from its appearance’. These are the criteria St Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologica, Part I. Question 75, Article 1 to discuss whether the soul has a body.

81 ‘through the path of the will’. This was a standard concern of the Church Fathers.

82 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 27, Article 5.

83 John 1:12.