Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 14

As mentioned earlier, the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée, knew that the individual volumes of this history would require some dovetailing, and it was up to them to see that there was no overlapping of periods. The American scholar, Douglas Bush,¹ agreed to write to ‘The Early Seventeenth Century, From c. 1600 to c. 1660’ and in January 1938 Wilson informed Lewis of this, asking if he wanted to include William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas in his sixteenth-century volume.

TO FRANK PERCY WILSON (OUP):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 25th 1938

My dear Wilson

No, I don’t want Dunbar: and I don’t cleave to Douglas even, if anyone wants him. And at the other end of the principle is a simple one—the sooner Bush can begin and I leave off, the better I shall be pleased. The O HELL lies like a nightmare on my chest ever since I got your specimen bibliography: I shan’t try to desert—anyway, I suppose the exit is thronged with dreadful faces and fiery arms²—but I have a growing doubt if I ought to be doing this.

Mind you, I’d sooner have Dunbar than Donne: sooner, in general, come early on the scene than linger late. Let the others choose.

I hoped we should all meet at the Aldwych and set out to find it with Tillyard who proved to know no more about London than I do. We got to a thing called Bush House in the end where we lunched in a barber’s shop, served by tailors, off sponges. I was sorry not to see you again.

Do you think there’s any chance of the world ending before the O HELL appears?

Yours, in deep depression,

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[The Kilns]

March 28th 1938

My dear Barfield–

Thanks for letter: I have written to Tolkien. ‘Omit no manly degree of importunity’³ towards Harwood. I begin to realise how much the quidity of the walks depended on him. I love your part in him as Lamb said. Can nothing be done about it. I am ready for feudal arrangements if they are any good. Also, I must warn you that something seems to be wrong with my left foot. I shall come, of course, D.V.,⁴ but how much I’ll be able to walk, I don’t know. (Memo: I can’t drive a car) and H.J.⁵ said ‘I hope you are not the sort of people who walk 12 or 15 miles a day.’ (That’s where the Sadism will come in!) So there’ll be much more tour than walking. I suppose you know Bournemouth is about 20 miles long.

Orpheus goes back tomorrow.⁶ I can’t pretend to have anything like taken it in yet: think what one would make of the Ring under similar conditions—and this presents difficulties of the same kind. I like the matter of I i as much as I always did and am more reconciled to the style. I ii is excellent, though I’d like more (and better) variations in the Hiawatha metre. I iii I’m still not quite sure about: I expect it wd. act well. Act II is simply superb. It brought tears to my eyes. III i also very good—until the scene with Persephone which I don’t understand. IV i Aristaeus’s opening speech does not get me at all. The ‘thing’ may be good. I begin to see my way a little more in the scene between O. and the satyr, but this needs more re-reading. IV ii very good: Cyrene’s ritual goes off admirably. IV iii—I don’t know. Mostly above my head. The lyrical part at the end: that is very unlike you. A sort of Swinburne-Morris-Kipling style (I deemed that I had good hunting…Have I used well, Demeter, the man’s good gift of his breath—the high gods etc). Is there some point in this that I’m missing? This is rotten criticism: but it’s not an easy poem.

Yours

C.S.L

TO JANET SPENS (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

April 18th 1938

Dear Miss Spens

Thanks for your kind and interesting letter. You are right of course about the silliness of dragging in Mason: that was merely (as sillinesses so often are) the intrusion of a favourite hobby horse of mine in a place where it was not wanted—my belief, namely, that the continuity between the Romantics and the XVIIIth c. needs to be stressed more than it usually is.

Yes, the Dynasts is very queer: the invention of a whole pantheon to symbolise the non existence of God. I think it is not uncommon to find atheists perpetually angry with God for not being there. Perhaps it is a laudable trait!

I hadn’t noticed the parallel between Urania and Cymoent.⁷ But I still think there is an important difference. Marinell is, in the story, Cymoent’s literal son, and Cymoent is a character not a personification only. But Adonais and the Muse are ‘a poet’ and ‘the spirit of poetry’ and I don’t count the latter to break down like a bereaved human being. Shelley seems to be taking his symbols too seriously in one way and not seriously enough in another. It is like making the sun weep because a candle has gone out. I must re-read The Witch.⁸

The chief reason why I can’t read Godwin is that I have never got hold of a copy of Political Justice;⁹ but I intend to ‘one of these days’. I shall be very interested to hear what you think of him. My own growing suspicion is that he can’t be so bad as our critical tradition (a very flippant, elegant, belle-lettristic tradition) makes out. If Shelley likes an author¹⁰ and the Saintsburies and Raleighs and Garrods sneer at him—well, it makes one wonder. I hope you will find time to let me know how he struck you.

With many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th April 1938

Dear Griffiths

It was nice to hear from you again and of course I read the articles with interest.¹¹ I think at the top of p. 8 in the first you might have expressed more clearly the actually antimoral side of romanticism you were in when we first met.¹² Have you forgotten that in our fiercest arguments you were actually defending cruelty and lechery. On p. 9—is it your considered view that Berkeleyian idealism is to be found in the Confessions? I shd. doubt it.¹³ ‘Strange as it may seem’ a few lines lower is ambiguous. I take it you mean it was strange that this shd. have been a discovery.¹⁴ In next para. I shd. have liked an explicit statement of the view you then expressed to me, in words that I have never forgotten ‘The choice in the long run is between Christianity and Hinduism’.

In the second article your account of the night of prayer (p. 31)¹⁵ omits a v. interesting fact you told me shortly after it—that what started you off was the consciousness of sin in some religious writer you were reading which you could not share tho’ you were satisfied on objective grounds that you were more sinful than the writer. They are nice, plain articles and very clear.

I have been in considerable trouble over the present danger of war. Twice in one life—and then to find how little I have grown in fortitude despite my conversion. It has done me a lot of good by making me realise how much of my happiness secretly depended on the tacit assumption of at least tolerable conditions for the body: and I see more clearly, I think, the necessity (if one may so put it) which God is under of allowing us to be afflicted—so few of us will really rest all on Him if He leaves us any other support.

About our differences: I feel that whenever two members of different communions succeed in sharing the spiritual life so far as they can now share it, and are thus forced to regard each other as Christians, they are really helping on re-union by producing the conditions without which official reunion would be quite barren. I feel sure that this is the layman’s chief contribution to the task, and some of us here are being enabled to perform it. You, who are a priest and a theologian, are a different story: and on the purely natural & temperamental level there is, and always has been, a sort of tension between us two which prevents our doing much mutual good. We shall both be nicer, please God, in a better place. Meanwhile you have my daily prayer and good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC):¹⁶

Magdalen College, Oxford. May 28th 1938

Dear Betjeman

Mea culpa! I don’t like to think how long these two books of yours have been on my shelves and my conscience. Not that I’ve been reading them—I’m afraid the mere reluctance to let books go—and a still greater reluctance to put up a parcel—has been the main factor. Your pardon.

Why do you never drop in and see me?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC):

Magdalen College, Oxford. June 3rd 1938

Dear Betjeman

Sorry, I couldn’t manage Whit Monday, but very many thanks. Pay my respects to that very great man Dawkins.¹⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):

[Magdalen College] June 7th 1938.

[Dear Williams]

Though I have not yet finished it I feel I must write and congratulate you on producing a really great book in your He Came Down from Heaven.¹⁸ It is thickly inlaid with patins of bright gold—‘He does not exist primarily for us’ (p. 3)—‘All that could be said would be that they had not yet happened’ (p. 6).¹⁹ (This is really overwhelming. I honestly think it quite likely that when we are in our graves this may become one of the sentences that straddle across ages like the great dicta of Plato, Augustine, or Pascal)—on Bible-worship of the odious new ‘literary’ sort (7, 8.)²⁰—and every word on p. 25.²¹ And it’s so clear, which at one time I should never have expected a book of yours to be.

Damn you, you go on getting steadily better ever since you first crossed my path: how do you do it? I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams’ and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame. I’ve a good mind to punch your head when we next meet.

[C. S. Lewis]

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 10th 1938

My dear Barfield

What frightfully bad luck. (This would have been really an ideal week end as, in addition to having papers to correct so that I couldn’t talk, I have run a needle into my foot so that I can’t walk: you could have concentrated on Orpheus with almost no interruption). I hope the measles will soon go over, and it’ll go hard but we’ll fix up another time in the long vac. I’m afraid the lyric is not very appropriate, now!

Think not the doom of man reversed for thee. Apropos of Johnson, isn’t this good, from the Rambler, from a man who decided not to marry a blue-stocking on finding her an atheist and a determinist. ‘It was not difficult to discover the danger of committing myself forever to one who might at any time mistake the dictates of passion, or the calls of appetite, for the decree of fate; or consider cuckoldom as necessary to the general system, as a link in the everlasting chain of successive causes.’²²

And, in another way, isn’t this splendid ‘Whenever, after the shortest relaxation of vigilance, reason and caution return to their charge, they find hope again in possession.’²³

What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?—They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact)

It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi, (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it. More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation

1 What is this Ablaut that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures?

2 Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise.

I must fix my Irish visit before I can make a new date with you, but we’ll manage one before or after your holidays. When are you going away? You note that hope is once again in possession.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Sept 6th 1938

My dear B.

(1.) As at present advised I can come on 23rd, but no date is so safe as the 30th. I am sure Cecil said he could not come before the end of Sept. but a I may be wrong and Β the fixture between you and me was prior and he is merely appenditical and agglutinative. All the same I’d much prefer the 30th if you can possibly do it.

(2.)

Some believe the slumber Of trees is in December When timber’s naked under star And the squirrel keeps his chamber.

But I believe their fibre Awakes to life and labour When turbulence comes roaring up The land in loud October,

And charges, and enlarges The beach, and long besieges, And scourges trees till, like the bones Of thought, their shape emerges.

Form is soul. In warmer Seductive days, disarming Its firmer will, the wood grows soft And spreads its dreams to murmur;

Into earnest winter, Like souls awaked, it enters. The hunter frost and the cold light Have quelled the green enchanter. ²⁴

(3.) Isn’t Jupiter splendid these nights? C.S.L.

Lewis had already mentioned in his letter to Griffiths of 29 April the impending danger of war; in the next two he explores his increasing and justified concern. For this was the time of the Munich crisis. In March 1938 Germany had invaded Austria. By the end of May, encouraged by the lack of reaction to the invasion on the part of Britain and France, Hitler began to threaten Czechoslovakia, and especially the Sudetenland-a tiny section of the Czech Republic that lay on the border of Germany.

In June 1938 Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, said ‘off the record’ that Britain favoured turning over the Sudetenland to Germany ‘in the interest of peace’. He sent a representative to Czechoslovakia to mediate between that country and the Sudeten Germans. Finally, on 5 September, the Czech president agreed to accept the German demands. That was not at all what Hitler wanted, and he used his own propaganda machine to cause outbreaks of fighting in the Sudetenland. This, in turn, led Czechoslovakia to declare martial law.

Britain and its allies were very keen to avoid war, and on 29 September 1938 representatives from Germany, England, France and Italy met in Munich to decide Czechoslovakia’s fate. An agreement was signed stating that Germany would take over the Sudetenland. On 1 October German troops began occupying the region. After that similar settlements were made over Hungary and Poland. Hitler had succeeded and by 15 March 1939 he was to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Sept 12th 1938

My dear Barfield

What awful quantities of this sort of thing seem necessary to break us in, or, more correctly, to break us off. One thinks one has made some progress towards detachment, some ,²⁵ and begin[s] to realise, and to acquiesce in, the rightly precarious hold we have on all our natural loves, interests, and comforts: then when they are really shaken, at the very first breath of that wind, it turns out to have been all a sham, a field-day, blank cartridges.

This is how I was thinking that night, about the war danger. I had so often told myself that my friends and books and even brains were not given me to keep: that I must teach myself at bottom to care for something else more (and also of course to care for them more but in a different way) and I was horrified to find how cold the idea of really losing them struck. An awful symptom is that part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’ as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of ones personal interests was our real ,²⁶ instead of the opposite.

I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet.

This morning comes your letter, and I know you at least (I cd. hardly depend on any one else for so much) will not think me heartless for connecting it in this way with what I was already thinking, for the subjects really flowed together—indeed they are the same subject.

Well, well: you know all I am thinking about at least as well as I do. As you said in that essay of yours one cannot in the Simon of Cyrene moment see the cross from the Joseph of Arimathea point of view, but one can remember that the other side is real: hence that apparently naked will, stripped of its emotional motives, which, on your view, is alone free.

I have a lot more to say on this (I’ve just read the Theologia Germanica)²⁷ when we meet. That is, if we meet, for of course our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week. I can’t feel in my bones that it will, but my bones know dam’ all about it. If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some ways we’ve had a corking time these 20 years.

Be thankful you have nothing to reproach yourself about in your relations with your father (I had lots) and that it is not some disease. The horror of a stroke must be felt almost entirely by the spectators.²⁸

I’ll fix with Cecil.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Out of the Silent Planet was published by John Lane, the Bodley Head on 23 September 1938.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 5th 1938

Dear Dom Bede

I am afraid I have forgotten most of the things I said in my last letter. The opinion of my friend about the end of life was not, I should suppose, quoted with any approval of mine. As to whether reason can rigorously prove God and immortality, what is one to say? I do not remember to have seen a proof that appeared to me absolutely compelling, but that may be only my reason or the writer’s reason: At any rate it is obvious that pure reason, in human beings, is very often in fact not convinced. I shd. suppose that the truths imbedded in Paganism owe at least as much to tradition and divine guidance as to ratiocination. About war—I have always believed that it is lawful for a Christian to bear arms in war when commanded by constituted authority unless he has very good reason (which a private person rarely has) for believing the war to be unjust. I base this 1. On the fact that Our Lord does not appear to have regarded the Roman soldiers as ex officio sinners. 2. On the fact that the Baptist told soldiers not to leave the army, but to be good soldiers.²⁹. On the opinion of St Augustine (somewhere in De Civitate).³⁰ 4. On the general agreement of all Christian communities except a few sects—who generally combine pacifism with other odd opinions. I take the dicta in the Sermon on the Mount to be prohibitions of revenge, not as a counsel of perfection but as absolutely binding on all Christians.³¹ But I do not think punishment inflicted by lawful authorities for the right motives is revenge: still less, violent action in the defence of innocent people. I cannot believe the knight errant idea to be sinful. Even in the very act of fighting I think charity (to the enemy) is not more endangered than in many necessary acts wh. we all admit to be lawful.³²

On reunion I have no contribution to make: it is a matter quite above my sphere.³³

I was terrified to find how terrified I was by the crisis. Pray for me for courage.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS STUART MOORE (EVELYN UNDERHILL) (M):³⁴

As from Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct 29th 1938

Dear Madam

Your letter is one of the most surprising and, in a way, alarming honours I have ever had. I have not been for very long a believer and have hitherto regarded the great mystical writers as a man in the foothills regards the glaciers and precipices: to find myself noticed from regions which I scarcely feel qualified to notice is really quite overwhelming. In trying to thank you, I find myself regretting that we have given such an ugly meaning to the word ‘Condescension’ which ought to have remained a beautiful name for a beautiful action.

I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book.³⁵ Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well!

Again thanking you very much,

Yours very truly,

C. S. Lewis

During the course of 1938 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press asked F. P. Wilson to prepare a ‘progress report’ on the Oxford History of English Literature. In his Report to the Delegates, dated 20 December 1938, Wilson said that C. S. Lewis had written to him thus:

I go on reading and write on each subject while it is fresh in mind. Out of these scattered sheets, perhaps after much correction, I hope to build up a book. The subjects so treated already are Platonism, Douglas, Lyndsay, Tottel, Mulcaster’s Elementarie, Sir Thomas More, Prayer-book, Sidney, Marlowe (non-dramatic), Nashe, Watson, Barclay, Googe, Raleigh (poems), Shakespeare (poems), Webbe; and among other sources Petrarch and Machiavelli.

I am at present hard at work not directly on the book but on a lecture entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’: a similar Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry which I have and still give proved to be a useful buttress to the other book. ³⁶

I can give no indication of when it will be done. I find the work to be got through is enormous and would be delighted for an honourable pretext to withdraw: excessive pressure from the delegates might come to constitute an honourable pretext.³⁷

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):³⁸

[The Kilns]

Dec. 28th 1938

Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure.

You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.

What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.)³⁹ and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds⁴⁰ both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon⁴¹ the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs⁴² in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen.

I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre, ⁴³ but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Micromégas⁴⁴ but purely satiric.

Yrs.

C. S. Lewis

1 Professor Douglas Bush (1896–1983), born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, was educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. An instructor in English at Harvard, 1924–7, he taught in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, 1927–36. In 1936 he returned to Harvard as Professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 1966. He and Lewis were both writing volumes for the Oxford History of English Literature, Bush’s contribution being English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945). His other boob include Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (1952), John Milton (1964) and Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry (1968).

2 Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 641–4: ‘They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld/Of Paradise, so late their happy seat./Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate/With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.’

3 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1,1759, letter to Joseph Simpson, p. 347: ‘Omit no decent nor manly degree of importunity.’

4 Deo volente— ‘God willing’.

5 This was probably his friend of undergraduate days, Alfred Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin. See note 3 to the letter to Hamilton Jenkin of 11 January 1939.

6 Barfield had finally completed his poetic drama, Orpheus, which is first mentioned in the poem Lewis included in his letter to Barfield of 5 April 1935. The play was performed on stage in 1948 and was eventually published as Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, ed., with an afterword by John C. Ulreich, Jr (West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Lindisfarne Press, 1983). In the foreword to the published work Barfield wrote: ‘I had casually mentioned to my friend C. S. Lewis that I seemed to be feeling an impulse to write a play in verse and was wondering about a subject…He said in effect: “Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance?”…Apart from the actual writing, the “getting down to it” consisted almost exclusively of a careful re-reading, with a classical dictionary beside me, of Virgil’s presentation of the myth in the fourth Georgic.’

7 A character in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III, iv.

8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824).

9 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

10 Percy Bysshe Shelley married Godwin’s daughter, Mary.

11 Griffiths published the two-part story of his conversion to Catholicism in the Benedictine periodical, Pax. nos. 198 and 199 (April/May 1938).

12 Pax, no. 198, p. 8: ‘[At Oxford] found friends who were of a like mind with myself, and the love of nature and poetry became the ruling passion of our lives. We sought out the solitude of the hills and the sea, whenever it was possible, and passed whole days, and weeks in the vacation, in reading and walking, in silent communion with nature. All out philosophy was to live according to nature, and all our religion was the worship of nature.’

13 ibid., p. 9: ‘I…found in them [St Augustine’s Confessions) the idealism of Berkeley taken up into a magnificent system of Christian philosophy, and the “intellectual love” of Spinoza transformed into a deep passion of religious love.’

14 ibid.: ‘The discovery, strange as it may seem, that another [Lewis] had been led to the Christian faith by the path of philosophy which I was pursuing, and had found the fulfilment of his philosophy in his faith, was an inspiration which was destined never to fade.’

15 Pax, no. 199, p. 31: ‘I decided that Anglicanism represented as pure a form of Christianity as I could find…But nothing could bring me any peace…I went up into a chapel at the top of the mission house, in which I was staying, one evening to pray, and there the thought came to me that I must make an effort to break with this world, which was destroying the peace of my soul. I formed a resolution that I would not go to bed that night, but would spend the whole night in prayer. It is difficult to describe the agony which 1 endured.’

16 See Sir John Betjeman in the Biographical Appendix.

17 White at Oxford Betjeman had become friends with Professor Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871–1955), Director of the British School of Archaeology, Athens, 1906–14, and Bywater and Southby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford, 1922–39. Lewis and Dawkins had been members of Tolkien’s Icelandic Society.

18 Charles Williams, He Came Down From Heaven (London: Heinemann, 1938).

19 ibid., ch. 1, pp. 5–6: ‘it might be said that the Bible, up to and including the Acts of the Apostles, is concerned rather with what happened, the Rituals with what is happening. The Epistles belong to both. It is true that all that did happen is a presentation of what is happening; all the historical events, especially of this category, area pageant of the events of the human soul. But it is true also that Christendom has always held that the two are indissolubly connected; that the events in the human soul could not exist unless the historical events had existed. If, per impossibile, it could be divinely certain that the historical events upon which Christendom reposes had not yet happened, all that could be said would be that they had not yet happened.’

20 ibid., pp. 7–8: ‘It is the habit nowadays to talk of the Bible as great literature; the Bible-worship of our forefathers has been succeeded by a more misguided and more offensive solemnity of conditioned respect, as accidentally uncritical as deliberately irreligious. Uncritical, because too often that literary respect is oddly conditioned by an ignoring of the book’s main theme.’

21 ibid., ch. 2, p. 25: ‘The distinction between necessary belief and unnecessary credulity is as necessary as belief; it is the heightening and purifying of belief. There is nothing that matters of which it is not sometimes desirable to feel: “this does not matter.” “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.” But it may be admitted also that this is part of the technique of belief in our present state; not even Isaiah or Aquinas have pursued to its revelation the mystery of self-scepticism in the divine. The nearest, perhaps, we can get to that is in the incredulous joy of great romantic moments—in love or poetry or what else: “this cannot possibly be, and it is”. Usually the way must be made ready for heaven, and then it will come by some other; the sacrifice must be made ready, and the fire will strike on another altar,’

22 The Rambler was a twice-weekly periodical in 208 numbers issued by Dr Samuel Johnson between 20 March 1750 and 14 March 1752. The quotation comes from no. 113 (16 April 1751), ‘The History of Hymenaeus’s Courtship’ (The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. IV (1969), p. 239).

23 ibid, no. 123 (21 May 1751), ‘The Young Trader Turned Gentleman’, p. 291.

24 This poem was published with slight variations as ‘Experiment’ in The Spectator, CLXI (9 December 1939), p. 998. It was further revised, and retitled ‘Pattern’, before it appeared in Poems and CP.

25 ‘awareness of death’. Plato, Phaedo, 81a.

26 ‘task’ or ‘work’.

27 The Theologia Germanica is an anonymous fourteenth-century German spiritual treatise counselling radical poverty of spirit and renunciation of self as a way of union with God. Martin Luther published an incomplete text in 1516 and the full text in 1518, giving it the tide Deutsch Theologia. The edition Lewis used was Theologia Germanica, trans, from the German by Susanna Winkworth, with a preface by the Rev. Charles Kingsley and a letter to the translator by the Chevalier Bunsen (London: Macmillan, 1907).

28 Owen’s father, Arthur Edward Barfield, died at his home, Red Roofs, Burtons Lane, Chalfont St Giles, on 15 September 1938, aged seventy-four.

29 Luke 3:14.

30 St Augustine, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), trans. John Healey (London: Everyman’s Library, 1945), book XIX, ch. 12: ‘War’s aim is nothing but glorious peace. For what is victory but a suppression of resistants, which being done, peace follows? And so peace is war’s purpose, the scope of all military discipline, and the limit at which all just contentions aim. All men seek peace by war, but none seek war by peace.’ The same idea is expressed in some of his other writings.

31 Matthew 5:39: ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’

32 In 1940 Lewis addressed an Oxford pacifist society on ‘Why I Am Not a Pacifist’, which is published in Timeless at Heart (1987) and EC.

33 Lewis was eventually persuaded to devote a short paper to ‘Christian Reunion’. It was published in Christian Reunion and Other Essays (1990) and is reprinted in EC.

34 Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who was married to Hubert Stuart Moore, was famous for her works on mysticism. She converted to Christianity in 1907, and to Anglicanism in 1921. Profoundly influenced by Friedrich von Hügel, she devoted herself to giving spiritual direction, retreats, and writing. Her books include Mysticism (1911), The Life of the Spirit and the Life of today (1922) and Worship (1936). Lewis was replying to Underhill’s letter of 26 October 1938: ‘May I thank you for the very great pleasure which your remarkable book “Out of the Silent Planet” has given me? It is so seldom that one comes across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: & this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn & oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour & deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars”. I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!’ (Bodleian Library. MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 68).

35 Inch. 5 of Out of the Silent Planet (London: 1938; HarperCollins, 2000), Ransom is in the spaceship on the way to Mars: ‘He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds…now…the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for the empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even from the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens’ (p. 29).

36 i.e. The Allegory of Love.

37 CG, p. 477.

38 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix. Green was reading English Literature and had been attending Lewis’s ‘Prolegomena’ lectures. He had written to thank Lewis for Our of the Silent Planet.

39 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930; Penguin, 1937).

40 J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Last Judgement’, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927). John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), geneticist, was Professor of Genetics at University College, London, 1933–57. For most of his life he was a disillusioned Marxist. Haldane hated Lewis’s science fiction novels and attacked them in his essay ‘Auld Hornie, F.R.S.’ in the Modern Quarterly (Autumn 1946). Lewis’s ‘Reply to Professor Haldane’ is published in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; Fount, 2000).

41 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

42 Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), American novelist remembered principally for his Tarzan stories and who wrote a number of stories set on other planets.

43 Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), Iter Exstaticum Coelestre (1656).

44 Voltaire, Micromégas (1753).