by C. S. Lewis
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I THE NATURE OF MAN 1. MAN IN GOD’S IMAGE
2. FALLEN MAN
3. THE INCONSOLABLE LONGING
4. THE FREE SELF
5. THE CHILD AND CHILDLIKENESS
II THE MORAL WORLD 1. THE ‘TAO’
2. REALITY
3. HIERARCHY
4. PROPER USE OF OBJECTS
5. RELIGION AND IRRELIGION
III THE BIBLE
IV THE TRINITY 1. GOD
2. CHRIST
3. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND ANGELS
V SIN 1. EVIL
2. SELF
3. PRIDE
VI THE CHRISTIAN COMMITMENT 1. ALTERNATIVES
2. THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY
3. SALVATION
4. PRACTISING THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
VII HELL AND HEAVEN 1. HELL
2. PAIN AND PLEASURE
3. HEAVEN
VIII LOVE AND SEX 1. AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
2. LOVE
3. SEX
IX NATURE 1. THE REALITY OF NATURE
2. NATURE AND SUPERNATURE
3. GOD AS CREATOR OF NATURE
4. NATURE, MYTH, AND ALLEGORY
X THE POST-CHRISTIAN WORLD 1. THE MODERN VIEW
2. MATERIALISM, DETERMINISM, AND OBJECTIVE VALUE
3. EDUCATION AND RELIGION
4. THE ARTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PREFACE
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. Before he was ten his mother had started him in French, Latin and the reading of fiction. After preparatory study in Irish and English schools, he attended Malvern College in England for one year and then studied for Oxford under W. T. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham in Surrey. By this time—he was sixteen—he had become an inveterate reader, fallen in love with romantic story and northern myth, been engulfed by the haunting mystery of Joy, developed into an habitual walker, learned to revel in the glory of the English countryside, and turned atheist. Oddly, however, it was the rigorous dialectic taught by Kirkpatrick, himself an atheist, which in due course brought Lewis to Christianity.
On his nineteenth birthday Lewis, a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, arrived in the frontline trenches of France, where he was wounded in action. Before enlisting he had attended University College, Oxford, and after the war he returned. In 1920 he took a First Honour in Moderations, in 1922 a First in Greats, and in 1923 a First in English, also the Chancellor’s Prize for an English Essay. In October 1924 he became a lecturer at University College, and in 1925 took up his work as Fellow at Magdalen. Four years later the most important event of his life occurred. He was converted to Christianity. He remained at Magdalen until 1954 when he was elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, a post he held until a few weeks before his death on 22 November 1963.
Lewis was among the great teachers of his generation. He had both a powerful, discriminating mind and brilliance of language. He was lightning quick in noting any logical flaw in even a casual remark. In the presentation of an abstruse idea in criticism or in theology, he had a natural tendency toward analogy and metaphor. Once after an involved debate on Christianity and culture he said, ‘If we could thrash the problem out on the neutral ground of clean and dirty fingers, we might return to the battlefield of literature with new lights.’ He liked his ideas to fit the truth as snugly as old slippers fit the feet, and he dropped many of his most provocative thoughts as lightly as a feather.
A visitor to the Socratic Society of Oxford gives a lively account of Lewis. He wore ‘an old battered tweed sports coat . . . well-worn corduroy trousers, a patterned, well-washed shirt with a nondescript antique type tie. He was ruddy of complexion, radiating health, of substantial girth all over, and his eyes sparkled with mirth’. The subject for the evening was the meaning of history and a professor of history buried his nose in a dull paper and read endlessly while the audience listened sleepily. When it came Lewis’s turn to speak, there was immediate attention. ‘He was exciting. . . . Vivid images and portraits just tumbled out of him. He had no notes and spoke spontaneously with charm and lilt.’ His lectures were crowded and students left them with the sense of genuine acquisition.
It was not, however, as lecturer to a few hundred students or private associations but as writer to thousands that Lewis is best known. His brother tells us that before Lewis was thirteen he had produced a complete novel. His published works run to more than forty volumes, including poetry, short stories, novels, children’s stories, allegory, letters, literary criticism, studies in philology, and learned works on medieval and renaissance literature. Both as scholar and as creative writer he was praised, and indeed these two qualities join in whatever mode he used. Immense knowledge, logic, and imagination joined in Lewis to make him one of the finest Christian apologists of our time.
Occasionally over-assertive and unduly combative in conversation, Lewis actually belonged to the greatly good men of all time. Like Dr Samuel Johnson, though dialectically formidable and capable of annihilating an opponent, Lewis was yet nobly humble of heart. He risked and in some measure, especially among his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge, damaged his scholarly reputation by writing books that warmly and wittily defended orthodox Christianity. Again like Johnson, Lewis was perfectly at home among Greek and Latin texts and languages generally, but he contrasted with the Great Cham in the far-flung strength and grace of his imagination.
The paradoxes are as much accentuated in Lewis’s personal as in his scholarly life. A man of phenomenal memory, his mind was all but a blank when it came to making up a list of his own books and articles. Hating letter writing as the chief burden of his life, he nevertheless spent long hours answering, mostly in his own hand, correspondents around the world. A lover of solitude or else his small circle of intimates, he made even casual visitors to his rooms in the university feel leisurely at home. Completely erudite in the philosophical highlands, he was at the same time a man of simplest affections and in whom ‘the element of play was never far away’, as his delightful stories for children prove, and this despite the fact that he disliked the society of small children. So much a lover of nature that on one occasion at least he stood outside to enjoy the scene while dictating to his secretary through the open window, Lewis nevertheless spent his life as a sedentary scholar. By his own admission awkward in his social affairs, he acted on his conviction of Christian duty to sit at the bedside of the sick and personally serve the poor. He gave away two-thirds of his income and would have given more except for income taxes. Though severely wounded on the western front in World War I, he made light of his military service. Believing the modern world to be quite literally in a hellish tailspin, he was nevertheless a man of unceasing personal cheerfulness. A man of massive intellect, he was at the same time a true mystic in the sense of believing absolutely in God.
Actually Lewis is paradoxical on a small view, not much so on a large. The world is so little used to seeing a believer that it is easy to see him as an oddity. He had so little confidence in the works of men that he took his own books with several grains of salt and actually forgot some of their titles. Though he might easily have justified himself as serving God by writing books which made profound spiritual impressions, he nevertheless believed that a Christian needed to make personal contacts for God. Lover of nature, he always remembered that nature’s beauty ‘withers when we try to make it an absolute.’ In a word, he was a man with a clear and operating hierarchy and hence suffered a minimum from the present ubiquitous practise of making man the real measure of things. He once desc
ribed himself as a ‘converted pagan living among apostate Puritans’ and ‘a man who had taken as long to’ acquire inhibitions as others have needed to get rid of them. He enjoyed, perhaps too much, calling himself an Old Western Man and taking potshots at nearly everything modern. Yet beneath his lance breaking there was a world of spiritual actualities. For instance, as few today, Lewis saw and feared the sinuosity of pride, calling it ‘the essential vice, the utmost evil . . . the complete anti-God state of mind’. He regarded such spiritual sins as far more vicious than our overt ones.
He was able to find deep satisfaction in things ordinarily taken for granted—a blade of grass, sunlight falling on a tree, the ride from the university on the public bus and the walk down Kiln Lane to his beloved home (‘I love monotony’, he once said), fairy stories, cheerfulness, humility, courtesy even to dogs and cats, the true brotherhood of man and also the unique individual (his housekeeper told me that he would talk at length with her and claimed he learned much from her), and of life itself as a constant miracle.
He was not unlike Aslan, his own Christ-symbol in the Narnia stories. Aslan was a loving but never a tame lion and did not hesitate to bowl the children over or put a substantial scratch on them to turn them away from a worse danger ahead. Lewis had the gift of loving his generation and tempering his scratches to his clear view of man’s real needs rather than the shoddy ones to which we are ordinarily addicted. Someone objected to Lewis’s trying to solve such great problems as pain and miracles in a relatively small book. But he believed that such problems had at least essential answers and set out like a hound on the scent of a fox to find them. He liked answers better than questions.
Lewis’s Christian books are remarkably ‘of a piece’. In The Christian World of C. S. Lewis I have mentioned some of his main themes—his wish to uphold the reality and utter truthfulness of orthodox Christianity, his assurance that all men are destined to eternal life either in heaven or in hell and his belief that momentarily they are preparing themselves for one place or the other, his belief that God is to be obeyed explicitly, his conviction of a devilish fallacy at the centre of much modern thought, that the elevation of self over God is perhaps man’s most persistent temptation, and his often mentioned belief that many world myths are shadows of the light of God brooding over man.
Although in selecting the entries for this anthology I paid no attention to themes, their appearance was not surprising, as chapter titles and sub-headings indicate. Lewis’s constant allusions to God’s gift of selfhood and the dire dangers of its abuse are well represented. As might be expected, there is much about contemporary times. Perhaps the best evidence of all of Lewis’s basic aim in his Christian works is the large chapter on ‘Christianity and the Church’ and especially the portion of it given to the practise of a holy life. Though one section is marked ‘Hierarchy’, the whole volume might not inappropriately be called by that title. All other things are seen in the light and by the standard of the great ‘I Am’ and take their values from that fact. For a writer who always described himself as no theologian, there is a great deal on the Trinity. One fact which will not surprise readers of the children’s books is the frequency of entries concerning salvation. Also the idea that ‘Aslan is not a tame lion’ is hammered home not only there but in the majority of Lewis’s Christian works.
Concerning a distinguished colleague of his, Lewis said, ‘Of such a man’s mind the least gleanings are venerable.’ I suppose this is the assumption on which anthologies are generally produced. One wishes to preserve in a single place the essential wisdom of the man. At the same time it would be a mistake to substitute such a collection, valuable as it is, for the works proper. Shakespeare anthologised is something quite different from Shakespeare dramatised. To appreciate an anthology adequately, one needs to have walked along the level floor of the author’s mind, or, to change the figure, to have examined not simply the diamond in the ring but the ring, the hand, and indeed the person wearing it. Good writing always pleases both by the excellence of its parts and the perfection of the whole. Here we have the parts, and it is hoped that they may make the reader turn, or turn again, to the whole body of Lewis’s works.
Because this is primarily a collection of Lewis’s remarks on Christian themes it omits most of his comments, pungent as many of them are, on literature, criticism and other purely scholarly subjects. Nevertheless, it was one of the distinguishing aspects of Lewis’s thought that his Christian books were marked by a profound logic (‘brevity comparable to St Paul’s’ and argument ‘distilled to the unanswerable’, said the New York Times of one book of his), and his scholarly works never ignored the Christian philosophy at the base of his thought. To him the world was a unity with God as its sovereign creator and unceasing ruler. For this reason it will be noticed that every one of his books, together with most of his uncollected essays and articles and even a few still manuscript remarks, are included in this volume.
Expository books lend themselves better to quotation than do poetry and fiction. Nearly three-fourths of the material in Lewis’s anthology of George MacDonald is taken from expository volumes by that writer. Some of Lewis’s own expository books, such as The Problem of Pain and Miracles, are so rich that it is difficult to make proper selections from them. Mere Christianity, though rewarding in ideas, is often lacking in the shapeliness of expression that an anthology demands, perhaps because it was originally spoken into the microphones of the BBC. Oddly, I find relatively little that I judge suitable for the anthology in his novel Out of the Silent Planet, but in the companion novel Perelandra, once the ‘temptation’ scenes begin, there is something on almost every page that might be used. I have found it especially hard to choose passages from Lewis’s poetry, not because it is not rich in content and style but because each poem is so completely a unity that parts are usually not detachable.
Worthy as it might be, my aim has not been to compile a book of what Lewis believed. For instance, he held that pacifists are wrong and he steadfastly refused to be classified as High, Low, or Broad Church, but such opinions are omitted. Although passages on such subjects as the inspiration of the Bible are included, there is no systematic ‘covering’ of the subject. An anthology is no place for answers to criticisms or fine-pointed arguments. To be sure, on every page one will discover Lewis’s spiritual convictions, but never as systematic theology. Nor is this volume intended primarily as ‘spiritual uplift’ or sermonic exhortation to lead men to Christ or Christians to a closer walk with God. Though one could wish that the book might often have these effects, it is nevertheless of another sort.
Neither have I attempted to wedge into the anthology interesting personal aspects of Lewis. Where is there a more picturesque biographical sketch than Lewis’s account, in Surprised by Joy and the Letters, of his father? Where clearer detail of the logic which led him to God? Where a better account of the war years at Oxford? But an anthology is not the place for such things.
Again, in certain instances passages were not amenable to the length I regarded best. The vivid accounts, for instance, in The Great Divorce, of the conversion of the lustful man and of the tragedian striking poses against heavenly reason are examples of excellent things which had to be passed over. Many passages in The Pilgrim’s Regress presented the same difficulty, e.g., the Freudian jailer who persuaded the prisoners to believe that their own viscera were the only true reality.
But I should say what I have sought to include. First, I have followed the tradition of ‘wit and wisdom’ by seeking entries containing the pungent and provocative idea. Secondly, and again in the tradition of anthologies, I have chosen self-contained remarks, i.e., ones requiring no editorial explanation or comment. Thirdly, it need hardly be mentioned that entries should be in the best style. Often in one way or another they embody a figure of speech. Fourthly, I have desired to include not simply aphoristic remarks as such but rather ideas shaped and coloured by the particular bias of Lewis’s mind. It is a Lewis antholog
y.
It is obvious that no two people endeavouring to select the best from a man’s works will always choose identical passages, and the richer the content of those works the less likelihood of total agreement. Concerning the making of anthologies Lewis himself once remarked, ‘No man ever agrees with another man’s choice, and to disagree is one of the pleasures of using an anthology.’ Nothing more can be said than that here you have my own choices based on thirty-odd years of reading and rereading Lewis.
Speaking of an anthology which he reviewed, Lewis said, ‘If a second edition is called for I hope the editor will tell us where, in the works of the author, each passage is to be found; otherwise one of the chief uses of an anthology—that of directing us to the originals—is frustrated.’ Since I heartily agree, I have followed this principle. Yet because there are several editions of most of Lewis’s books, I have thought it wise to refer to general units, such as chapters and sections, rather than to specific pages, and this even in cases where presently only one edition is available. In cases where an essay originally appeared in a periodical and was later incorporated in a book, I have, for the convenience of readers, referred to the book. But the acknowledgements below make known the publisher’s and my gratitude to the original sources.
Where Letters is given as a source the reference is to Letters of C. S. Lewis; whereas Letters to Malcolm refers to that book.
I have mentioned the frequent use of Lewis’s fiction. But I must remind anyone who has had the misfortune not to have read The Screwtape Letters that the point of view there is upside down and the ‘Enemy’ is God.
My first thanks are due the Class of 1963 of Wheaton College, U.S.A., whose financial grant made possible a year’s leave of absence from my teaching for the preparation of this anthology and work on other projects.