by C. S. Lewis
I express my deep appreciation to the Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis for their encouragement in the preparation of this book.
I am grateful to Dr Corbin Carnell, Mr Jocelyn Gibb, the Reverend Walter Hooper, and Dr Owen Barfield for criticisms of the manuscript. To the latter two I am indebted for numerous other favours. I take this occasion to mention in particular Mr Hooper’s indispensable bibliography which any Lewis student must keep close at hand. My thanks are also due to Miss Agnes Horness and to my wife, Martha, for valuable assistance. It is also my great pleasure to acknowledge the friendship and encouragement of Major W. H. Lewis.
The publisher and I also express our gratitude for permission to use excerpts from the following works by C. S. Lewis:
The Athlone Press for ‘The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version’ (Selected Literary Essays).
The Bristol Diocesan Gazette for ‘The Trouble with “X”’ (August 1948).
Cambridge University Press for ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, The Discarded Image, An Experiment in Criticism, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and Studies in Words.
Church of the Covenant, United Church of Christ, for Encounter with Light (later collected with other letters from Lewis to the author, Sheldon Vanauken, in A Severe Mercy).
Church Times for two letters by Lewis.
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, for The Allegory of Love, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Lewis’s review of The Oxford Book of Christian Verse from the 1941 volume of the Review of English Studies.
The Coventry Evening Telegraph for ‘Who Was Right—Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer?’ (21 February 1945), later retitled ‘Two Lectures’.
Decision for ‘I Was Decided Upon’ (September 1963) and ‘Heaven, Earth and Outer Space’ (October 1963), later combined and retitled ‘Cross-Examination’.
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company for Christian Reflections, a letter in Clyde S. Kilby’s The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, and also several items listed as unpublished letters which are now included in Letters to an American Lady.
Essays in Criticism for ‘A Note on Jane Austen’.
Executors of Lewis’s Estate and Geoffrey Bles for The Pilgrim’s Regress, They Asked for a Paper, Transpositions and Other Addresses (Amer. ed., The Weight of Glory, pub. by The Macmillan Company), ‘A Christian Reply to Professor Price’ from the Phoenix Quarterly (Autumn 1946, originally titled ‘Religion Without Dogma?’), A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, and the introduction to The Incarnation of the Word of God by St Athanasius.
Mr W. G. Gardiner and Mr J. S. A. Ensor and the Electric and Musical Industries Christian Fellowship of Hayes, Middlesex, for Answers to Questions on Christianity.
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. for The Four Loves, Letters of C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Of Other Worlds, Poems, Reflections on the Psalms, Rehabilitations and Other Essays, Surprised by Joy, Till We Have Faces, and The World’s Last Night.
Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. for the preface to D. E. Harding’s Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.
William Heinemann Ltd for Spirits in Bondage.
David Higham Associates Ltd for Arthurian Torso, a joint work by Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis.
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd for a part of Lewis’s foreword to Joy Davidman’s Smoke on the Mountain.
Lumen Vitae for ‘Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers’ (September 1948, later retitled ‘God in the Dock’).
The Macmillan Company for The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Horse and His Boy, The Last Battle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew, Mere Christianity, Miracles, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, Prince Caspian, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Silver Chair, That Hideous Strength, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, The Weight of Glory, and the introduction to Letters to Young Churches by J. B. Phillips.
Mother Mary Martin and the Medical Missionaries of Mary for ‘Some Thoughts’ in The First Decade: Ten Years’ Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary.
Melbourne University Law Review (formerly Res Judicatae) for ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ (June 1953).
The New England Anti-Vivisection Society for Vivisection.
The New English Weekly for ‘The Romantics’ (16 January 1947), later revised into ‘The Prudent Jailer’ in Poems.
The Observer for ‘Must Our Image of God Go?’ (24 March 1963).
Oxford University Press for The Personal Heresy and for an excerpt from R. S. Wright’s Asking Them Questions.
Punch for ‘Revival or Decay?’ (9 July 1958).
St James’ Magazine for ‘Scraps’ (December 1945).
The Saturday Evening Post for ‘We Have No “Right to Happiness”’ (21–28 December 1963).
The Seabury Press, Inc. for A Grief Observed.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge for an excerpt from Lewis’s review of Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker (Theology, October 1941).
The Socratic Society of Oxford for ‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’ (The Socratic Digest, 1952), ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, and ‘Religion Without Dogma?’, (The Socratic Digest, 1948).
The Spectator for ‘Equality’ (27 August 1943), ‘Evil and God’ (7 February 1941), ‘Private Bates’ (29 December 1944) and ‘Prudery and Philology’ (21 January 1965).
Student Christian Movement in Schools and the SCM Press Ltd for Man or Rabbit?
Time and Tide for ‘Delinquents in the Snow’ (7 December 1957), ‘Haggard Rides Again’ (3 September 1960, later retitled ‘The Mythopoeia Gift of Rider Haggard’), ‘Hedonics’ (16 June 1945), and various contributions to ‘Notes on the Way’, later retitled ‘The Necessity of Chivalry’ (17 August 1940), ‘First and Second Things’ (27 June 1942), ‘Democratic Education’ (29 April 1944), ‘Different Tastes in Literature’ (1 June 1946), ‘Period Criticism’ (9 November 1946), and ‘Priestesses in the Church?’ (14 August 1948).
World Dominion for ‘Myth Became Fact’ (September–October 1944).
Additionally, I should like to thank the following for permission to use material:
The Bodley Head Ltd for The Last Battle, The Magician’s Nephew, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
Executors of C. S. Lewis and Geoffrey Bles Ltd for The Abolition of Man, The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, The Horse and His Boy, Letters of C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mere Christianity, Miracles, Of Other Worlds, Poems, Prince Caspian, The Problem of Pain, Reflections on the Psalms, The Screwtape Letters, The Silver Chair, Surprised by Joy, Till We Have Faces, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, and the introduction to Letters to Young Churches by J. B. Phillips.
Executors of C. S. Lewis and J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for Dymer.
I
THE NATURE OF MAN
1. MAN IN GOD’S IMAGE
Of each creature we can say, ‘This also is Thou: neither is this Thou.’
Simple faith leaps to this with astonishing ease. I once talked to a Continental pastor who had seen Hitler, and had, by all human standards, good cause to hate him. ‘What did he look like?’ I asked. ‘Like all men,’ he replied. ‘That is, like Christ.’
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 14
No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 11
‘. . . the eternal mood
Blowing the eternal theme through men that pass.’
Dymer, canto 8, st. 10
God is present in each thing but not necessarily in the same mode; not in a man as in the consecrated bread and wine, nor in a bad man as in a good one, nor in a beast as in a man, nor in a tree as in a beast, nor in inanimate matter as in a tree. I take it there is a paradox here. The higher the creature, the more, and also the less, God is in it; the more present by grace, and the less present (by a sort of abdication) as mere po
wer. By grace He gives the higher creatures power to will His will (‘and wield their little tridents’): the lower ones simply execute it automatically.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 14
I have said that he was almost wholly logical; but not quite. He had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist. He spent Sunday, as he spent most of his time on weekdays, working in his garden. But one curious trait from his Presbyterian youth survived. He always, on Sundays, gardened in a different, and slightly more respectable, suit. An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 9
‘Creation’ as applied to human authorship seems to me to be an entirely misleading term. We re-arrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us. Try to imagine a new primary colour, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster which does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are recombining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings. Because of those divine meanings in our materials it is impossible that we should ever know the whole meaning of our own works, and the meaning we never intended may be the best and truest one. Writing a book is much less like creation than it is like planting a garden or begetting a child; in all three cases we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream which works, so to speak, in its own way. I would not wish it to be otherwise. If one could really create in the strict sense, would not one find that one had created a sort of Hell?
Letters (20 February 1943)
The deeper the level within ourselves from which our prayer, or any other act, wells up, the more it is His, but not at all the less ours. Rather, most ours when most His. Arnold speaks of us as ‘enisled’ from one another in ‘the sea of life’. But we can’t be similarly ‘enisled’ from God. To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 13
2. FALLEN MAN
‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’
Prince Caspian, ch. 15
Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
The World’s Last Night, ch. 6
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is? . . . If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 7
‘Nothing is yet in its true form.’
Till We Have Faces, bk 2, ch. 4
3. THE INCONSOLABLE LONGING
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 10
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself? . . . Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?
A Severe Mercy
It now seemed that . . . the deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world.
The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 8, ch. 6
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence. . . . Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. . . . The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. . . .
Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.
The Weight of Glory
‘Chewing the cud of lusts which are despair
And fill not, . . .’
Dymer, canto 9, st. 8
I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want? Is it this?’ Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it ‘aesthetic experience’, had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’ I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 14
Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? . . . A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called ‘falling in love’ occurred in a sex
less world.
The Weight of Glory
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. . . .
Our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.
The Four Loves, ch. 1
A music that resembled
Some earlier music
That men are born remembering.
‘Vowels and Sirens’, Poems
‘It was when I was happiest that I longed most. . . . The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.’
Till We Have Faces, bk 1, ch. 7
She wanted comfort but she wanted it, if possible, without going out to St Anne’s, without meeting this Fisher-King man and getting drawn into his orbit.
That Hideous Strength, ch. 6
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
The Last Battle, ch. 15
The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 11
From that first moment in the schoolroom at Chartres my secret, imaginative life began to be so important and so distinct from my outer life that I almost have to tell two separate stories. The two lives do not seem to influence each other at all. Where there are hungry wastes, starving for Joy, in the one, the other may be full of cheerful bustle and success; or again, where the outer life is miserable, the other may be brimming over with ecstasy.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 5
About death I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for a patria. It is the bright frontispiece which whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.