by C. S. Lewis
The Allegory of Love, ch. 6, sec. 1
When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is, essentially, the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our own day differs from his as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.
‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’, God in the Dock
Before leaving the Tree [Eve, in Paradise Lost] does ‘low Reverence’ before it ‘as to the power that dwelt within’, and thus completes the parallel between her fall and Satan’s. She who thought it beneath her dignity to bow to Adam or to God, now worships a vegetable. She has at last become ‘primitive’ in the popular sense.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 18
It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. . . . Keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through your mind . . . by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. . . . Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
Introduction to St Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God
When the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted . . . that imaginary quarrel between the ethical and the poetic which moderns often unhappily read into the great poets . . . supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, Dedication
Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’.
An Experiment in Criticism, ch. 7
The typical modern critic is usually a half-hearted materialist. He accepts, or thinks he accepts, that picture of the world which popularised science gives him.
The Personal Heresy, ch. 1
Of course the converted Intellectual is a characteristic figure of our times. But this phenomenon would be more hopeful if it had not occurred at a moment when the Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets and critics are read by our most esteemed critics and poets (who don’t usually like them much) and nobody else takes any notice. An increasing number of highly literate people simply ignore what the ‘Highbrows’ are doing. It says nothing to them. The Highbrows in return ignore or insult them. Conversions from the Intelligentsia are not therefore likely to be very widely influential. They may even raise a horrid suspicion that Christianity itself has become a part of the general ‘Highbrow racket’, has been adopted, like Surrealism and the pictures painted by chimpanzees, as one more method of ‘shocking the bourgeois’.
‘Revival or Decay?’, God in the Dock
It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness—at least the firmness—of Jane Austen’s thought. . . . The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, ‘some duty neglected, some failing indulged’, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blamable, distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. In her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler. All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naïvely so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one’s neighbours. . . . Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel.
‘A Note on Jane Austen’, Selected Literary Essays
That, perhaps, is where Scott differs most from the type of artist dear to the modern psychological critic. The blue devils do not haunt his work; they leave no trail of laudanum, drink, divorce, tantrums, perversions, or paranoia across his life.
‘Sir Walter Scott’, Selected Literary Essays
[In Milton’s time] men still believed that there really was such a person as Satan, and that he was a liar.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 13
Now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of ‘appeals’, ‘drives’, and ‘campaigns’. Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding ‘keenness’. And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them ‘rulers’. ‘Leaders’ is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call ‘magnetism’ or ‘personality’.
‘De Descriptione Temporum’, Selected Literary Essays
All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust of power appear as the commands of a great super-personal force that they can be exercised with self-approval. The first symptom is in language. When to ‘kill’ becomes to ‘liquidate’ the process has begun. The pseudoscientific word disinfects the thing of blood and tears, or pity and shame, and mercy itself can be regarded as a sort of untidiness.
‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’, Of Other Worlds
If towering memory in our glance
Reveals its pride, they call it names
Like ‘fantasy’ or ‘outworn romance’.
So tireless propaganda tames
All but the strong whose hearts they break,
All but the few whose faith is whole.
Stone walls cannot a prison make
Half so secure as rigmarole.
‘The Romantics’, The New English Weekly
The percentage of mere syntax masquerading as meaning may vary from something like 100 per cent in political writers, journalists, psychologists, and economists, to something like forty per cent in the writers of children’s stories. . . . A good metaphysical library contains at once some of the most verbal, and some of the most significant literature in the world. . . . I doubt if we shall find more than a beggarly five per cent of meaning in the pages of some celebrated ‘tough minded’ thinkers, and how the account of Kant or Spinoza stands, none knows but heaven. But open your Plato, and you will find yourself among the great creators of metaphor, and therefore among the masters of meaning.
‘Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare’, Selected Literary Essays
Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. . . . The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it; the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learn
t the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all.
Letters (17 January 1932)
The value we have given to that word [‘Puritanism’] is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 10
The history of all arts tells the same miserable story of progressive specialisation and impoverishment.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ch. 4
If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. . . . An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. . . . And always, of every idea and of every method the Christian will ask not ‘Is it mine?’ but ‘Is it good?’
‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections
The patrons of sentimental poetry, bad novels, bad pictures, and merely catchy tunes are usually enjoying precisely what is there. And their enjoyment. . . . is not in any way comparable to the enjoyment that other people derive from good art.
It is tepid, trivial, marginal, habitual. It does not trouble them, nor haunt them. To call it, and a man’s rapture in great tragedy or exquisite music, by the same name, enjoyment, is little more than a pun. I still maintain that what enraptures and transports is always good. . . .
The experiences offered by bad art are not of the same sort.
‘Different Tastes in Literature’, On Stories
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
The Four Loves, ch. 6
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.
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ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
George MacDonald: An Anthology
Mere Christianity
Miracles
The Abolition of Man
The Great Divorce
The Problem of Pain
The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)
The Weight of Glory
The Four Loves
Till We Have Faces
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Reflections on the Psalms
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Personal Heresy
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays
Poems
The Dark Tower: And Other Stories
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Narrative Poems
Letters of C. S. Lewis
All My Road Before Me
The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics
On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
CREDITS
Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder
COPYRIGHT
A MIND AWAKE. Copyright © 1968 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565549
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author.
Title: A mind awake : an anthology of C. S. Lewis / C. S. Lewis.
Description: First edition. | San Francisco : HarperOne, 2017. | Originally published as A Mind Awake in New York in 1968 by Harcourt Brace.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030638 | ISBN 9780062643551 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062565549 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Theology. | BISAC: RELIGION / Spirituality. | RELIGION / Meditations. | RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts.
Classification: LCC BT15 .L48 2017 | DDC 230—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030638
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* George MacDonald.