12.12.2013 C.S. LEWIS by a.n. wilson

this is the most honest and searching biography of c.s. lewis i have read to date, though its weakness is a bit too much subjectivity at places. possible theories are stated as fact. the seem like good theories but have no documentation in fact....however, overall, i think a more true to life, rough edge picture of lewis appears, but
rather than disgracing him, to me he is more greatly treasured and loved
and God has more of the glory He deserves.
wilson presents him as we all are - a sinner...in lewis' case...saved by the grace of God.
and if it were possible for anyone of us to be completely known to others as God knows us,
God would have all the glory.
O dear Lord help each of us, more and more,
to see ourselves as You see us
and to be seen by others as we truly are...as You know us, in fact, to be.
may we consider how You worked in and through a sinner like c.s. lewis,
and be moved to be broken and crushed and real before You
asking that we may so live that You may be seen and known and loved and most highly exalted!
may we remain, in our hearts, on our faces in the dust before
the living God with whom we have to do and before whom we will very soon stand in judgment.
may we humble ourselves completely before You here,
that You may know us and lift us up, in glory to You alone, there.

''for the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword,
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joint and marrow,
and is a  discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight;
but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.
seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens,
Jesus the Son of God,
let us hold fast our profession.' hebrews 4.12-4
'for our God is a consuming fire.' hebrews 12.29

the friendships he had made with fellow undergraduates at Univ(ersity) while he was reading Greats
were none of them particularly deep or long lasting.
it was surely symptomatic of the distance he kept
that he did not learn his nickname in college until he had been there nearly 4 years.
'coming back to college i heard with interest what is i suppose my nickname.
several Univ. people whom i don't know passed me.
one of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who i was,
for i heard him answer, 'Heavy lewis'.
the anecdote reveals not only that he was a stranger to them,
but that their identity was not of the smallest interest to him.
with the friends he made when he began to study english literature it was quite otherwise.

it is by no means the case that he fell in with a crowd who were specifically religious or 'holy'.
he was, however, among a group of men, mainly of his own age,
who had been through the war and who were led, by their study of literature,
into a consideration of wider matters of concern than paper logic.
professor george gordon presided over a group which met regularly at exeter college
and to which L attached himself.
It included f.w. bateson, nevill coghill (cog) and others.
a good example of the tenor of the discussions was an evening on 1 june 1923,
when a student called strick, whom L had never esteemed very highly,
read a paper of amazing excellence on tragedy.
'it was more on life than on letters' L recorded.
considerations of the theory of tragedy, as expressed in the writings of critics like bosanquet and bradley,
gradually passed, in the course of the evening, to talk of masefield,
and 'then to war reminiscences between gordon, strick, coghill and me'.

..gordon's discussion group, cog's friendship and the stimulation of the english course
were the positive features of that year.
equally forceful in the formation of L's future character were the darker sides of life.
strick,..entered into a tragedy of his own;
unable to shake off the memories of the trenches, he had a nervous breakdown.
much nearer home, mrs. moore's

(note: this was the mother of paddy moore, a fellowsoldier of L's acquaintance with whom
he entered a pact that if anything happened to either one in the war, the other would care for the parent
left behind. paddy was killed and lewis began to care for his mother.)

brother, dr. askins, was descending into insanity.
askins had brought his family to live at iffley, a village just outside oxford.
while the lewises were worrying about Jack (c.s. lewis' family-given name, hereafter J))
throwing himself away on an unknown married woman (mrs. moore, hereafter MM)
who might-for all they knew-be a blackmailer,
it is possible that the askinses were worried that the impulsive, passionate, warm-hearted Jamie
was unsuitably involved with a young man.
as it turned out, dr. askins-'the doc , hereafter D' as L always called him-was a highly congenial man,
and l often liked to walk down to iffley to see him.
by now, some of L's friends- barfield (a school acquaintance, hereafter Bar)
and greeves (a close childhood friend, hereafter Gre)-
had been introduced to the moores (mrs. moore's daughter, maureen, lived with her)and the askinses
and formed part of the same circle.

what none of them -least of all mrs moore- knew about the doc was that
he had contracted syphilis during his own student days
and by 1923 the disease had got to his brain.
afterwards, when his diary came to be transcribed by warnie (L's brother, hereafter, War)
 into the Lewis Papers,
jack maintained that the idea of doc's syphilis had been a mere delusion.
it was felt to be real at the time.
one day in feb 1923, the doc lunched with L and MM in headington.
L then accompanied the D back to iffley on foot. as they walked along, they discussed the afterlife,
and it became apparent that this was no 'ordinary' discussion
of the kind which L might have had with Bar or Cog.
the D was convinced that he was going to hell.
demons were saying things inside his head,
horrible blasphemies and obscenities which were causing him torment.
'he was walking very stiffly'.
three days later MM summoned her doctor, who examined D
and pronounced him doomed, incurably, to 'lunacy and death'.
that night, theD had a bad fit
-'rolling on the floor and shrieking that he was damned for ever and ever.
screams and grimaces unforgettable'.
dr. hichens returned and l had to hold D on the floor, dripping with sweat,
while chloroform (used to anesthetize, make unconscious or kill) was administered.
'he'd got as strong as a horse.
he was ages going over
and kept on imploring us not to shorten his last moments
and send him to hell sooner than need by'.

it was in these circumstances that L was trying to
prepare essays on 'the owl and the nightingale' for miss wardale
and on elizabethan literature for his other english tutor, f.p.wilson.
'for painfulness i think this beats anything i've seen in my life'.
with theD and his wife(?) mary in the house,
L is now obliged to rest on the sofa.
his own bed was being slept in by 'rob', the D's son.
to use the word 'sloop' for those weeks would be to distort language.
he hardly slept at all, for all the noise and worry,
and almost the only moments of true repose which he enjoyed
were when he was able to slip into MM's bed after she had 'just vacated it' for the afternoon.
for reasons which now seem obscure, they were not able to find an appropriate asylum for the D for over two weeks,
and there were intense worries about his pension coming through.
eventually, a mental hospital was found in henley, and l and rob drove the D over there on 12 march 1923.
when he got home, J found MM completely exhausted.
mary-dubbed the She-Wold by L-said that she wanted to buy L
a present in recognition for all his kindness.
'i had thought it was not in her power to annoy me more, but this was the last straw'.
he stomped out of the house and bought himself a large whisky and soda.

L felt himself changed by the D experience.
the D had been, in the loose sense of the term, a Romantic,
a man who had appealed to the side of L's nature which loved wagner,
as well as to the side which liked to hear Bar or yeats speak of the occult.
the D, in his time, had been interested in spiritualism, theosophy,yoga.
now, 'i thought i had seen a warning.
it was to this, this raving on the floor,
that all romantic longings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end...
safety first, thought i:
the beaten track,
the approved road,
the centre of the road,
the lights on...
for some months after that nightmare fortnight,
the words 'ordinary' and 'humdrum' summed up everything that appeared to me most desirable.'

 86 by the following year, 1924,
he was considering applying for the philosophy fellowship at st john's college
and was going to offer them, in proof of his worth,
a dissertation on bertrand russell's'worship of a free man'.
L had been arrested by this book because in its pages
'i found a very clear and noble statement of what i myself believed a few years ago.
but he does not face the real difficulty
-that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts,
and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole.
reading R, in short, compelled him to reconsider the great questions
which had been posed by socrates and plato in athens 4 centuries BC.
what is the Good?
if the universe is what the nineteenth century materialists believed it to be
and if human beings are no more than physical phenomena within it,
to be scattered as soon as their brain cells are interfered with or their bodies decay,
then how can they attach a hierarchy of significance to the thoughts that pass through their heads?
why are R's ideals any more or less lofty than those of a common criminal?
why are his brilliant discoveries about mathematics of more or less consequence
than the mental ramblings of a manual laborer?
once a hierarchy of values is implied, either moral or intellectual,
then you are taken outside a purely material realm into that of metaphysics.

the followers and friends of R, particularly ludwig wittgenstein
and subsequently such popularizers of wittgenstein's early thought as a.j.ayer,
saw their way out of this string of difficulties by placing a clear no-entry sign
at the turning of the road.
'the world is that which is the case'.
this did not imply (for wittgenstein, though it did for ayer) that metaphysics was all wrong;
it merely placed a drastic limitation on what philosophers could meaningfully discuss.
the so called verification principle
(familiar in different forms from the time of the cartesian philosophers in the lath 17th century)
was erected  as a great totem (anything serving as a distinctive, often venerated symbol)
before which thinking man was expected to bow down.
a statement could not be meaningful unless it was capable of verification by some means external to itself.
the only truths which passed this test were statements of a priori acceptability,
such as mathematical formulae
and statements relating to our sense data, to the physical universe.
the words 'science' and scientific', which had been given an inflated importance in the victorian period,
were now swollen yet further to embrace all truth
questions of aesthetics, morality and above all questions of religion
were relegated to the scrap heap where language was meaningless.
the areas which had concerned the noblest and most agile minds of the previous 23 centuries
were put on one side as being not merely unimportant but actually nonsensical.

this was the philosophical world into which L was about to step.
mid twentieth century logical positivism, with ayer as its enfant terrible, was yet to flower.
R was a figure who interested L because he appeared to embody
a phenomenon which to a lesser degree had been shown forth in old kirkpatrick:
(L's tutor just preceding oxford, who taught him how to think logically)
a passionate belief in virtue, without any philosophical justification for his position.

in the year that L was wrestling with these problems in his mind,
his friend Bar  was following a very different course.
far from wrestling with plato, Gar had gone back to him with alacrity,
only via the writings of rudolph steiner.
reading steiner was for Bar a profound religious awakening;
It made 'the burden roll' from his back.
steiner made Bar see that there was no need to accept the darwinian,
purely materialistic interpretation of the world.
the crude darwinian view of human consciousness,m for example,
was that it had somehow of other 'evolved' from a succession of increasingly intelligent apes,
beginning with a creature who little thought beyond where his next banana was coming from,
and culminating in the president of the royal society.
but this was only a theory and not, on the face of it, a particularly probable one.
steiner recovered from plato the idea of consciousness and imagination
as reflections of the soul or mind outside the human.
for Bar, the words of coleridge took on new significance when the poet wrote of the imagination as the
'repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM'.
the extreme disagreement between L and Bar on this matter led to the exchange of letters
which they came to call 'the great war'.

L was sufficiently committed to the life of the mind to see that
if what Bar was saying was true, it would profoundly affect everything.
there cannot be a greater difference than that between someone who supposes
that the human race (and with it all art, philosophy, science and virtue)
is a mere atomic accident in a blankly meaningless universe
and those who believe that there is a plan and behind it all a design.
L could, as it were, feel the breath of that idea on the back of his neck,
and he did not like it.
this was an unhappy period of his life, dogged by uncertainty about everything.
Bar's talk about the burden rolling from his back
did not stop l from wanting to hug his own burden.

"i woke up this morning in such a state of misery and depression
as i never remember to have had.
there was no apparent reason.
really rather ridiculous-i found myself in tears for the first time for many a long day, while dressing
...read hume's  'of morals'. this contains nearly all my own fallacies in ethics
-which look more fallacious in another person's language.

were it not for the distressing fact that nearly all his favourite english authors
also seemed to arouse the same metaphysical speculations,
he would perhaps have been happier teaching english literature.
f.p.wilson, his old tutor, thought very highly of his powers,
and urged him to pursue his studies in a B. Litt or a doctoral thesis.
L suggested the idea that he might like to work on
'a study of the romantic epic from its beginnings down to spenser, with a side glace at ovid'.
this was far too broad a sweep for the essentially minimal confines of a 'research degree',
and wilson urged him to find something narrower.
in fact, this idea contained the seeds of his first important book, 'the allegory of love'.
from the eginning, 'Heavy L was to be a heavy weight in the field of scholarship.
not for him, as for so many scholars,
the painstakingly minute study of some small area, the discovery of more and more about less and less.
instead, the broad, general sweep, the bold big outline, was to be his mode.
it was this which would make him such a very satisfying critic for the general reader,
as well as an inspired lecturer for generations of undergraduates.

...concerning religious certainty...
there were, primarily, the tugs of sympathy.
his closest friend from childhood, arthur greeves(Gre),was religious.
his closest undergraduate friend owen barfield, was also a believer.
when he visited L at magdalen (Bar was now working as a solicitor in london),
the two friends often reverted to the 'great war' and there was no doubt, any longer,
who was going to be the victor.
someone who occasionally joined in these discussions was a pupil of L's alan griffiths (Grif),
had become a friend.
he, like L, had not yet reached a position of religious faith,
but he was dissatisfied with purely materialistic explanations for life's mysteries,
and he found the conversation of Bar intoxicating.
once, when the three of them were sitting in L's rooms, L happened to refer to philosophy as 'a subject'.
'it wasn't A SUBJECT to plato, said Bar, 'it was a way'.
'the quiet but fervent agreement of griffiths and the quick glance of understanding between those two
revealed to me my own frivolity.
enough had been thought and said and felt and imagined.
it was about time that something should be done'.

among the circle of people he found most sympathetic,
L was in fact beginning to feel an odd man out.
Cog and tolkien (Tol) were both christians.
chesterton, always a favourite author, was a christian;
it was at this period that L read 'the everlasting man'.  and it made a profound impression on him.

but there was something, or, as L came to feel, SOMEONE, else.
no doubt there were many contributory external or psychological factors in what was happening
to the way he perceived his own personality.
it could be said that some sort of crisis was going to force itself up in the life of the emotional young man
who was so strictly engaged in compartmentalizing his life:
a father who was never meant to know about janie moore;
minto (new nickname for MM) herself cut off from college;
almost all his friends kept in darkness about his emotional history,
and most of them at this period unaware of his religious interests;
pupils who were discussing with him the things he cared about the most -books-
but in a fashion which prevented his strength of feeling breaking through.
Grif for instance, only came across L's children's stories after he had died
and he 'recognized in them a power of imaginative invention and insight
of which i had no conception before.
it must be remembered that l always affected (i think it was deliberate)
to be a plain, honest man with no nonsense about him,
usually wearing when out on a walk, an old tweed hat and coat
and accompanied with a pipe and a dog'.

...he began to feel himself approached by God
and in the summer of 1929 went through a mystical experience.
as befitted a man who had sung the pleasures of the ordinary,
it occurred on a bus going up headington hill, on his way back to MM's house.
there were no words in the experience, but he became aware of the fact that he was keeping something at bay
or another way of looking at it would be that he was wearing some rigid outer clothing,
like corsets or a  suit of armour.
in his moment of illumination on the bus,
: felt that he could either remain encased in this shell
or he could take it off.
after this strange sensation he felt as if he were a snowman
'at last beginning to melt'.

some time in that summer of 1929, in his college rooms at magdalen,
he 'gave in and admitted that God was God,
and knelt and prayed;
perhaps, that night the most defected and reluctant convert in all england'.

the 'conversion' was a recognition that God was God,
it was not a conversion to christianity.
he writes about it in unforgettably dramatic terms and with the sublime egoism
(to use the word purely, with no pejorative sense) of a man alone with God.
he really was, at that moment, one for whom there were
'two and tow only supreme and luminously self evident beings, myself and my Creator'...
since L was to go on to become a faithful and devoted christian,
he writes rather as if the 'conversion' were a fait accompli,
after which nothing could be the same.
but men either because they have decided that there was less to the experience than they at first supposed
or because they could not endure the ethical and spiritual demons which were implied
in the unspoken, ineffable moment of divine knowledge.

that summer, however,events were to place a seal on what happened to L in his magdalen rooms.
it is probably fanciful cast MM as phaedra
or the p'daytabird (nickname War and L had given to their father) as theseus
(phaedra, the wife of theseus, fell in love with hippolytus her step son...caused his murder)
but now L was crossing the sea (to ireland, their childhood home) to see his father for the last time.
a great emotional business was reaching its climax.

L continued, throughout life, to be obsessed not only by his father,
but also by the possibility that his life could be interpreted in a purely freudian way.
'in those days, the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt
in the circles i most frequented in oxford', he told readers of the 1950 reprint of dymer.
much earlier, at the time of 'the D's insanity' in 1923,
L had written to Gre, 'arthur, whatever you do never allow yourself to get a neurosis'.
this piece of advice might suggest that his grasp of the 'new psychology' was still at the rudimentary stage,
since he speaks of a neurosis as if it were something avoidable.
the letter is interesting, though, for the light it casts on his rooted dread of mental imbalance,
and on his horrified feeling that the unsatisfactory relations which had existed
between himself and his father since early adolescence
might somehow mar him for the rest of his life:

you and i are both qualified for it (neuroses) because we were both afraid of our fathers as children.
the doctor who came to see the poor D (a psychoanalyst and neurological specialist)
said that every neurotic case went back to the childish fear of the father.
but it can be avoided.
keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritualism, of everything eccentric.
keep to work and sanity and open air
-to the cheerful and the matter of fact side of things'.

this was advice which he had been unable to follow himself.
with the reading of 'hippolytu' and the cracking of the outer shell of his
cheerful, hard working, nonsense self,
introspection was running riot and 'spiritualism'
by which he clearly meant dabbling in affairs of the spirit rather than solely a preoccupation with the dead
-had, by the summer of 1929, taken a firm grip on him.
no wonder, then, what when he came to write up the experience in 'surprised by joy'
he should have been so insistent that his father's last illness and death
'does not really come into the story i am telling'.
he was frightened that hostile readers of his theological work would be able to say
that his religion could be 'explained' in terms of the oedipus complex
(or perhaps the hippolytus complex)
and that he was only able to find peace for his heart by coming to terms with
a heavenly Father of his own projection when he had seen the last of his earthly father in belfast.
so much did he dread that his own was a case of 'redemption by parricide'
(much evidence given in the book that there was a real, long term hatred of his father)
that he emphasized the unwillingness with which he accepted the divine call with language
which is exaggerated and almost coarse.
he was a 'prodigal who is brought kicking, struggling, resentful and
darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape'.

he crossed the irish channel on 12 august and reached little lea (name of his birth home)
on the morning or the thirteenth.
his father had been 'under the weather' since july
and L was half aware that he might be coming home for the last time.
once he set eyes on albert, he knew that the old man was very sick indeed.
his father rejoiced to see him and noted that jacks was
'looking remarkably well in in great form'.

J fell quickly into the routine of looking out for the absurdities in his father's speech
to put into a P'dayta-Pie for Warnie;
but he had no heart for it.
he began to write about one such P'dayta-ism, and then crossed it out.
the truth was, as he wrote to War, that 'P. is rather seriously ill'.
it was cancer of the bowel, though the doctors were slow or unwilling to diagnose it at first.
not long after j came home, albert began to run high fevers.
his heart was not strong either
and by the end of the month he was confined to his bed.

J stayed up to nurse him.
delighted to have his boy at home,
albert was in particularly cheerful form, in spite of his pain.
when the doctors broke it to him that he would need an operation,
his son noted that 'he is taking it like a hero'.
all of a sudden, J saw that his father was a sort of hero
-a maddening, eccentric hero
but a man whose decency, courage and good humour were as unshakable as his sincere piety.
the two men were enjoying a condition of harmony which had been unknown in all the previous years...

...'surprised by joy', limited by the necessarily artificial conventions of auto biography,
gives an impression that the development of L's opinions was much more cut and dried
than was really the case.
he gives us a picture of a firm conversion to theism in the summer of 1929,
followed by a period in which he believed in God, but not in the doctrines of christianity.
then, in the late summer of 1931, he writes that he passed definitely from this position of 'rational theism'
into a full acceptance of the christian dispensation.

while not exactly false, this simple version of his spiritual growth
gives no picture of the tremendous vacillations in his faith
which he confided to arthur greeves during this period.
for example, in his attempt to lead a new life,l
he attributes any success he may have had in conquering lust, anger or pride to God's grace,
a very specifically christian idea;
and this is a full 15 months before his conversion to christianity.
anything which smacks of an incarnational theology, he eschews.
that is to say he is not in the least drawn to the idea that Christ came in the flesh
and he finds the simplicity and literalism of what might be termed 'mere christianity' frankly unacceptable.
to greeves, the orthodox believer, he wrote in january 1930,
'in spite of all my recent changes of view i am still inclined to think
that you can only get what You call Christ out of the gospels by picking and choosing
and slurring over a good deal'.
 the authors he found most helpful in this 'interim' period were all mystics,
or figures who emphasized spirit over matter
- macdonald, william raph inge, jacob boehme,
whose quasi-theosophical, semi-astrological 'de signatura rerum (the signature of things)
gave him 'about the biggest shaking up i've got from a book, since i first read 'phantastes'.
but such moments of uplift as were provided by the mystics
could not prevent L's common sense humility from seeing
'how much of one's philosophy and religion are mere talk'.
when in college, he had begun to attend chapel (ie. the prayer book office of morning prayer) each day.
it could not prevent him from having doubts.
'i have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God's existence:
but the irrational dead weight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of the age, and the cares of the day,
steal away all my lively feeling of the truth,
and often when i pray i wonder if i am not posting letters to a non existent address'.

...one september night in 1931, when L was entertaining j.r.r. tolkien to dinner at magdalen.
he had also asked henry victor dyson, (hereafter Dy) a lecturer at reading university
who had been an exact contemporary of tolkien's as an undergraduate at exeter college.
like Tol, Dy (known to all his friends as hugo) was a christian
-though he was a high anglican while Tol was roman catholic.
L had got to know him because he was a frequent visitor o oxford,
anxious to get a job in the oxford english faculty
and a friend not only of Tol but also of nevile coghill.
Dy was a beguilingly witty man, handsome and bright eyed,
whose talk was a flow of fantasy, keen literary appreciation and occasional learning.
like many oxford men, he belonged to the strong socratic tradition in which dialogue
was esteemed as highly as the written word.
..the combination of Tol and Dy was therefore a formidable one.
after dinner the talk fell to the great question which was uppermost in L's mind:
that question being, in the words of his pupil betjeman
'and is it true and is it true, this most tremendous tale of all?'

Bar, both in conversation and in writing,
had already gone a long way in revealing to L the fallacy of making sharp distinctions
between 'myth' and 'fact'.
in his book 'poetic diction' he had pointed out that in earlier times,
those who first used language
did not necessarily distinguish between 'metaphorical' and 'literal' uses of words.
the latin spiritus, for example, means breath.
modern rationalists might wish to distinguish between the
'meaning' of 'spirit in some elevated sense' and that of 'merely breath'.
but early users of the language would not have made such a distinction.
when the wind blew it was not 'like' someone breathing.
it was the breath of a divinity.

this powerfully confirmed the way in which Tol had been accustoming himself to think about the world
ever since he grew o manhood.
one of the great distinctions in his mythology is made between the elves, who are 'animist' and 'pagan'
and the Men, who are destined to move beyond this.
the elves, who will never leave the material universe and do not know what happens to Men when they die,
are embodiments of language users for whom the breath-wind-spirit distinction would be meaningless.
by contrast, God willed that 'the hearts of Men would seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein'

in his dialogue with L that september night, Tol was really arguing
for a less human and more 'elven' approach to the gospel story.
L complained that he could not see any personal relevance for himself in the story of Christ.
'what i couldn't see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was ) 2000 years ago
could help us here and now - except in so far as his Example helped us'.
Tod pointed out that this was, as much as anything, an imaginative failure on L's part.
when L came across Myths of dying and reviving gods, he was moved.
when he read stories about balder, adonis and bacchus,
he was prepared to 'feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp
even tho' i could not say in cold prose 'what it meant'.
he stopped short of understanding christianity because when he thought about that,
he laid aside the receptive imagination with which he allowed himself
to appreciate myth and became rigidly narrow and empiricist.
he should understand that 'the story of Christ is simply a true myth:
a myth working on us in the same way as the others,
but with this tremendous difference that it REALLY HAPPENED:
and one must be content to accept it in the same way'.

to this extent, Tol argued 'doctrines' which are extracted from the 'myth' are less true than the 'myth' itself.
the ideas are too large and too all embracing for the finite mind to absorb them.
that is why the divine providence revealed himself in story.
L claimed that this was tantamount to 'breathing a lie through silver',
a riposte (a quick, sharp return in speech) which Tol
felt sufficiently challenging to require a written reply.
the result was the verse known as 'mythopoeia', some of which he quoted in his essay.
its 'argument' repeated the discussion which he and L shared with Dy on that memorable september night.
myth was the exact opposite of a 'lie breathed through silver'.
man's capacity to mythologize was a remnant of his pre lapsarian capacity to see into the life of things:

disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.

it was a completely still, warm evening and the tree friends
walked round and round the mile long circuit of addison's walk beneath the avenues of beeches.
quite suddenly, at a crucial point in the conversation,
there was a rush of wind, causing the first fall of leaves in the season.
they stood in the dark and listened.
at first the pattering leaves sounded like rain.

it was at this point that Tol reiterated the argument already made familiar to L by Gar.
we speak of 'stars' and 'trees' as though they were entities which we had masted
in our post newtonian, materialist fashion.
but for those who formed the words Star and Tree they were very different.
for them stars were a living silver, bursting into flame in answer to an eternal music in the mind of God.
all creation was 'myth woven and elf patterned'.
it was late; the clock in magdalen tower had struck three in the morning
before L let Tol out by the little postern on magdalen bridge.
Dy lingered, and he and L found still more to say to one another,
strolling up and down the cloister of New Buildings.
they did not part until four a.m.

nine days later, on 28 september, there was an outing from the kilns to whipsnade zoo.
minto and maureen, accompanied by an irish friend called vera henry and the dog mr papworth...
were to travel by car.
J and War were to go by motorcycle-daudel as War called it-
with War in the saddle and J in a lowslung sidecar.
it was a thick, misty day, but when the two brothers got beyond the small market town of thame,
the fog gave way to bright sunshine.
they stopped for beer and then waited anxiously at an agreed spot for minto and the others.
they had still not turned up by two oclock
and since  their sandwich lunch was in the car, J and War were feeling 'uncommonly peckish'.
at two twenty minto's party appeared, saying that the reason for their delay was that
liddiat, the handyman employed by minto at the kilns,
had pumped up the tyres of the car so hard that it was impossible to drive at more than 15 miles per hour.
in spite of the frayed tempers caused by this, it was an enjoyable expedition.
everyone, but especially the two lewises, loved the zoo
and J made friends with a bear whom he nicknamed bultitude.
he said how much he would like to adopt the bear-which in a sense he was to do-
for bultitude appears as one of the characters in the final volume of his space trilogy 'that hideous strength'.

to all appearances, it had been a completely normal day.
only, as L tells us in 'surprised by joy',
'when we set out i did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God
and when we reached the zoo i did'.
when confiding the news the Gre, he said,
'my long night talk with Dy and Tol had a good deal to do with it'.

179...L's decision to become a broadcaster during world war II..
this came about in (a haphazard ) fashion.
feeling sheepish about his ineligibility for active service,
L had accepted an invitation from the RAF chaplains to tramp around the country
and give talks to the men in various RAF stations.
Tod, who found the contents of these talks, when published, not especially to his taste,
nevertheless admired the simple religious feeling which inspired them.

'teaching was his original object.
he took it up in a pauline spirit, as a reparation (the making amends for a wrong or injury done) ;
now the least of christians (by special grace) but once and infidel
and even if he had not persecuted the faithful,
one who scorned the faith,
he would do what he could to convert men or stop them from straying away.
the acceptance of the RAF mission mission,
with its hardship of travel to distant and nasty places
and audiences of anything but the kind he was humanly fitted to deal with,
lonely, cheerless, embarrassed journeys leaving little behind
but doubt whether any seed had fallen on good soil;
all this was in its way an imitation of st. paul'.

the talks which L gave to the RAF were on such basic issues as
'why we think there is a right and wrong',
and from such simple beginnings he framed, in language
which was meant to be arresting to ordinary men in the ranks,
an exposition first of the theist position, then of the christian religion.
in february 1941, he was approached by the director of religious broadcasting at the BBC
and asked if he would be prepared to give a series of broadcast talks on
'The Christian Faith as i see it - by a layman'
and although there was first a certain amount of debate
about what the nature and title of the broadcasts should be.
L began to do this in the late summer of 1941,
taking the train from oxford to london every wednesday evening and broadcasting from 7.45 to 8 pm.

sound broadcasting is a particular skill,
not necessarily related to literary ability though impossible without it.
that is, one needs the literate ability to express oneself clearly;
but one also needs the right voice and the ability to be concise.
L's broadcasts during the war were in three series and they were written up
(published more or less as spoken over the air)
as 'broadcst talks (1942), 'christian behaviour' (1943) and 'beyond personality' (1944).
the key to them lies in the title of the second series - christian behaviour.
L is better than any modern writer both at explaining what christian behaviour should be
and at analysing its difficulties.

'people often think of christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says,
'if you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you,
and if you don't I'll do the other thing'.
i do not think that is the best way of looking at it.
i would much rather say that every time you make a choice
you are turning the central part of you,
the part of you that chooses,
into something a little different from what it was before.
and taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices,
all your life you are slowly turning this central thing
into either a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.'


it is unfortunate that shorhand here makes l imply that the life of submission to grace
is a course of self improvement.
indeed overall, he says surprisingly little about Grace and next to nothing about the sacramental life;
for these reasons one might regret the title which he gave to the tree books gather into one
-'mere christianity' -
for it implies that he has written a sort of mini Summa or encyclopaedia of theology.
that was not his intention.
his intention in the lively 15 minute talks was to answer such questions as
'can an intelligent person be a christian?
what should a christian's attitude be towards war, sex or money?
is there a heaven and a hell?
he answers these questions with a breeziness and a self confidence which on an academic podium
would have been totally unacceptable.
...such lapses were seized upon eagerly by L's jealous academic colleagues.
there is nothing like worldly success on the part of one academic to make  all the others hate him..
L's immediate success with the general public
and the huge popularity  of his theological books,
guaranteed him a rough ride with the Fellows of magdalen,
as well as  with those in the oxford faculties of theology and english literature...

193...(speaking of another friend who greatly influenced L...charles williams..henceforth W..)
for W himself, the time in oxford was enormously productive.
in 1943, he had published by far his best book, a thoroughly original, imaginative and yet scholarly
reading of dante called 'the figure of beatrice.
by the end of that year, he was reading aloud to the Inklings
(a group of men, literary and friends, who were gathered by Lewis and regularly met
to talk, discuss and debate or read things they were currently writing)
some draft chapters of a new novel, 'all hollows eve',
which must have one of the most dramatic openings in fiction:
the heroine is flitting about her old haunts in london,
not yet realizing that she has just died.
some of the ideas of this book, and indeed the whole of the first bit of dialogue in chapter one,
came to W in discussion with a new member of the oxford english faculty, helen gardner,
who had recently returned not only to her old college of st hilda's,
but also to the practice of the christian faith.
she and W used to go to the same church for mass: st cross.
she was one of the many people who would have acknowledged the truth of L's words,
'women fine (W) so attractive that if he were a bad an he could do what he liked'.
W introduced helen gardner, among many others, to his idea of substitution:
that you do not merely pray for a sufferer, you ask to take their suffering upon yourself...

...'the abolition of man'...
this is an important book: nothing less than an analysis of where and how the modern world has gone wrong.
this may provoke in many readers the response,
'as we should expect, here is an affectedly old fashioned, crusty man with a pipe
and a lot of male cronies
who is going to complain about any modern developments in thought, knowledge or understanding'.
one has to recognize that L was by temperament in danger of turning into a caricature backwoodsman.
but he was also a man with a supremely workable intelligence
and in this book he deserves to command his widest audience.
he is not simply addressing-as in his works of literary scholarship-those who might want
to read macrobius or thomas usk;
nor is he, overtly at least, arguing a case for christianity.
rather, he is analysing what has happened to society
and, indeed,  to our whole way of looking at the universe.
this is something which affects us all,
and we all need to consider the validity or otherwise of L's arguments.
i consider 'the abolition of man' (taom) to be quite detached from 'that hideous strength'.
it is true that many of the fears expressed in taom were translated into fiction in the novel,
as was the insight which many readers of the lectures might deem their most fanciful strand:
the observation about the close kinship which exists between what we call science and magic.
-'for magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man'.



but taom is concerned with something much more incontrovertible than this.
and it must be remembered that it was written at a period when, abroad,
hitler and stalin were defying all previously understood notions of decency
-indeed inventing value or non value systems of their own
-while at home L was finding himself, at the socratic club and elsewhere,
with philosophers like a.j.ayer who absolutely denied the possibility of attaching meaning
to sentences which were not either verifiable through sense perception or verifiable as a priori truths.
(from a general law to a particular instance; valid independently of observation; not based on
prior study or observation)

into the latter category ayer and the other logical positivists
(philosophical movement that rejects all transcendental metaphysics,
statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experiences
and in statements of logic, mathematics of philosophy itself,
and with such statements of fact deriving their validity  from the rules of language....note:
...in layman's language, 'whatever doesn't make sense to me, is not real and does not impact me at all)

would only admit certain mathematical and logical formulae.
such concepts as right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly,
were dismissed form their vocabulary.
L's contention-which cannot, historically, be denied-was
that there has been a system of values, discernible in almost all moral and religious centres,
from the beginning of literature until the mid twentieth century.
to emphasize that he was not talking just about the judaeo-christian tradition but about something both
deeper and wider than that,
L borrowed the chinese word and called this the TAO.
in an appendix quoting from sources as varied as
the old norse 'voluspa',
the ancient egyptian 'confession of a righteous soul'
the old chinese analects,
cicero and epictetus,
he makes his point.
they all point to the existence of something outside individual feeling
or the purely utilitarian requirements of a society, something which might be termed a generally accepted standard of right and wrong.
all these sources abhor murder, dishonesty, theft, unkindness, disregard of the old, cruelty to children,
ruthless 'justice' untempered by mercy.

that these should be considered abhorrent, L gently points out, is no longer taken for granted.
and his rhetoric is all the more effective for the fact that he does not terrify his audience at the outset
with examples which might be deemed monstrous or freakish.
he says nothing about hitler, nothing about stalin.
instead he stars off with two harmless english schoolmasters who have written a textbook
for the use of older children.
in this book, which L calls 'the green book',
the authors quote the well known story of coleridge at the waterfall.
two tourists approach, one who calls the waterfall 'sublime' and the other who calls it 'pretty'.
coleridge rejects the second judgement with disgust and endorses the word 'sublime'.
the 'green book' tells its readers,
'when the man said that is Sublime he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall..
actually...he was not making a remark about the waterfall but a remark about his own feelings'.
the 'green book' translates the sentence as 'i have sublime feelings'.

having dismissed the absurdity of making 'that is sublime'
mean 'i have sublime feelings
(by this interpretation it would mean, by contrast, i have humble feelings),
L reflects on the implications of this teaching
and in the rest of his short book he sketches these implications out with nightmarish clarity.
IF ALL VALUE JUDGEMENTS ARE R-E-A-L-L-Y
STATEMENTS ABOUT OUR FEELINGS
and
IF WE NO LONGER BELIEVE IN THE TAO,
WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

'it is the sole source of all value judgements.
if it is rejected,all value is rejected'.

he concludes that the two schoolmasters who wrote 'the green book' were unconsciously passing on
what they had absorbed from the higher reaches of the intelligentsia,
a disregard of all value judgements.
in answer to the question Where does that leave us?,

L predicts that
IT WILL LEAVE US IN THE HANDS OF UNSCRUPULOUS OPERATORS
WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IN HUMANITY ITSELF.
the abolition of man will have occurred because there will be no reason to regard man,
as the Tao has always regarded him as a moral being.

many a mild eyed scientist in pince nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst
(ie. freud, shaw and a.j.ayer)
means in the long run just the same as the nazi rulers of germany.
TRADITIONAL VALUES ARE TO BE 'DEBUNKED' and
MANKIND TO BE CUT OUT INTO SOME FRESH SHAPE
AT THE WILL (which must...be an arbitrary will) OF SOME FEW LUCKY PEOPLE
IN ONE LUCKY GENERATION
WHICH HAS LEARNED HOW TO DO IT,
the belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure
and the consequent treatment of mankind as specimens, mere hUlA (greek), preparations,
begins to affect our very language

-once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.
(note: like human beings deemed  UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENTS of wanted or unwanted sex.
WHO IS THE NEXT (GROUP?) TO BE DEEMED UNWANTED by 'society'?)

virtue has become 'integration' and diligence 'dynamism'
and the boys likely to be worthy of a commission are 'potential officer material'.

he concludes his lectures by imploring scientists to return to a sense of the Tao.
'the regenerate science which i have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables
what modern science threatens to do to man himself...
it is no use trying to 'see through' first principles.
if you see through everything, then everything is transparent.
but a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.
to 'see through' all things is the same as not to see'.

in his short book L does not elaborate on what remedies there can be
which will save the world  from the effects of exploitation by a comparatively few unscrupulous people.
he does not claim to know the answers.
those who identify L's fears purely with the nazi 'experiments'
might consider that the world has become a better place since 1944 and that he was exaggerating.
but the whole growth since that period of ecology,
of knowledge about the calamitous consequences of viewing the earth merely
as a thing to be exploited by man its master, gives lie to this.
L's arguments cover the proliferation of nuclear arsenals;
the so called advance of medical science in the area of experimenting on human embryos
the effect on third world countries of such fruits of enlightenment as modern baby food and aerosol sprays.
his diagnosis of the disease cannot be lightly dismissed.
in taom he does not advance the cure, though it is no secret where he thought it lay, if there was one.

the highly serious journey of dante alighieri from hell to paradise was entitled 'the divine comedy' because this was a poem with a happy ending father than an unhappy or tragic one.

it was not 'a comedy' in the sense of being intended to make its readers laugh.
L's boldest fiction, 'the great divorce', is a comedy in both senses.
it is a conscious echo of dante, being a journey from hell to heaven.
but it is also full of human vignettes which are cruelly amusing.
the 'divorce' of the title is thee gulf fix between heaven and hell,
a gulf which varies in size depending upon thee perspective from which it is viewed.
the journey, in a celestial bus from the dingy town of Hell
up o the outer borders of the Heavenly Places, is long and steep.
just as the town itself owes much to the dingier parts of dante's inferno
-particularly to his sixth circle, home of the heretics whom the wind leads and the rain beats,
so the journeying up through a vast gorge to the heights of paradise
is also modelled on dantean geography.
but viewed from the perspective of heaven, this vast gorge is just a tiny little crack in the grass.
and the infernal ghosts who seem so hellishly substantial on the bus
are wrathlike and insubstantial when exposed to the bright beams of reality. 

behind the story is the idea-more generous than anything in dante-
that all may be saved if they so choose.
everyone on the bus from hell can stay in heaven if they wish;
and they will then look back on their time in the dingy twilit town as a mere period of purgatory.
but man of the ghosts on the bus are already lost souls.
they prefer their own sinful obsessive selves
to the loss of self which is necessary before they can be saved.