Annotations and Study Guide to Letters to Malcolm
For about seven years C. S. Lewis carried on a
correspondence in Latin with an Italian priest living in
Letters to other correspondents in 1952 and 1953
frequently provided answers to questions raised about prayer, and on 8 December
1953, Lewis presented a paper, “Petitionary Prayer: A
Problem without an Answer,” to the Oxford Clerical Society. However, in a
letter to the Anglican nun Sister Penelope on
A decade later he did write a book on prayer,
incorporating some of the things from that manuscript as well as from “Petitionary Prayer” and letters from the early ’50s. In a
letter to Mary Willis Shelburne,
Letters
to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964)
turned out not to be a carefully reasoned work of apologetics, like The Problem of Pain (1940) or Miracles (1947). Now in the last year of
his life, Lewis did not have the physical or intellectual energy to undertake
such a task, and perhaps he decided that was not the right approach for a
discussion of prayer. As he puts it in Letter 12, “In a book [on prayer] one
would inevitably seem to be attempting, not discussion, but instruction. And
for me to offer the world instruction about prayer would be impudence.” So, he says,
tongue-in-cheek, “however badly needed a good book on prayer is, I shall never
try to write it.” He of course is
writing a book on prayer, but as discussion, not instruction. He creates a
correspondence with an imaginary friend, Malcolm, in which the two exchange
ideas about their prayer lives: “Two people on the foothills comparing notes in
private.” It was the last book Lewis wrote. He died
Responses to the book have varied widely. The book has
received widely varied reactions. Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien disliked the
book intensely: “I personally found Letters
to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work” letter to David
Kolb, S. J.,
Letters to Malcolm
is well suited for use by a Sunday School class or discussion group: the
chapters are short and they raise a wide range of questions that a group can
profitably explore together. In this site I have attempted to provide resources
that might be helpful for individuals reading the book or groups using it for
discussion—annotations that clarify allusions, references, and ideas in the
text and topics for reflection and discussion for each letter. I hope they will
be helpful in making one of my favorite Lewis books more widely appreciated.
Unless otherwise noted, quotations of the Bible in these
notes are from the King James Version, the translation Lewis generally used in Letters to Malcolm. In his writings,
Lewis often quoted literary works or the Bible from memory; as a result, the
wordings sometimes are not exactly accurate. References to and quotations of The Book of Common Prayer in these notes are from the 1662 prayerbook used in the Church of England throughout Lewis’s
lifetime (see the note to Letter 1, paragraph 12). Because Letters to Malcolm exists in several editions, these notes refer to
it by letter and paragraph numbers, instead of page numbers.
Letter 1
Letter 1 deals with corporate prayer (prayer as a part of
pubic worship), saying that will not be the subject of this book. Lewis
explains why he likes worship services to remain the same, so he can cease
paying attention to the form and concentrate on God; and explains why, although
he wants the form to remain constant, he accepts that the language of the
prayer book needs to change to fit contemporary usage.
*Paragraph 1, the Republic – Plato’s Republic.
*Paragraph 1, the
“new” psychology – Especially Freudian psychology. Sigmund Freud’s first
book, Studien über Hysterie, was published in 1895. Lewis was an
undergraduate at
*Paragraph 6,
thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping – This is an
application of a principle Lewis learned from Samuel Alexander’s Space Time and Deity (1920), which he
regarded as “an indispensable tool of thought” (Surprised by Joy, chap. 14): “You cannot hope and also think about
hoping at the same time; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt
this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.”
*Paragraph 8, habito dell’arte
– Dante, Paradiso, 13.78 (“in the practice of his art”).
*Paragraph 12, if
we can also reconcile government, to a new Book – A revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was completed in
1927 and approval
by the
*Paragraph 19,
Cranmer – Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Archbishop of Canterbury 1533-1556,
who shaped the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England under Edward VI.
The first Book of Common Prayer
(1549) was compiled under his guidance, and his revision of 1552 gave the BCP the beauties of prose style for
which it remains famous.
*Paragraph 20,
“let your light so shine” – Matthew
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Do you share Lewis’s preference for having the
structure and words of a church service remain the same week? Why or why not?
--Lewis explains in a letter why he prefers that even the
wording of the prayers be the same each week: “The advantage of a fixed form of
service is that we know what is coming. Ex
tempore public prayer has this difficulty; we don’t know whether we can
mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney
or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional
activity at the same moment: two hardly compatible things. In a fixed form we
ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers; the
rigid form really sets our devotions free.
I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from
straying” (Letters, 1 April 1952).
Discuss the extent to which what Lewis says here fits your own experience and
does not fit.
--Lewis says we go to church to use or enact the service,
to worship God, not to be entertained. Do you see the two as incompatible? Is “being
entertained” a danger in church services?
Letter 2
Letter 2 moves into the book’s discussion of private
prayer by considering the advantages of “ready-made” (written) prayers and
prayers in one’s own words (or without words, which Lewis considers the best
approach, when it can be achieved).
*Paragraph
1, “magical” – Lewis indicates his
“high,” “magical” view of the Eucharist in the last paragraph of his sermon
“The Weight of Glory” (1941), when he says that “the Blessed Sacrament . . . is
the holiest object presented to your senses.”
*Paragraph
1, the Imitation – Thomas à Kempkis, Imitation of Christ (1418).
*Paragraph
2, Rose Macaulay – English author (1889?–1958), who published thirty-five
books, mostly novels but also biography, travel, and literary studies. She is remembered especially for her novels satirizing
middle-class life. Her letters had recently been published: Letters to a Friend, 1950-1952 in 1961
and Last Letters to a Friend, 1952-1958
in 1962. The friend was the Reverend John Hamilton Cowper Johnson. In a letter
dated 5 March 1951 she wrote, “I am interested just now in selecting short
passages, fragments from Psalms and Bible and collects and missal and general
reading (in any language that I know) that seem to suit the occupations and
emergencies and encounters likely to occur in the day ahead. If one collects a
store of such, one can select at will.” Later letters refer frequently to that
collection, as for example a letter dated
*Paragraph
2, objets d’art – (French) Art object. Any object that has been fashioned to be a
thing of beauty in itself rather than having a practical function.
*Paragraph
3, “Who art thou that judgest” – Romans 14:4.
*Paragraph
5, Pascal – Blaise
Pascal (1623-62). See #350 in his Pensées de M. Pascal sur la réligion, et sur
quelques autres sujets (“Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on other
subjects”) (1670): “The Stoics. - They
conclude that what has been done once can be done always, and that since the
desire of glory imparts some power to those whom it possesses, others can well
do likewise. There are feverish movements which health can not imitate.”
*Paragraph
8, As Solomon said – 1 Kings 8:38.
*Paragraph
10, “the faith once given” – Jude 3.
*Paragraph
11, “what things I ought to ask” –
Romans
*Paragraph
12, Petrarch, Donne – Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), Italian poet who is known for
perfecting the sonnet form and for his love poems addressed to Laura. John
Donne (1572-1631), English poet and clergyman, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in
*Paragraph
14, My grandfather – Lewis’s
grandfather, Thomas Hamilton (1826-1905) was vicar of Saint Mark’s, Dundela—the church which Lewis’s parents attended and in
which Lewis was baptized—from 1874 until ??.
*Paragraph
14, they affected him like mountains – Dante, Paradiso 25.38.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Do you pray using both your own words and prayers
written by others? If so, why? What benefits do you find in each? If not, why
not? Some people believe when one prays aloud, one should not write out the
prayer—“genuine” prayer should be spontaneous, not “prepared.” Do you think
that? Why or why not? How does considering such issues take us back to the
heart of what prayer is and does?
--Do you sometimes pray without using words? When or why
do you do so? What is helpful about doing so? When or why is using words more
valuable or important?
--Mother Teresa once was asked, “When you pray, what do
you say to God?” She replied, “I don’t say anything, I listen.” Then she was
asked, “Well, when you listen, what does God say to you?” And she answered, “He
doesn’t say anything either, he listens.” Discuss how this relates to Lewis’s
remarks on prayers without words.
Letter 3
Letter 3 begins to treat practical matters regarding
prayer, some hows, whens,
and wheres of private prayer.
*Paragraph 1,
Manichaean – Follower of the beliefs put forward by Mani (c. 216-c. 276);
basic to Manichaeism is the conflicting dualism between the realm of God (light
and spiritual enlightenment) and the realm of Satan (darkness and material
things).
*Paragraph 2, when
consistent with good faith and charity – In Mere Christianity, Lewis calls sex outside of marriage a
“monstrosity” because it tries to “isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from
all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it.” He adds
that marriage must be considered in relation to justice, the keeping of promises.
*Paragraph 2,
“whether we eat or drink” – 1 Corinthians
*Paragraph
2, Bishop of Woolwich – John Arthur Thomas
Robinson (1919-1983), the Bishop of Woolwich from 1959 to 1969,
was considered a left-wing modernist. The best-known of his writings is Honest to God (1963).
*Paragraph
2, Aphrodite – The Greek goddess of
love (known as “Venus” in Roman mythology).
*Paragraph
2, Homeric laughter – Roaring
laughter. See the Iliad 1.599; the Odyssey 20.346.
*Paragraph
4, festoon – Literally it means to
decorate with a string or garland of leaves, flowers, or ribbon in loops
between two points; here it is used figuratively, as explanations or
amplifications of a text.
*Paragraph
8, “work is prayer” – Alluding to St.
Benedict’s maxim, Orare est laborare, laborare
est orare (To pray is
to work, to work is to pray).
*Paragraph
8, oratio – (Latin) Speech, message.
*Paragraph
9, the resurrection of the body –
Discussed in Letter 22.
*Paragraph
10, the osteoporosis – Lewis suffered
from osteoporosis the last five or so years of his life.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Discuss the kinds of practical matters Lewis explores:
When do you find is the best time for prayers? What is the best place? How
important is it to kneel? What other problems do you encounter in or about
prayer? How do you deal with them?
--Do you, like Lewis, find it an enrichment to think that
your prayers of praise and adoration are joined with those of the angels and
archangels and all the company of heaven?
--How important are specific details in your prayers? Do
you think we can become too concerned about details? If so, in what ways could
that be detrimental?
Letter 4
Letter 4 deals with two difficulties regarding prayer:
why should we pray, since God already knows what we need? And, what things is
it appropriate to include in our prayers?
*Paragraph
6, school of thought, “freedom is willed necessity” – Lewis probably is referring to “compatibilism,”
of which David Hume is the most prominent defenders. Compatibilists
believe that every event (and thus all human actions) are causally determined
(i.e., necessary), but among those events some occur as the result of human
choice, others don’t. If I remain in a room because I choose to, I’m free; if I
remain in a room because I am locked in and cannot exit even if I wanted to,
I’m constrained. The first case is as causally determined as the second, but
the first occurs as the result of my choice (i.e., my will is part of the
causal sequence), the second doesn’t. Thus, the first case (the case of
freedom) exhibits “willed necessity,” whereas the second doesn’t (because what
is necessary is not also willed). [Thanks to my colleague Anthony Perovich.]
*Paragraph
6, unveiled – See also Letter 21,
paragraph 8, and the note to it. Veils cover up; prayer involves removing
anything that hides our real selves or forms a barrier between us and another.
*Paragraph
8, Buber – Martin Buber (1878-1965),
Jewish philosopher. His best-known book is Ich und Du (1923), translated into English in 1937 as I and Thou. Buber conceived the
relationship between God and humanity not as abstract and impersonal, but as a
dialogue between persons addressing each other with the familiar Du (“thou”) rather than the formal Sie (“you”).
*Paragraph
9, anthropomorphic images – See the
introductory note to Letter 15. In Miracles,
chap. 10 (“Horrid Red Things”) Lewis argues that it is pretty nearly impossible
to avoid using anthromorphic images in thinking about
God; if we try, they are only replaced by more absurd images, such as a gas or
a fluid.
*Paragraph
9, “Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou” – A variant on “This also is Thou: neither is this Thou” as said by one
of the church fathers, St. Ephrem the Syrian. See the note to Letter 14, paragraph 6, below.
*Paragraph
14, “ordinate loves” –
*Paragraph
16, when the great blow had fallen upon me – Lewis presumably refers here to the death of his wife in 1960, or
the reappearance of the cancer that eventually was the cause of her death.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Lewis does not define prayer, but his most basic
description of prayer, or explanation of why he prays, is that to pray is to
enter and be in the presence of God. How might this relate to Lewis’s idea of
prayer as “unveiling”?
--What things do you consider appropriate to pray about
in petitionary and intercessorary
prayer? What things are not? On what basis should we decide?
Letter 5
In Letter 5 Lewis explains the way he meditates on, or
elaborates on, phrases in the Lord’s Prayer as he prays them.
*Paragraph
1, festoonings
– See note to Letter 3, paragraph 4.
*Paragraph
5, Queen Victoria – The Queen
disliked Prime Minister Gladstone, in part because, she said, he addressed her
as though she were a public meeting.
*Paragraph
8, “the same mind which was also in Christ” – Philippians 2:5.
*Paragraph
10, Lycidas – John Milton’s famous pastoral elegy on the death of
his friend Edward King in 1637.
*Paragraph
12, encore – Lewis also warns elsewhere against seeking satisfaction
or security through repetition. In Lewis’s novel Perelandra, the character Ransom, on the planet Venus, comes upon a fruit
whose taste is so delicious and satisfying that it seems “a totally new genus of pleasures, . . . out of all
reckoning.” He is about to pick another one, but it feels wrong “to repeat a
pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual” (chap. 3). The next day, after a
similar experience with a certain kind of berry, such restraint turns into a
principle: “This now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application
and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film
that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it
possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that.
But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence
against chance, a security for being able to have things over again” (chap. 4).
Upon further reflection, it occurs to him that on earth people would learn how
to produce it and charge more for it so people could have that taste as often
as they want it: “Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a
voice that could not be disobeyed” (chap. 4).
*Paragraph
13, “Unless a seed die . . .” – John
*Paragraph 14, “things
requisite and necessary . . .” – From the Order for Evening Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer.
*Paragraph
14,
*Paragraph
16, Juvenal – Roman poet (c. 60-140 A.D.), known for his harsh, biting
satire. The quotation is from his tenth satire (line 111).
*Paragraph
17, de jure – (Latin) Legally; according to law.
*Paragraph
17, de facto – (Latin) In fact; in reality.
*Paragraph
17, “beauty so old and new” –
*Paragraph
17, “light from behind the sun” –
Charles Williams, “The Calling of Taliessin,” the
opening poem in The Region of the Summer
Stars (1944): The climax of the search of the poet Taliessin
for a depth of poetry worthy of Camelot comes near a clear city on a sea-site,
through “a light that shone from behind the sun; the sun / was not so fierce as
to pierce where that light could / through every waste and wood; the city and
the light / lay beyond the sun and beyond his dream.” Lewis uses this passage
also as the epigraph to the fourteenth chapter of Miracles.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--As Lewis prepares to tell Malcolm some of his festoonings, he says that Malcolm in turn must tell Lewis
some of his. Reflect on your own ways of thinking about phrases in the Lord’s
Prayer and compare them with those of Lewis and of others in your discussion
group.
--Lewis says in paragraph 5, “prayer is not the time for
pressing our own favourite social or political
panacea.” What does he mean by that? Have you heard people do that sort of thing?
Letter 6
Letter 6 begins by arguing that religion is not the same
as Christianity or the Church, and goes on to discuss whether feelings of guilt
are a good thing or not.
*Paragraph
2, Vidler, Soundings – Alec R. Vidler
(1899-1991), historian, Dean of King’s College,
*Paragraph
2, F. D. Maurice – Frederick Denison
Maurice (1805-1872), author of many books on education, morality, and theology,
and one of the originators of the Christian Socialist movement. The views
expressed in his book Theological Essays
(1853) were described as dangerous by the council of King’s College,
*Paragraph
2, Bonhoeffer
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German theologian.
He was a leader of the
*Paragraph
2, the Establishment – That is, the
Church of England. I suspect the kind of argument Lewis refers to was: “A national
church—that is, a church built into the constitution as a complement and
counterpoise to the state and to civil government—is a standing witness to the
fact that man, every man, is a twofold creature with a twofold allegiance,
whether he realizes it or not. He is a citizen of an earthly temporal state,
and as such has duties to perform and needs to be satisfied. But he is more
than that. He has a mysterious origin and destiny and spiritual capacities for
freedom and fullness of life which are not within the power or control of civil
government. A man is not only a political creature, but also a spiritual being
who belongs to a realm of eternal verities which lifts him above all the realms
of this world even while he is immersed in them. A national church, recognized
as such by the state, is a constant, public and impressive reminder of this
fact” (Vidler, “Religion and the
*Paragraph 3, Newman – John Henry
Newman (1801-90) was a promising Anglican clergyman and theologian who
converted to Catholicism in 1845. The first volume of his Parochial Sermons, from which Lewis quotes, was published in 1834
(later reprinted as the first volume of Parochial
and Plain Sermons): “Heaven then is not like this
world; I will say what it is much more like—a church. For in a place
of public worship no language of this world is heard; there are no schemes
brought forward for temporal objects, great or small; no information how to
strengthen our worldly interests, extend our influence, or establish our
credit. These things indeed may be right in their way, so that we do not set
our hearts upon them; still (I repeat), it is certain that we hear nothing of
them in a church. Here we hear solely and entirely of God. We praise
Him, worship Him, sing to Him, thank Him, confess to Him, give ourselves up to
Him, and ask His blessing. And therefore, a church is like heaven;
viz. because both in the one and the other, there is one single sovereign
subject—religion—brought before us” (sermon 1, “Holiness Necessary for Future
Blessedness”). The choice of the word religion may be unfortunate; but thrust
of the passage as a whole seems unobjectionable.
*Paragraph
5, Simone Weil – French philosopher
and mystic (1909-1943). Originally Jewish, she converted to Christianity and
became a practicing Roman Catholic. Most of her books, published posthumously,
consist of notebooks and religious essays.
*Paragraph
6, “When the means are autonomous they are deadly” – Charles Williams, “Bors
to Elayne: on the King’s Coins,” in Taliessin through Logres
(1938): “When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words / escape
from verse they hurry to rape souls; / when sensation slips from intellect,
expect the tyrant; / the brood of carriers levels the good they carry.” Lewis
quotes the same passage in the sixth chapter of Reflections on the Psalms (1958), to amplify this sentence: “Thus
the Law, like the sacrifice, can take on a cancerous life of its own and work
against the thing for whose sake it existed.”
*Paragraph
7, Voilà l’ennemi – (French) “There [is] the enemy”—that is, putting
religious trappings above essential truths is the enemy of Christianity.
*Paragraph
10, “outgrown . . . survive chiefly as venerable archaisms or as fairy-stories”
– Vidler, “Religion
and the
*Paragraph
12, maladies imaginaries – (French) Hypochondriacs.
*Paragraph
17, “Peace, prattler” – George Herbert,
English poet (1593-1633), “Conscience” (1633).
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Some people say, “Christianity is not a religion.” Do
you agree? If so, what do you mean by that? Does Letter 6 support the point you
are making?
--What, according to Lewis, is positive about feelings of
guilt? What is not positive? How do we keep the two sides in balance? What does
Lewis recommend?
--What does Lewis mean by saying church activities can
become “an idol that hides both God and my neighbors”?
Letter 7
Letter 7 explores the objections some people raise
against petitionary prayer: that prayer is useless
because things are predetermined, or that if God alters the course of events in
answer to prayer, the world would be unpredictable, which would be an unacceptableposition to hold. Lewis refutes both arguments.
*Paragraph
1, “Lord, I am not high minded” –
Psalm 131:1 (Lewis uses here the translation by Miles Coverdale found in The Book of Common Prayer, which he would have heard in chapel and church
services).
*Paragraph
1, Our Lord in
*Paragraph
2, “nevertheless, not my will but thine” – Matthew 26:39; Mark
*Paragraph
2, The servant is not greater – John
*Paragraph
3, cairngorms – Precious stones of a
yellow or wine-colour, consisting of rock-crystal coloured by oxide of iron, in
common use for brooches and seals and other
*Paragraph
8, “the masterly administration of the unforeseen” – Robert Bridges, English poet (1844-1930),
“Introduction,” The Testament of Beauty
(1929), Book 1, line 7 (“We sail a changeful sea through halcyon days and
storm, / and when the ship laboureth, our stedfast purpose /
trembles like as the compass in a binnacle. / Our stability is but balance, and
conduct lies / in masterful administration of the unforeseen”).
*Paragraph
11,
*Paragraph
11, Bradley – Francis Herbert Bradley
(1846-1924) was the most famous, original, and philosophically influential of
the British Idealists. As a philosophy student at Oxford, Lewis studied
Bradley’s works. He talks in Surprised by
Joy (chap. 13) about ways of thought that “enabled one to get all the
conveniences of Theism, without believing in God. The English Hegelians,
writers like T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet (then mighty names), dealt in
precisely such wares.”
*Paragraph
11, Ethical Studies – F. H. Bradley, Ethical
Studies, 2nd ed., rev., with additional notes by the author
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
*Paragraph
11, Arnold – Matthew Arnold (1822-88),
English poet, known for his influence on public education and as a “prophet of
culture.” The “baiting of
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Are there other objections to petitionary
prayer that you have heard people raise, or can imagine them raising? How would
you reply to their objections?
--What does Lewis provide as reasons we should offer petitionary prayers? Can you think of other reasons for
doing so?
Letter 8
In Letter 8 Lewis responds to news that Malcolm and
Betty’s son George might be seriously ill, which makes questions about petitionary prayer no longer theoretical, but intensely
real.
*Paragraph
1, froth and bubble – Lewis may have
been alluding to a line by Austrailian poet Adam
Lindsay Gordon (1833-70), “Life is
mostly froth and bubble.”
*Paragraph
2, “He has no children” –
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.3.216.
*Paragraph
2, in my own trouble – Presumably
after the death of his wife in 1960, or after the reappearance of the cancer
that eventually was the cause of her death.
*Paragraph
6, before He prayed in
*Paragraph
6, Isaac had been spared – Genesis
22:1-14.
*Paragraph
8, an angel appeared “comforting” him
– Luke
*Paragraph
9, the servant is not greater than the master – See Letter 7, paragraph 2.
*Paragraph
10, raison d’état – (French) A political principle or basis for action.
*Paragraph
10, murderous rabble – Luke 23:18-23.
*Paragraph
10, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” –
Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1.
*Paragraph
11, Every rope breaks . . . Every door is slammed – Lewis echoes what he wrote a few years earlier in A Grief Observed (1961), describing his
feelings after the death of his wife: “But go to Him when your need is
desperate . . . and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and
double bolting on the inside. After that, silence” (notebook 1, paragraph 7).
And, “It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labeled
‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope
until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I
didn’t” (notebook 3, paragraph 3).
*Paragraph
12, “dark night” – That is, the “dark
night of the soul,” from the book with that title by St. John of the Cross (see note
to Letter 12, paragraph 7 below). The “dark night” is a crucial part of the
journey into mystical experience. It begins by leaving behind worldly comforts
and securities and continues by exploring the mysteries of divine nature. “The
final stage of the dark night, which John sees as only for the most spiritually
adept, is an utter relinquishing of self, a painful death of the ego that leads
to an eventual dawn, a whole level of illumination in the seeker’s
understanding of God and his purposes” (David Downing, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis [2005], 77).
*Paragraph
12, One of the seventeenth-century divines – ??.
*Paragraph
12, “sensible consolation” – “A supernatural
illumination of the intellect giving rise to joy, peace, courage, and divine
love, attracting the will and heart to virtue and heavenly things. Substantial
consolation affects the intellect and will. It is often a simple tranquillity
in God’s service” (New Catholic
Dictionary).
*Paragraph
12, Niebuhr – Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892-1971), American theologian, author of many books including Moral Man and Immoral Society
(1932), An Interpretation of
Christian Ethics (1935), and The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vol;
1941-1943).
*Paragraph
13, a Job’s comforter – Job’s friends
came to him in his distress supposedly “to mourn with him, and to comfort him”
(Job 2:11), but they ended up rebuking him for failing to admit to doing evil,
which they assume must have been the cause of his misfortunes.
*Paragraph
14, playing with counters, stakes have to be raised – More echoing of A
Grief Observed: “Bridge-players tell me that there must be come money on the
game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that [with
faith]. . . . You will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are
raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing nor for counters or
for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world” (notebook 3, paragraph
4).
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Do you agree with Lewis that feeling anxieties in a
situation like Malcolm and Betty’s is an affliction, not a defect of faith? Why
or why not? How should we deal with them?
--What does Lewis mean by saying “In every Church, in
every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the
very purpose for which it came into existence”? Do you agree with the
statement? Can you provide illustrations? What responsibility does that place
upon members of the organization?
Letter 9
Letter 9 focuses on what for Lewis is the actual problem
regarding petitionary prayer: Do prayers act as
genuine causes? If so, how?
*Paragraph
3, if the disciples were asleep – Matthew 26:40; Mark
*Paragraph
3, astonished
*Paragraph
5, God and His acts are not in time –
For a fuller discussion of this, see Mere
Christianity 4.3 (“Time and Beyond Time”).
*Paragraph
6, God, we believe, is impassible –
That is, as a spirit, God does not have or show emotion.
*Paragraph
7, post hoc, propter hoc – (Latin) After this, because of this.
*Paragraph
, 11, “Work out your own salvation” –
Philippians
*Paragraph
11, Pelagianism – Pelagius, British monk living in
*Paragraph
11, “For it is God who worketh in you” – Philippians
*Paragraph
11, Augustinianism –
*Paragraph
12, “whereto serves Mercy but to confront the visage of offence?” – Shakespeare, Hamlet,
3.3.46-47.
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Lewis wrote, in a letter quoted above, “One cannot
establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics.” Elsewhere (in “The Efficacy of
Prayer”) he describes experiments he has heard of, where a team of people pray
for one group of patients but not for another group, and the effectiveness of
prayer is assessed after three months or a year (according to a recent news program,
such a study is about to be undertaken by a research institute in the United
States). Are such studies a good or worthwhile thing? If so, what is their
value? If not, what is wrong with them? How does the question relate to an
understanding of what prayer is and how it “works”?
--In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, the priest Harry Harrington says to Lewis, when Lewis’s wife has
shown some improvement, “Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard
you’ve been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.” And Lewis replies,
“That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray
because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time,
waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.” Discuss what is sound
and helpful about what the character Lewis says, and what is not, and how it
relates to what is said in this chapter.
Letter 10
Letter 10 begins by discussing how images should be treated
in reading the Bible, then returns to petitionary
prayer, explaining why he believes that prayer does matter, especially because
“the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of
art to which every being makes its contribution and (in prayer) a conscious
contribution” (par. 11).
*Paragraph
1, this language is analogical – That
is, God can be said to be grieving only by speaking of God in human
(anthropomorphic) terms (by a comparison or analogy). See the note to Letter 4,
paragraph 9; the note to Letter 9, paragraph 6; and the introductory note to
Letter 15.
*Paragraph
2, Never take the images literally – Lewis’s
point can be illustrated from what he says in Mere Christianity 3.10 about biblical imagery used to depict
heaven: “There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the
Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend
eternity playing harps.’ The answer to such people is that if they cannot
understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All
the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely
symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are
mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the
present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are
mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity
share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is
mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the
preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think
that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
*Paragraph
2, “demythologising” – An approach to New Testament studies developed by
German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976); Bultmann held that many passages in the Bible, especially those about
God and his dealings with man, have the form of mythological expressions; if
they are to be intelligible in the twentieth century, that which is mythical
must be explained as such, so that the
essential meaning of the work can appear more distinctly.
*Paragraph
3, “God has instituted prayer . . .”
– Blaise Pascal (1623-62), Pensées de M. Pascal sur la
réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets [“Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion,
and on other subjects”] (1670), #513.
*Paragraph
3, stone will be bread – Matthew 7:9;
Luke 11:11.
*Paragraph
4, “the first Almighty Cause . . .” –
Alexander Pope, English poet (1688-1744), An
Essay on Man, 1.145-46.
*Paragraph
8, “To generalise is to be an idiot” – A marginal comment by romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) in a copy Sir
Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses: “To generalise is
to be an idiot; to particularise is the alone
distinction of merit.”
*Paragraph
9, the death of every sparrow – Matthew
10:29; Luke 12:6.
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--What are advantages, and disadvantages, of using
anthropomorphic images for God, as the Bible does regularly? Should we try to
conceptualize God without them? If we use them, is it important to keep in mind
that they are only images?
--Do you agree with Lewis that having one’s prayer be
“heard” is more important that achieving a “result”? I heard a lawyer say that
frequently people undertake a legal action not so much to achieve a certain result
(win the case) as to have the case be heard, to have their issue taken
seriously. Could that sometimes apply to prayers as well?
--What
does Lewis mean by “The world was made partly that there might be prayer”?
Letter 11
Letter 11 deals with the difficulty that arises from the
fact that the New Testament tells us two apparently contradictory things about petitionary prayer: In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught his
disciples to pray “Thy will be done,” and that is the way he himself prayed in
Gethsemane; but elsewhere he removes that limitation and promises that whatever
we ask for in faith will be given us.
*Paragraph
2, aorist – The simple past verb in
Classical Greek, expressing past action with no implication as to completion,
duration, or repetition.
*Paragraph
4, “That which they greatly feared . . .” – Job
*Paragraph
8, on Vidler’s principles, “venerable archaisms,”
“outgrown” – See Chapter 6, paragraph
2 (and the note to it) and paragraph 10.
*Paragraph
10, the Widow started Huck Finn off –
Samuel L. Clemens, The Adventures of Huckkleberry Finn (1884), chap. 3.
*Paragraph
10, “addressed to our condition” –
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854),
chap. 3: “There are probably words addressed to our
condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more
salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new
aspect on the face of things for us.”
*Paragraph
13, the “evidence . . . of things not seen” – Hebrews 11:1.
*Paragraph 14,
friend is above the servant – See Letter 7, paragraph 2, and Letter 8,
paragraph 9.
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Lewis writes in Surprised
by Joy about his experience when he was nine and his mother was gravely ill
with cancer: “I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in
faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by will power a
firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I
thought, I achieved it” (chap. 1). Yet his mother died, which probably—although
he denied it—contributed to his loss of faith a few years later. What would you
say about prayer and its effect to someone in such a position?
--Lewis says working up a subjective state of belief by
will power or emotions “is not faith in the Christian sense.” What is faith in
the Christian sense? How can it be developed?
Letter 12
Letter 12 picks up on the reference to those of advanced
degrees or kinds of faith in Letter 11, and moves on to talk about mystics and
mysticism, with two paragraphs on intercessory prayer at the end.
*Paragraph
1, Rose Macaulay’s approach – See
Letter 2, paragraphs 2-4 and the notes to them.
*Paragraph
1, the Imitation – Thomas à Kempkis, Imitation of Christ (1418).
*Paragraph
2, when I was still a walker – For
most of his life, Lewis took daily walks in the afternoon and enjoyed
cross-country walks, staying overnight in country hotels. In the last few years
of his life, because of osteoporosis and heart problems, he had to give up
walking. “I’ll never be able to take real walks again—field-paths and little
woods and wonderful inns in remote villages, farewell!—but it’s wonderful how
mercifully the desire goes when the power goes” (Letters to an American Lady, 30 November 1957).
*Paragraph
2, the precipices of mysticism – For
a study of Lewis and mysticism, see David C. Downing, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis (2005). Downing
concludes that Lewis was “part logician, part mystic, and his books offer a
unique blend of charisma and clarity—of explaining what can be known, while
exploring the unknown and the unknowable” (14).
*Paragraph
5, aiguilles – Sharp, pointed
mountain peaks.
*Paragraph
5, “If it were so, He would have told us” – John 14:2 (“If it were not so, I would have told you.”)
*Paragraph
6, “And when he hatth the kernel eate
. . .” – John Donne (1572-1631),
“Community” (1633), 23-24.
*Paragraph
7, Plotinus, Lady Julian, St. John of the Cross – Three notable mystics.
Plotinus (205-270 a.d.)
was born in Egypt and is generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism and
one of the most influential philosophers in antiquity, after Plato and
Aristotle. The ultimate goal, in his philosophy, is unification with God, which
can be attained only when the soul, in an ecstatic state, loses the restraint
of the body and has for a time an immediate awareness of God. Lady Julian: Juliana of Norwich
(1342-c. 1416), English anchoress and author of Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1390), an expression of mystical
fervor in the form of sixteen visions of Jesus. St. John of the Cross: John
de Yepes (1542-1591), founder (with St. Teresa of
Avila) of the Discalced Carmelites, and author of a number of important works
of Christian mysticism: Ascent of
*Paragraph
7, “It may be that the gulfs . . .” –
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1833), 62-63, describing what might be the
different results if Ulysses’s men join him in
undertaking one, last voyage to the west.
*Paragraph
10, “mortal glimpse of death’s immortal rose” – ??
*Paragraph
11, “flesh” and not “spirit” – Romans
8:1-8.
Topics for
reflection and discussion:
--Mysticism is defined as experiencing immediate
spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or
a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or
spiritual ecstasy. Have you had such experiences yourself, or know others who
have? Discuss their value or their effect on the person who has them.
--Lewis says a desire to “peep behind the scenes” (to
attain a glimpse of heaven) should not be one’s motive for attempting the
mystic way. What would the proper motive be?
--In an essay, “Work and Prayer” (1945) Lewis recalls an
old maxim that says “laborare est orare (work is prayer),” at least a kind of prayer (God in the Dock, 106). What does the
maxim mean? What seems to you the proper mixture of prayer and work?
Letter 13
Letter 13 picks up the question raised at the end of
Letter 11: is there a Listener at all, when we pray, or “Are we only talking to
ourselves in an empty universe?” Lewis had raised similar questions in a poem he
wrote in 1933 and reprints here, with some minor revisions. He enclosed a copy
of the original poem with a letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, dated
*Paragraph 1,
“I’ve just found in an old note-book . . . with no author’s name attached”
– Lewis often wrote ideas for essays or books, or first drafts of them, in
school notebooks. A Grief Observed
(1961) purports to be notes he jotted in four such notebooks during the night
when he wasn’t able to sleep. That “no author’s name [is] attached” is a signal
that it is his own poem; if it were by someone else, he would have recorded the
author’s name.
*Paragraph 2,
“Pantheism” – A belief system that identifies the universe with God or God
with the universe: “God is all, and all is God.” Use of the word “dream,” Lewis
seems to say, breaks down all separation between humans and God: if the one
great reality, infinite and eternal, is God, everything finite and temporal is
part of God. In that case we, like a dream, have no actual reality. Lewis
disagrees with this in the following paragraph.
*Paragraph 2,
soliloquy – A speech in drama in which a character talks to himself,
revealing innermost thoughts.
*Paragraph 2, If
the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God – This
sentence may be exploring the idea raised in Romans 8. “When we cry, ‘Abba!
Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit” (v. 15-16 NRSV)
and “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to
pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for
words” (v. 26 NRSV). The rest of the letter discusses the way God can be in us
and help us speak to him while still remaining “other,” separate from us.
*Paragraph 3, Owen
Barfield, Saving the Appearances
– Arthur Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was one of Lewis’s closest friends, from the
time they met as undergraduates in Oxford. Although Barfield practiced law for
his livelihood, he published many books on language and philosophy. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry
was published in 1957. The two maxims Lewis summarizes can be found in Chapter
23, “Religion.”
*Paragraph 3, “
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With
echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting
the shoreless watery wild,
We
mortal millions live alone.
* Paragraph 3, “enisled”
– To be placed or settled on an island; thus, to be isolated or cut off.
* Paragraph 5, ontological
continuity – In philosophy, “ontology” is the branch of philosophy that
studies the nature of existence or the essence of being. “Ontological
continuity” here summarizes the connection we have with God through the nature
of our existence as created beings has been discussed in the previous two
paragraphs.
*Paragraph 5,
“Whither shall I go . . .” – Psalm 139:6band 7b; Lewis uses here the
translation by Miles Coverdale found in The
Book of Common Prayer, which he
would have heard in chapel and church services.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--What does Lewis mean by saying that “prayer in its
most perfect state is a soliloquy, . . . God [speaking] to God” (paragraph 2)?
What does it mean in regard to what prayer is? How might it affect the way we
engage in prayer?
--What is Lewis’s answer, and your answer, to his
question, “Why should God speak to Himself through man?”
--In the last paragraph, Lewis distinguishes between
creation and Incarnation, and then comments on the importance to God of the Incarnation,
what it does for God. Explain what it does and discuss how that is meaningful
to us.
Letter 14
Letter 14 develops further the idea introduced in Letter
13, the “otherness” of God, and thus continues to explore the relationship of
human to the divine. The letter affirms again that God is in us, without being
us, and asks what that means in terms of our daily walk with God.
*Paragraph 1, “got
it all out of his head” – Lewis echoes here words he had used in talking
about Creation in Mere Christianity:
“Christianity . . . thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and
cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the
animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of his head’ as a man
makes up a story” (Bk. 2, Ch. 1). He used the same wording in the sixth of the
Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew, describing the creation of the Narnian world: as Lucy hears Aslan
sing, plants and then animals begin to spring forth across the landscape and
“with an unspeakable thrill, she felt quite certain that all the things were
coming (as she said) ‘out of the Lion’s head’” (chap. 9).
*Paragraph 4, the very Pagans knew – In
Greek mythology, Zeus and other gods would often would appear at people’s doorsteps,
disguised as beggars, and judge them by how they treated strangers at the door.
*Paragraph 4, parable of the sheep and the goats – Matthew
25:31-46, esp. v. 35: “for I was ahungered, and ye gave me meat.”
*Paragraph 4, are His “brethren” – Matthew 25:40 (“Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
me”).
*Paragraph 5, Owen’s view – Owen’s view, expressed in the next
sentence, refers back to Letter 13, Owen Barfield’s book Saving the Appearances.
*Paragraph 6, “This also is Thou: neither is this Thou” – A quotation from one
of the Church Fathers, St. Ephrem the Syrian, commenting on how the more a
person comes to contemplate God in nature, the more he or she realizes that God
is also above and beyond nature.
*Paragraph 8, perhaps in Woolwich: See note
to Letter 3, paragraph 2.
Lewis satirically asks if the
parishioners in Woolwich actually believe “God can be found in the sky” the way
Robinson implies they do.
*Paragraph 10, a
Burning Bush – Alludes to the burning bush episode in Exodus 3, “the place
whereon thou standest is holy ground” (v. 5). See
also Letter 15, paragraph 16,
*Paragraph 11,
Boehme – German theologian Jacob
Boehme (1575-1624).
*Paragraph 12, “prevent us in all
our doings” – From an ancient collect used several times in the Book of Common Prayer: “Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most
gracious favour, and further us with thy continual
help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify
thy holy Name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life. Through Jesus
Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
*Paragraph 12, as if the
word prevent had its modern meaning – The Latin roots of prevent are pre (“before”) and venio (“come”)—thus the prayer asks God to “go before us” in
all that we do.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--What is the meaning, and what are the implications
for us, of the pastor’s reply to what Hitler looked like: “Like all men, that
is, like Christ” (p. 74)?
--What is the value, and the danger, of having special
“holy” places and things (p. 75)?
--What does Lewis mean by “watered versions of
Christianity” in this chapter and why does he object to them?
Letter 15
Letter 15 is tough reading at times, as Lewis explores
what for him was a crucial issue for his Christian life. The letter asserts
that addressing God in prayer is not a simple matter, even if one tries to
approach God simply. Betty says he should “just talk to God.” But Lewis replies
that this raises two questions: Who am I, and who is God?
How do we know someone? Can we really know another
person, even someone who has been a close friend, or spouse, for many years?
From our experiences with a person, we form a mental image of the person—but
that is not the whole person, or not
the real person. There is always more
to the person than we can know, and our impressions of the person must
constantly be readjusted as we learn more about him or her.
Lewis says it’s much the same with our relationship to
God, and with ourselves. Each of us fashions out of many years of varied
experiences a mental construct of our idea of God, and our idea of our own
self. That “self” (not our “real” self) addresses that “God” (our inevitably
partial conception of God). As with humans, we must allow our conception of God
to grow and change. If we do not, that conception will harden into a “god”
(even an “idol”). In order for us to have a genuine, authentic encounter with
God, our mental representations of self and God must be smashed and replaced with
ones that are more adequate and true—a process that must happen again and
again.
The remarkable thing about prayer is that for each of us
it can be a genuine, authentic encounter between our self and God. It can be
the most totally “real” experience I can have in this life, as my sense of
consciousness brings together the God who made me and enables me to think and
speak, and the I who was made by God and enabled to think and speak.
*Paragraph 1, Mullingar
– A historic town in
*Paragraph 1, dialectical – Characterized by logical argumentation
*Paragraph 2,
Victorian Gothic – Gothic architecture—characterized by pointed arches,
ribbed vaulting, flying buttresses, and rich ornamentation—was prevalent in
western Europe from around 1150 through the 1500s. There was a revival of the
Gothic style in the 1800s, especially during Queen
*Paragraph
4, St. François de Sales – St.
François de Sales (1567–1622) was a French priest who became Roman Catholic
bishop of
*Paragraph 4, Mettez-vous en la presence de Dieu – “Place
yourself in the presence of God.” This phrase begins each meditation in the first
part of Introduction to a Devout Life.
“Part First” is entitled “Containing Instructions and Exercises for Conducting
the Soul from Her First Desire Till She Be Brought to a Full Resolution to
Embrace a Devout Life.” Sometimes he adds a second sentence: “Beseech Him to
inspire you.”
*Paragraph 6, the bright blur in the mind
– Chapters 15, 16, and 17 of Letters to
Malcolm were published as a slender hardback book with the title Beyond the Bright Blur (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). The flyleaf says, “This limited edition is
published as a New Year’s greeting to friends of the author and his publisher.”
*Paragraph 6, break the idol – A major
theme in Lewis’s A Grief Observed
(1961), written after the death of his wife, expresses briefly what is
developed here in greater detail: that our impressions of other people, and of
God, are images formed in our minds. If we allow our images of God (and people
close to us) to harden, to remain stable and unchanged and to be mistaken for
reality, they will turn into idols. For reasons of spiritual (and relational)
health, it is essential that our images be broken, so they can grow and change.
For that reason, God’s greatness and incomprehensibility exceeds and thus
shatters our images, unless we resist and confine God to box of our own
fashioning. Lewis’s use of the term “idols,” and his ideas in this chapter, are
indebted to Saving the Appearances: A
Study in Idolatry (1957), a book by his friend Owen Barfield which explores
the way that western thought has come to regard representations (appearances,
mental images) as reality, thus turning them into idols.
*Paragraph 8, for
if I try to examine . . . it stops happening – In Surprised by Joy (ch. 14) Lewis calls
this principle, that we cannot simultaneously engage in an activity and analyze
that engagement, “an indispensable tool
of thought.” He learned it from Samuel Alexander’s Space Time and Deity (1920) and sums it up as follows: “You cannot
hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to
hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at
the hope itself.”
*Paragraph 8, The psychologists – Lewis means
especially Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which was part of the “new
psychology” when he was an undergraduate (see Letter1, paragraph 1, and the
note to it). Lewis agrees with Freud that our “conscious” awareness is only the
visible tip of the iceberg, with the unconscious being the 9/10 below the
surface. But in mentioning “the variety of its contents,” he disagrees that
sexuality is the dominant force in the unconscious.
*Paragraph 10, Verbum superne prodiens – (Latin) Literally, “the Word going forth (or advancing, going
forward) from above.” Lewis’s translation looks at the process from a human
vantage point.
*Paragraph 12, delirium tremens – A kind of delirium
induced by withdrawl from dependency on alcohol, characterized by tremblings
and various delusions of the senses.
*Paragraph 13, my
material surroundings – Barfield in Saving
the Appearances reiterates Kant’s understanding of perception, that we do
not “see” actual external objects. We “see” only the mental representations
created in our minds by our senses and nerve impulses. We “see” images in our
minds, not “the thing itself.”
*Paragraph 14,
shaving glass – mirror.
*Paragraph 15,
leave the stage – In paragraphs 13-15 Lewis expands on Shakespeare’s famous
line, “All the world’s a stage” (As You
Like It 2.7.138). Lewis’s point is that this life is not the ultimate
reality, any more than a play performed in a theater is real life. Just as a
“real” audience watches characters in a play, so we are being “watched” by
“real” Persons in a realm beyond this world.
*Paragraph
16, theophany
– A
manifestation or appearance of God or a god to a human being.
*Paragraph
16, holy ground; the Bush is burning
– See Letter 14, paragraph 10, and the note to it. God speaking to Moses from a
burning bush is a notable example of a theophany.
*Paragraph 17,
iconoclast – a breaker or destroyer of icons, or images. Again Lewis echoes
what he wrote earlier in A Grief
Observed: “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. . . . My idea
of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He
shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that
this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the
supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins” (notebook
4, paragraph 14).
*Paragraph 17,
Thomas Aquinas – St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) is considered by the Roman Catholic
Church to be its greatest theologian
*Paragraph 17, “It reminds me of straw” – Aquinas is reported to have said, late in his life to his friend Reginald, “I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.”
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Reflect on the picture of God in your own mind. Has it
grown and changed over the years (from your childhood impressions? From
subsequent ones that replaced those?). Lewis incorporated the need for growth
in our conceptions of God in his second of the Chronicles of Narnia, Prince
Caspian (1951). The Pevensie children return to Narnia a year (in our time) after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the youngest, Lucy, meets
Aslan.
“Welcome, child,” he said.
“Aslan,”
said Lucy, “You’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older,
little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you
grow, you will find me bigger.”
“Grow” here means not just
getting older, but increasing in wisdom and understanding. And that raises a question
for each of us: Is my conception of God large enough? Have I allowed God to
replace my childhood conception of God with a more adult one?
--How do our mental images, or conceptions, of God come
to be broken, or to be shown to us as inadequate? What kinds of experiences
does God use to “smash” the “idols” we may want to worship?
--How do we form our mental images of ourselves? How can
those images become a barrier to authentic prayer, and a genuine relationship
with God? What kinds of experiences does God use to smash our “idols” of self?
--Does Letter 15 help you gain a fuller understanding of
prayer? If so, explain how and why.
Letter 16
Letter 16 turns practical, examining how the theoretical
discussion in Letter 15 relates to the actual practice of prayer.
* Paragraph 2,
things made of wood or plaster – Lewis doesn’t use the word icon, here, but that seems to be what he
means in this phrase; that is, broadly, any representational object intended as
an aid to devotion, stimulating and liberating certain activities in the
worshipper. A crucifix, for example, he says in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), “exists in order to direct the
worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion.” It may serve that purpose
better if it does not have “any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities
which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this
purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest ikon. The
emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the
material image and go beyond” (pp. 17-18). A similar, briefer discussion can be
found in the second paragraph of his essay “Christianity and Literature”
(1938). He nowhere indicates that he
used icons as part of his own spiritual practice (it is interesting, therefore,
to have an icon used as cover art for the current
* Paragraph 3,
people of our type – Here, people oriented to think philosophically.
*Paragraph 6,
*Paragraph 6, composition loci – (Latin)
Arrangement of place (that is, meditation should begin by making use of use of
visual and imaginative elements to place oneself in an appropriate setting for
meditating on a particular theme or topic).
*Paragraph 6, One
of his English followers – The quotation which follows is from “The
Practical Methode of Meditation” (1614) by an English
Jesuit, Richard Gibbons (1550-1632); Lewis may have found the passage in Louis L.
Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 27.
*Paragraph 8,
people like ourselves – Here, poetic types, people with highly visual
imaginations, whose minds revel in image making.
*Paragraph 8,
“Imagination” in the highest sense – The initial dictionary definition of imagination is visualization: “the
action or faculty of forming mental images of what is not actually present to
the senses.” Lewis does not include this in his definition of imagination; rather, he labels it “imaginatio, the image-making faculty” and treats
it as separate from imagination. Imagination, for Lewis, is the mental, but not
intellectual, faculty that puts things into meaningful relationships to form
unified wholes. Higher imagination, that used by creative writers, connects
things that were previously unconnected, not through a logical or intellectual
process but through association, intuition, or inspiration. The organic and
intuitive power needed to write “poetry” (including both mythic fiction and
great lyric poetry) involves “inspiration” or “genius.” The best poetry, for
Lewis, operates at a level beyond images. It conveys intense feeling, makes a
powerful impression, through suggestiveness, not statement.
*Paragraph 10, in
its raw, historical reality – For example, the effect Mel Gibson tried to
achieve in The Passion of the Christ
(2004).
*Paragraph 11,
Blake – William Blake, English romantic poet (1757-1827), from his
four-line poem “Eternity”: “He who binds himself to a joy / Does the winged
life destroy. / But he who kisses the joy as it flies, / Lives in eternity’s
sunrise.”
*Paragraph 11,
more like an adjective than a noun – The distinction here would be that
nouns are “quantitative” (naming things that can be counted) while adjectives
are “qualitative” (describing qualities or characteristics of the things). He
is saying here that qualities and characteristics he experienced in life (like
longing, ecstasy, beauty) made a deeper impact on him than the things he
encountered. (In his essay “On Story,” Lewis makes a point similar to the
sentence here about “the terrible and the lovely”: “The whole sense [quality]
of the deathly” is quite different from the “simple danger [thing, noun] of
death.”)
*Paragraph 12, “We
give thanks to thee for thy great glory” – A widely used prayer, from an
ancient liturgy. It appears as one of the post-Communion prayers in The Book of Common Prayer.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Lewis says addressing prayers continually and
exclusively to God the Son creates “Jesus-worship,” “a religion which has its
value; but [is] not, in isolation, the religion Jesus taught.” What is
“Jesus-worship”? What is its value? What is not valuable or healthy about it?
In what respects is it not the religion Jesus taught?
--Do you use images (external or mental) as a part of
your approach to praying? What kind of images do you use? Of what assistance or
value are they to you? Do you, like Lewis, prefer momentary, rapidly changing
images, or ones that remain stable or fixed?
--What does Lewis think is the value of imaging the
crucifixion? Why does he think it is of limited value? Do you agree with him?
Why, or why not?
Letter 17
Letter 17 discusses prayers of praise and adoration,
focusing especially on the intended purpose of pleasure and play in this world
and the world to come.
*Paragraph 1, the
*Paragraph 2, “all
the blessings of this life” – From a prayer of General Thanksgiving in The Book of Common Prayer: “We bless
thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.”
*Paragraph 3,
manifest – as an adjective in the top paragraph: “Obvious; readily
apparent.” As a verb in the next paragraph: “show plainly, disclose, reveal; make clear to the eye or understanding.”
*Paragraph 3, “the
means of grace and the hope of glory” – The prayer quoted in paragraph 2 continues:
“but above all, for thine inestimable love in the
redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and
for the hope of glory.”
*Paragraph 3,
sight had replaced faith – Alluding to 2 Corinthians 5:7, on the end times
and life in heaven: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
*Paragraph
5, aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures?
– In The Screwtape
Letters, Screwtape complains, “He [God] made the
pleasures: all our [the devils’] research so far has not enabled us to produce
one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our
Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has
forbidden” (letter 9).
*Paragraph 7,
pleasures for evermore – Psalm
*Paragraph 7, theophany – See Letter 15, paragraph 16.
*Paragraph
10, “This also is thou” – Quoting Lewis’s close friend Charles Williams: “This also is
Thou; neither is this Thou” (preface to The Descent of the Dove. The sentence expresses Williams’
understanding of the Way of Affirmation of
Images and the Way of Rejection of Images, terms which are
derived from Dionysius the Areopagite. The former consists in recognizing the immanence of God in all
things, and says that appreciation of whom and what God has made may lead us to
appreciation of Himself. The latter concentrates on the transcendence of God,
the recognition that God is never fully contained in His creation; it says that
we must renounce all lesser images if we would apprehend His.
*Paragraph 10, the
fatal word Encore – See note to
Letter 5, paragraph 12.
*Paragraph 11,
sensuous and aesthetic – The former would be physical pleasures, created by
one or more of the senses; the latter would be pleasures felt by the mind and
imagination, responding to experiences of beauty.
*Paragraph 13, William Law – English
clergyman (1686-1761) noted for his controversial, devotional, and mystical
writings. The passage Lewis refers to is from A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) chapter 22: “Now
you must not reserve the exercise of this attitude to any particular times or
occasions, or fancy how resigned you will be to God if such or such trials
should happen. This is amusing yourself with the notion or idea of resignation
instead of the virtue itself. Do not, therefore, please yourself with thinking
how you would act and submit to God in a plague, or famine, or persecution, but
rather be intent upon the perfection of the present day.”
*Paragraph 15,
simplest act of mere obedience – In Surprised
by Joy, Lewis writes, “To know God is to know that our obedience is due to
him” (chap. 15).
*Paragraph 15, to
obey is better than sacrifice – Echoing Samuel’s rebuke to King Saul, “To
obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of lambs” (1 Samuel
15:22).
*Paragraph 15, as
I think I’ve said before – See Letter 8, paragraph 12.
*Paragraph 15, the
game worth the candle – Alluding to old saying, the game is not worth the
candle, referring to a game of cards in which the stakes are smaller than the
cost of burning a candle for light by which to play. Thus, what one would get from an undertaking is not worth the
effort one would have to put into it.
*Paragraph 17,
“valley of tears” – A phrase long used as a metaphor for this life, filled
with difficulties and unhappiness.
*Paragraph 17, via crucis
– (Latin) “The way of the cross,” or via
dolorosa, “the way of grief,” a stretch of road between the Antonia
fortress and
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Reflect on Lewis’s principle that pleasures, as they
strike us, are shafts of glory that should be used as channels of adoration.
Explain what he means by “reading a pleasure” (paragraph 7). Think of examples
of Lewis’s points from your own experience.
--Explain what Lewis means by “the fatal word Encore”(paragraph 10). What can be
fatal about repetition? Think of experiences in your life that might clarify
and illuminate what Lewis is getting at.
--In what sense are “play” and “dance” appropriate for
characterizing what Lewis calls the celestial condition (existence in heaven)?
Explain the final sentence in this letter, “Joy is the serious business of
Heaven.” What does that concept imply for us in our lives, here and now?
Letter 18
Letter 18 focuses on prayers of repentance, much of it
with the difficulty of understanding penitence in relation to God’s being, and
the difficulty of knowing how to regard and deal with the inward corruption for
which we need God’s forgiveness.
*Paragraph 1, mala mentis gaudia
– (Latin) “Evil joys of the mind”; Lewis would have seen the phrase in its
original source, Virgil’s Aeneid 6.278-79, but he probably also knew Seneca’s comments
on the phrase in his Epistles (no. 59)
and he surely knew the discussion of it in The
City of God 14.8, where St. Augustine’s point (“But the good feel these
emotions in a good way, and the bad in a bad way”) is similar to things Lewis
said in the previous letter (p. 89).
*Paragraph 1, as
Plato said, “mixed” – See Plato’s Philebus, part 4.
*Paragraph
4, “Neither take thou vengeance for our sins . . . be not angry with us
forever” – From the Litany in The Book of Common Prayer: “Remember
not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou
vengeance of our sins: spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast
redeemed with thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.”
*Paragraph
4, “neque secundum iniquitates nostras retribuas nobis” – From a liturgy in the
Catholic Breviary, based on Psalm 103:10 (translated in the Litany in The Book of Common Prayer as “Neither
reward us after our iniquities”).
*Paragraph
6, “wrath” can be attributed to God only by an analogy – See Letter 9, paragraph 6: “God, we believe, is
impassible.”
*Paragraph
8, Blake – William Blake, English
romantic poet (1757-1827). The lines quoted are the first stanza of his 16-line
poem “A Poison Tree,” published in Poems
of Experience (1794).
*Paragraph
10, “the wrath of man worketh not the righteous of
God” – James
*Paragraph
13, Alexander Whyte – Scottish preacher and theologian
(1837-1921). Here, for example, is a passage from his sermon “My Whole Life is
a Continual Conversion”: “The unsounded depth of our own depravity, the
bottomless pit of sin and misery that is in us all—that takes a long lifetime
for its full discovery. Indeed it is never fully discovered to us in this life—else
we would go mad at the sight of it. The Holy Spirit has many awful things to
show His subjects about themselves, but they are not able to bear all those
awful things as yet; no more than a little child is able to bear all that lies
wrapped up in its own soul against its threescore and ten years to come.”
*Paragraph
13, Morris – Clifford Morris
(1914-??), a taxi driver in
*Paragraph
13, Dante, Pascal, and even Newman –
Three very different Christian writers: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian
author of the medieval dream allegory the Divine
Comedy; Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician
and philosopher, whose most influential theological work Pensées de M. Pascal sur la réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets (“Thoughts of M. Pascal
on religion, and on other subjects”), left unfinished when he died, was
published in 1670 and become a classic;
John Henry Newman (1801-90), a promising
Anglican clergyman and theologian who converted to Catholicism in 1845 and
thereafter was an influential defender of Catholicism (his best-known work is his
spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita
Sua [Defense of His Life], published in
1864). Lewis seems impressed that Whyte, a Puritan, was influenced by Catholic writers, not
just Protestants.
*Paragraph
13, Grace Abounding – Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners (1666),
a spiritual autobiography by John Bunyan (1628-88), Puritan preacher and writer
better known as the author of The
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The passage quoted by Lewis is from paragraph
84.
*Paragraph
13, Haller’s Rise of Puritanism – William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper
& Row, 1938), 77.
*Paragraph
13, Another author . . . “as if I had . . . liquid Corruption” – Puritan minister Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680), describing the experience that led to
his conversion.
*Paragraph
14, fruits of the spirit – Galatians
5:22-23 (“But the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
temperance: against such there is no law”).
*Paragraph
14, “Forgetting those things . . .” –
Philippians
*Paragraph
14, St. François de Sales – See note
to Letter 15, paragraph 4.
*Paragraph
14, green, dewy – Perhaps describing
how the fresh, spring-like atmosphere of St. François de Sales’s
chapter contrasts to the ugliness and degradation of the Puritans cited above.
*Paragraph 14, la douceur – “sweetness,
gentleness.” Lewis may be alluding to the Introduction
to a Devout Life, 3.9, “Of Meekness toward Ourselves,” in which St.
François de Sales considers the proper approach and attitude toward repentance.
For example: “Believe me, Philothea, as the mild and
affectionate reproofs of a father have far greater power to reclaim his child
than rage and passion; so when we have committed any fault, if we reprehend our
heart with mild and calm remonstrances, having more
compassion for it than passion against it, sweetly encouraging it to amendment,
the repentence it shall conceive by this means will
sink much deeper, and penetrate it more effectually, than a fretful, injurious,
and stormy repentence. . . . However, if any one
should find his heart not sufficiently moved with this mild manner of
reprehension, he may use one more sharp and severe to excite it to deeper
confusion, provided that he afterwards closes up all his grief and anger with a
sweet and consoling confidence in God, in imitation of that illustrious
penitent, who, seeing his soul afflicted,
raised it up in this manner, PS.xliii. 5: ‘Why are
thou sad, O my soul, and why dost thou disquiet me? Hope in God, for I will
still give praise to him, who is the salvation of my countenance, and my God.’”
[I am indebted to my colleague Francis Fike for help
with this note and with other French authors and translations.]
*Paragraph
15, perverse pride – A kind of pride
in despair, from thinking one’s sins are so great that God cannot forgive them
(a different thing from repentance).
*Paragraph
15, “over-just and self-displeased . . .” – John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 514-15. In these lines Samson’s
father, Manoa, warns him not to be harder on himself
than God would be (“over-just”), by thinking of his sins less as offenses
against God than as damaging to his own self image.
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--The first paragraph discusses bad pleasures, which
Lewis describes as intrinsically evil pleasures of the mind. He gives one
example—the pleasure of holding a grievance against someone. Find other such
examples, including ones from your own experience. Why do they seem
pleasurable? What can we do to avoid them?
--In what way is penitence before God similar to, and
different from, appearing before a justly angry parent or teacher? Explain what
Lewis means when he says wrath and pardon are part of the circle of life and
love and deeply personal relationships (paragraph 9). Can you think of such examples
in your own life?
--Lewis refers to Alexander Whyte’s
conviction that for spiritual health we need to be and remain continually
conscious of our inner corruption. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Letter 19
Letter 19 starts with communal worship and moves on to
deal mostly with Holy Communion, or the Eucharist. Lewis had a very high sense
of the Eucharist: see Letter 2, paragraph 1, and the note to it. In this letter
he describes his difficulty in writing about the Eucharist partly because of
his difficulty in grasping, intellectually, what is going on. He accepts the
power of the sacrament, the “magic” it achieves in us, but finds it difficult
to explain the nature of the magic and power.
*Paragraph 1,
“with angels and archangels and all the company” – From The Order of the
Administration of the Lord’s Supper in The
Book of Common Prayer: “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all
the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising
thee, and saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are
full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.”
*Paragraph 2,
“never anything can be amiss . . .” – Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.82-83; Theseus
is explaining why he will watch the drama prepared by the Athenian workmen,
even though it will not be polished, professional acting.
*Paragraph
2, Nisson hut – A prefabricated building of
corrugated steel in the shape of a half cylinder, used especially by military
personnel as a shelter (usually spelled “Nissen”).
*Paragraph 3,
light . . . under a bushel – Matthew 5:15 (“Neither do men light a candle
and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth
light unto all that are in the house”).
*Paragraph 5, He
handed them the bread and wine – See Matthew 26:26-29.
*Paragraph 5,
“substance” – What is real for Aristotle are not universals but
individuals. “Man” and “horse” for Aristotle are only secondary
substances. What are primary substances are individual things such as the
man called Socrates or a specific brown horse. The distinctive attributes of
the individual thing are inherent in it as a substance. Thus, to take the
attributes of one individual thing (Christ’s body and blood) and transfer them
to an individual wafer or cup of wine makes no logical sense: they would no
longer have substance.
*Paragraph 5, plasticine – A composition capable of remaining plastic for a
long time; used in schools as a substitute for modelling clay.
*Paragraph 7, Favete linguis
– (Latin; from Roman religious rituals)
“Favor with your tongue”; that is, say only pleasing things; “say
nothing bad lest you displease the gods” (Horace, Odes 3.1.2—one of many examples).
*Paragraph 9, datum – (Latin) “A thing given”; a
thing or fact.
*Paragraph 10, a priori – (Latin) Constructed in
the mind independent of observation or experience.
*Paragraph 10, causa sui – (Latin) “cause of itself”; something generated
within itself. Since Christianity believes God cannot be created by any other
force or being, God is either self-caused (causa sui) or uncaused.
*Paragraph 12,
objective reality . . . Other – In Surprised
by Joy, chapter 14, Lewis described an initial step toward belief in a
divine being as recognition of the existence of something “sheerly
objective . . . the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it
with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.”
*Paragraph 13,
Take, eat – “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26).
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Do you share Lewis difficulty in understanding what
“this is my body, this is my blood” means
in the communion liturgy? How do you understand it? Or isn’t understanding the
important issue here? Is that the point Lewis is making?
--Lewis says some component of “the magical” is essential
in one’s spiritual life—the percentage of it can never be reduced to zero.
Explain what he means by “the magical.” How can the use of that term aid our
understanding of the spiritual? How does this relate to the discussion of the
Eucharist earlier in the chapter? (It might help to consider the Chronicles of Narnia. Magic is a crucial part of the Narnian
world; in The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, for example, Lewis uses the phrase “Deep Magic” for the moral law
and “Deeper Magic” for grace and love. Reflect on what Lewis is attempting to
convey here.)
--Lewis rebukes some theologians for “discussing how far
certain positions are adjustable to contemporary thought” and avoiding the
issue of whether they may be “true accounts of any objective reality. As if we
were trying to make rather than to learn” (paragraph 12). I suspect he is
referring to things like the accounts of biblical miracles. How does this
paragraph relate to the discussion of magic above (paragraphs 7-10)? Do you
concur with the point he is making?
Letter 20
Letter 20 focuses mostly on the condition of those who
have died, and the reasons why Lewis believed in the existence of Purgatory.
*Paragraph 1, I
had really forgiven someone – The someone is probably Robert Capron, the
schoolmaster of Wynyard School in Watford, northwest of London, which Lewis
attended from September 1908 through summer 1910. Capron was a tyrannical,
abusive man whose teaching was described by Warren Lewis as “brutalising and intellectually stupefying.” Capron treated
Lewis as something of a pet, but the overall effect of the environment affected
Lewis for much of his life. Lewis wrote to an American correspondent in July
1963, “Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised
suddenly that I at last had forgiven
the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it
for years; and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week
or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is
the real thing” (Letters to an American
Lady, 6 July 1963). Trying to
forgive for over thirty years – That is, he had been trying since the time
of his conversion in 1931.
*Paragraph
1, parable of the Unjust Judge – Luke
18:1-8.
*Paragraph
3, I pray for the dead – The Church
of
*Paragraph
3, At our age – Lewis was 63-64 when
he wrote this book. He died
*Paragraph
7, perpetual increase of beatitude –
The depictions of heaven in Lewis’s stories use imagery of a journey, of
movement “further up and further in” (The
Last Battle, chap. 15) or “further and further into the mountains” (The Great Divorce, chap. 9), thus
indicating that growth in knowledge and love of God continue after death. Thus
the Prayers of the People in The Holy Eucharist: Rite One (The Book of Common Prayer, U.S., page 329) include these words:
“And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy
faith and fear . . . , beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy
love and service.”
*Paragraph
8, Dante’s Purgatorio – Dante, in the Divine
Comedy, depicts Purgatory as a process of purification, not a place of
punishment.
*Paragraph
8, Thomas More’s Supplication
of Souls – Sir Thomas More
(1478-1535), best known as a martyr under Henry VIII and as author of Utopia (1516). Supplication of Souls (1529) was a reply to The Supplication for the Beggars (1529), a pamphlet by Simon Fish attacking
the English clergy and Catholic practices, including the belief in Purgatory.
More framed his reply as if souls in Purgatory were answering Fish’s charges;
they urge their loved ones in our world to avoid sinful lives and they plead
for prayers to hasten their delivery from the painful fires of Purgatory.
*Paragraph
8, Fisher – John Fisher (1459?-1535)
was a leading clergyman and religious writer during the reigns of Henry VII and
Henry VIII. Like Sir Thomas More, he was beheaded for opposing Henry VIII’s assumption of authority to head the English church.
He was canonized in 1935 by Pope Pius XI. Fisher’s sermon is one of his commentaries on the seven penitential psalms.
*Paragraph
8, etymology of the word – From the
Latin purgare, to make clean, to purify.
*Paragraph
9, Newman’s Dream – John Henry Cardinal Newman (see note to Letter 18, paragraph
13). Lewis is referring to his dramatic poem “The Dream of Gerontius”
(1865), which describes the death of an old man and
the journey of his soul to the judgment seat of God. It was set to music as an
oratorio by Sir Edward Elgar in 1900.
*Paragraph
11, purification will normally involve suffering – In The Screwtape Letters, the person whom Wormwood has been
trying to bring to hell dies and enters the new life, and Screwtape
comments: “Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly
pleasure” (letter 31). In Mere
Christianity, Lewis says that God’s intention is to make us perfect: as
Christ might put it, “Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life,
whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it
costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally
perfect—until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased
with you, as He said He was well pleased with me” (book 4, chap. 9).
*Paragraph
16, George’s illness – See Letters
8-9.
*Paragraph
16, endless present – Lewis expands
on this thought in Mere Christianity
4.3: “Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments
following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty
tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we
call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the
world—is always Present for Him.”
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Do you pray for the dead? If not, why not? If so, for
what do you pray on their behalf?
--Lewis writes, “Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?” Do you agree? Why or why not? Some
Protestants dismiss Purgatory because they believe that “Christ has done it all”—cleansed
them and made them ready for heaven as well as saved them.” Others believe
that, although Christ’s sacrifice saves them from their sins, the dross left by
their sinfulness remains and needs to be cleansed. Which seems more correct to
you? Why?
--Lewis’s belief in Purgatory might be a result of his adherence
to Platonic philosophy, which holds that souls are corrupted by entering
physical bodies and need to be purified before it can return to the world of
ideas after the death of the body (perhaps the Catholic church’s belief in it
is in part a result of neo-Platonic influence). Does that make the doctrine of
Purgatory more, or less, acceptable to you?
--Lewis returns in this letter to the notion of time,
here to the question of whether the dead are or are not in time. Is that issue
valuable to our understanding of the faith? Why (and how), or why not?
Letter 21
Letter 21 begins by discussing the burdensomeness of
prayer, for the imperfect beings we are, the difficulty we have in concentrating,
and it leads from that into the wider sphere of duties generally, that is, of
moral obligations, which are part of our lives in this world but will not be in
the world to come.
*Paragraph 2, “litel winde, unethe hit might be lesse”
– (Middle English) “Then a wind, the very slightest.” See Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, line 201: “Therwith a wynd, unnethe it myghte be lesse / Made in the leves grene a noyse softe
/ Acordaunt to the foule’s
song aloft” (“At the same time a wind, scarce could it have been
gentler, made in the green leaves a soft noise which accorded with the song of
the birds above”).
*Paragraph
2, gas-ring – A single-burner cooking
appliance.
*Paragraph
4, prayer is irksome – This was particularly
the case for Lewis in his youth when he began trying to concentrate completely
as he prayed and, if he found his attention wandering, forced himself to start
over, which led to bedtime prayers taking a great deal of time: “This was the
burden from which I longed with soul and body to escape. It had already brought
me to such a pass that the nightly torment projected its gloom over the whole
evening, and I dreaded bedtime as if I were a chronic sufferer from insomnia” (Surprised by Joy, chap. 4).
*Paragraph
7, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever” – The answer to the first question in the Westminster Shorter
Catechism (1647), “What is the chief end of man?” is, “Man’s chief end is
to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
*Paragraph
7, If I were a Calvinist – Probably
implying that a Calvinist might take this as a sign that he or she is not one
of the elect (though John Calvin himself would not have done so).
*Paragraph
8, too naked a contact – See also
Letter 4, paragraph 6. Lewis uses the image of nakedness to convey a central
theme in his last novel, Till We Have
Faces (1956), the need for an authentic encounter with God, free from any
of the impediments or coverings we often place between ourselves and the divine
(see especially part 2, chapters 3 and 4). In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape says that devils try by every means possible to
prevent humans from attaining such a state: “In avoiding this situation—this
real nakedness of the soul in prayer—you will be helped by the fact that the
humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There’s such a
thing as getting more than they bargained for!” (letter 4).
*Paragraph
8, prays faintly – See Shakespeare, Richard II, 5.3.103: “He prays but
faintly and would be denied.”
*Paragraph
9, passion
inutile –
(French) a “futile emotion,” or a “passion without purpose.”
*Paragraph
11, Aristotle has taught us – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 7, section 13.
*Paragraph
12, two great commandments – To the
question “which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus replied, “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, ‘Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets” (Matthew
*Paragraph
12, “Ye must be born again” – John 3:7.
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12, as
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13, Dante’s Heaven . . . and Milton’s
– Dante’s Paradise, in the Divine Comedy,
is characterized by freedom, as souls move freely in response to God’s love.
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13, to pick up an earlier point – See
Letter 17, paragraphs 16-17.
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15, the longer one’s prayers take –
See the note above, to page 113, paragraph 2.
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15, “I tune my instrument here at the door” – John Donne, “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” line 4: “Since I
am coming to that Holy room, / Where, with Thy choir of saints forevermore, / I
shall be made Thy music ; as I come / I tune the instrument here at the door,
/And what I must do then, think here before.”
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15, “unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming” – John Milton, Paradise
Lost (1674), Book 3, lines 231-23, referring there to the doctrine of “prevenient grace,” which comes to humans without even being
sought.
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16, “the altar must often be built . . .” – Charles Williams, He Came Down
from Heaven (1938), chap. 2: “Usually the way must be made ready for
heaven, and then it will come by some other; the sacrifice must be made ready,
and the fire will strike on another altar.”
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Do you find, as Lewis did, that prayer can, at times at
least, be irksome? If so, is it helpful to hear him say that, and to have him
stress that prayer-life must be followed as a discipline, not left as something
we engage in when we feel like doing so?
--What, according to Lewis, is paradoxical about the two
great commandments given by Christ in Matthew 22:35-40 (Mark
--What do Lewis, and
--Explain and discuss the sentences, “In the perfect and
eternal world the Law will vanish. But the results of having lived faithfully
under it will not.”
Letter 22
Letter 22 begins with a defense of supernaturalism in
Christianity (particularly here, the existence of heaven) against demythologizers who attempt to explain away supernatural
aspects; it concludes with a discussion of the nature of the resurrection.
*Paragraph 2,
“faith once given to the saints” – Jude 1:3 (“It was needful for me to
write unto you and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith
which was once delivered unto the saints”).
*Paragraph 8, fear
that I was bribed – Of his initial conversion to Theism, not yet
Christianity, in 1929, Lewis wrote in 1955, “My conversion involved as yet no
belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was
permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt
obedience without even raising that question” (Surprised by Joy, chap. 15).
*Paragraph 8, the
Viking way – Odin, the greatest of the Norse gods, sacrificed himself so
that he might have the wisdom to guide the other gods. He encouraged bravery
and valor in men because everything, including the gods, will one day die. The
giants and trolls, forces of chaos, are the enemies of the gods and men; the
chaos characterizing Ragnarok, the final period, signifies their victory.
*Paragraph 9,
“bright shoots of everlastingness” – Henry Vaughan (1621-1629), “The
Retreat” (1655), line 20: “Happy those early days, when I / Shined in my angel
infancy . . . [And] felt through all this fleshly dress / Bright shoots of
everlastingness.”
*Paragraph 11, “I
know you are a hard man . . .” – Matthew 25:24 (“Lord, I knew thee that
thou art a hard man . . .”).
*Paragraph 12,
*Paragraph 15,
“prepare a place” – John 14:2 (“I go to prepare a place for you”).
*Paragraph 15, the
fields of my boyhood – Thus, in The
Last Battle (1956), Lewis says that Aslan’s
Country contains the “real Narnia” and the “real
*Paragraph 17, “a
whisper / Which memory will warehouse as a shout” – Owen Barfield, “The
Tower,” section 5, lines 34-35 (“Now, while thy freedom holds / While love
still glimmers low on the horizon . . . even now, not once, / But many times,
the secret-breathing world / Whispers to thee, yet whispers with a voice /
Which memory shall warehouse as a shout”).
*Paragraph 17,
“orient and immortal wheat” – English poet and prose writer Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), one of the last of the Renaissance Neoplatonists, from the third of his Centuries of Meditations, section 3: “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown.” The Third Century opens with these lines: “Will you
see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin
apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born
are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the universe. By the gift of God
they attended me into the world, and by his special favor I remember them till
now.” Note the resemblance to the later, more famous lines by Wordsworth in the
next note.
*Paragraph 17,
“appareled in celestial light” – William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), line 4 (“There was a
time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To
me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The
glory and the freshness of a dream.”)
*Paragraph 19,
like the Undines – In folklore, Undines were female water spirits who could
acquire a soul by marrying a human being. (The best-known retelling is by Baron
de La Motte-Fouqué, Undine (1811).
*Paragraph 20, intellectual
soul . . . naked spirituality – This suggestion seems more Platonic (or
neo-Platonic) than biblical. That is true also of Lewis’s depiction of heaven
in chapter 15 of The Last
*Paragraph 20, Yet
from that fast – “fast” is a typographical error in the American edition;
it should read “fact.”
*Paragraph 22, “we
know that . . . Him as He is” – 1 John 3:2 (“Beloved, now are we the sons
of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he
shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is”).
Topics for reflection
and discussion:
--Lewis separated himself from demythologizers
like Rudolf Bultmann in the early twentieth century,
and perhaps Bishop John Shelby Spong in the twenty-first
century, disagreeing with what he felt were their efforts to “explain away”
things in the Bible that conflict with modern scientific knowledge. Lewis
believed deeply that accepting the mythical elements as myth (stories that
convey reality to the heart and thus bring out its meaningfulness and enable us
to connect with it, which intellectual apprehension cannot achieve) is
essential to the faith. It was only when his friend J. R. R. Tolkien showed him
that myths are vehicles used by God to convey moral and spiritual truth that
Lewis was able to return to Christianity in 1931. In his essay “Myth Became
Fact” (1944) he wrote, “It is the myth which is the vital and nourishing
element in the whole concern. . . . It is the myth that gives life. . . . A man
who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth
would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not
think much about it” (God in the Dock,
ed. Walter Hooper, pp. 64, 65, 67). In light of this background, explain
Lewis’s points in the first half of this letter, and discuss the extent to
which you agree or disagree with what he is saying.
--In paragraph 8, Lewis says he considers it fortunate
that he believed in God (as a theist) before he believed in heaven. Contrast
this with those who urge people to become Christians so that they will go to
heaven when they die. Is it better (“purer,” less selfish) to come to God
because God is good and true, instead of coming to God to attain a blissful
existence after death?
--Lewis’s discussion of the resurrection is difficult to
grasp for most readers, and understanding it fully may require several readings
and perhaps a lot of discussion with other readers. Why does Lewis say the old
picture of the soul re-assuming the corpse is absurd? Do you agree with him? What
is it that he believes the resurrection will entail? Is there a difference
between what Lewis is doing in the second half of the letter and what he
disagrees with in the first half of the letter? Is he providing an example of a
better way to deal with difficult elements (in that he accepts the reality of
life after death, and tries to show what that actually means) than the demythologizers (who, he says, attempt to explain away the
parts that are difficult to accept), or are they in fact doing much the same
thing Lewis is? Is he being unfair to those whom he dismisses?