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 quit