This essay by Jackson Greer recounts the unlikely friendship between C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. 

I'm currently reading C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words. 

Two things particularly stand out to me as I am reading this book: first, the breadth and depth of Lewis's reading; and second, his incredible memory of what he has read. Let me give an example. In the second chapter of the book, he is discussing the different meanings of the word "nature" down through the centuries. One of these meanings is Nature personified, or "Great Mother Nature." Lewis discusses this usage in the following paragraph:

[The use of the word "nature" to refer to] Great Mother Nature has proved a most potent sense down to the present day. It is 'she' who does nothing by leaps, abhors a vacuum, is die gute Mutter, is red in tooth and claw, 'never did betray the heart that loved her', eliminates the unfit, surges to ever higher and higher forms of life, decrees, purposes, warns, punishes and consoles. Even now I am not sure that this meaning is always used purely as a figure, to say what would equally make sense without it. The test is to remove the figure and see how much sense remains. Of all the pantheon Great Mother Nature has, at any rate, been the hardest to kill. 

Lewis is referring to several famous passages on Nature from English letters--Tennyson, Wordsworth, Darwin, etc. Yet nearby this paragraph, he refers to Langland, Bernardus Silvester, Chaucer, Aristotle, Plato, Euripides, Addison, Milton, Spenser, and others. What strikes me is that Lewis is writing in a day without Google Scholar and without library databases. He is probably sitting in the Bodleian as he writes this, but much of this is off the top of his head. 

The gulf between the modern "well-read" reader (such as an English prof) and a reader like Lewis is immense. I read Lewis in awe, but love to learn from him.

The Prelude by William Wordsworth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I knew C. S. Lewis loved this poem, so I wanted to read it.

I enjoyed the first eight or nine books, which focus on Wordsworth's life and early intellectual growth. Specifically, I really enjoyed the passages where he recounts his youth in the Lake Country, his life at Oxford, a trip he took through Europe during the French Revolution, and a long vacation hiking in the Alps. He makes you feel as if you are there, and he has the same sorts of sehnsucht experiences that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy. (In fact, the title "Surprised by Joy" comes directly from a Wordsworth poem.)

I read up to the point where the poem becomes almost totally philosophical, in the last three or four books. But in the portion that I read, there are passages that are beautiful and profound.

I am a man too much of my time, with too short an attention span, too little patience, and a mind affected too much by screens, to fully appreciate the poem. So three stars says more about me than it does about Wordsworth, who is one of the Greats.

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In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis's autobiography, Lewis describes his ideal daily routine. This routine began during his teen years, when he lived with William Kirkpatrick, the tutor who helped him get into Oxford.

If I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be [on a walk]. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared. The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven.

Lewis goes on to describe weekends during these years:

Such is my ideal, and such then (almost) was the reality of "settled, calm, Epicurean life." ... Meanwhile, on afternoons and Sundays, Surrey lay open to me. I remember autumn afternoons in [valleys] that lay intensely silent under old and great trees. On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose and fingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to the anticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole weekend's reading lay ahead, I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth. And especially if there were some new, long-coveted book awaiting me.

It sounds like a nice life, but as Lewis points out, this lifestyle was "almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self-centered, for in such a life my mind would be directed toward a thousand things, not one of which is myself."

[J]ust as [C. S. Lewis] advocated equal rights for all races, I have no doubt he would fully advocate women’s rights, though his calling wasn’t one of a crusader. I cringe whenever I see Lewis called a misogynist. Certainly, to the degree that most of us are, he was a creature of his day and culture—indeed, he called himself a dinosaur—but in many respects, in the deeply respectful tone he speaks about women, he seems more ahead of his time than behind it. He . . . saw women as God’s image-bearers with fully equal value to men, even if sometimes intended for different roles, something he celebrated.

Randy Alcorn, "C. S. Lewis's View of Women"

C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law by Justin Buckley Dyer


R. J. Snell's review (here) is helpful.

"Lewis denied the grave error that ascribes so much sovereignty to God that he invents good and evil for no reason other than his pleasure. Not only is this a deeply misguided understanding of sovereignty, which presents God as being disordered and unintelligible in his own being. It also overlooks and fundamentally misunderstands the Trinitarian relations that are, in the Christian view, the order of truth, goodness, and beauty. God neither invents nor obeys some external moral law, for his inner life of triune relationality is the intelligible good. Nor is he some bizarre cosmic power, like Zeus on steroids. "

"In the most interesting and best section of a very solid book, Dyer and Watson explicate Lewis’s distaste for the thought of Karl Barth, one of the twentieth century’s most influential theologians, but a 'dreadful man' for all that, as Lewis described him."

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In Justin Dyer's "Seven Political Lessons from C. S. Lewis," Lewis's political views look a lot like those of Edmund Burke.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my third time through. Lewis isn't perfect, but overall this is a wonderful book. My favorite sections of the book are . . .

1) Lewis's argument that our common sense of right and wrong are clues to the meaning of the universe;

2) Lewis's argument for the deity of Jesus Christ (Because he claimed to be God, he was most emphatically not merely a good moral teacher. He was either a lunatic, a fiend, or God Himself);

3) Lewis's discussion of the cardinal virtues, the Christian virtues, and the seven deadly sins (Lewis shows great insight into the way we think); and

4) his explanation of how Christ transforms believers into new creatures--this section of the book is marvelous.



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There is an open space in the human heart–a void that seeks fulfillment and a hunger that longs for satisfaction. For the progressive this longing looks to the future. A brave new world is envisioned, an ideology is espoused and an action plan that brooks no dissent is put into place. 

For the conservative that same longing is not for a brave new world, but for a serene, old world. The progressive yearns for utopia. The conservative mourns for Eden. The progressive works for a revolution. The conservative seeks a resolution. The progressive destroys the past to build the future. The conservative restores the past to build the future. 

The driving motivation for the progressive is a gnawing unhappiness he wishes to placate by fabricating an untried recipe for happiness, while the conservative longs for a tried and true happiness he has lost and wishes to rediscover. This longing for a good that is gone or a bliss that can be faintly remembered is the beating heart of conservatism and the motor of its creativity. 

The nostalgia of the conservative is more than a reverence for past wisdom or an immature desire to return to the comfort of the nursery. It is more than the antiquarian’s interest in the artifacts of a bygone age. It is instead an intense bittersweet emotion that lifts and unlocks the heart and motivates creative and positive change.

Dwight Longenecker, "Looking for Another Country: Nostalgia and Desire in C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot"

I'm nearly halfway through C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. In chapter 4 of Christian Behavior, the third section of the book, his comments on our choices are insightful:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us is progressing to the one state or the other.

p. 87

In my re-reading of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, I have just come across one of the most insightful passages in the book. In this passage, Lewis shows that Jesus could have been merely a great moral teacher:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 

Lately I've been re-reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, a work I read in college but haven't read since. As I read, I'm struck again by Lewis's relentless logic.

Lewis was an Oxford scholar trained in argumentation. He was had intellectual integrity. Even as an atheist in his 30's, he was willing to seek out the truth, no matter how much the truth hurt, no matter how inconvenient it was for him.

Interestingly, one reason that Lewis became a Christian was the fact that he found the world to be unjust, and yet found within himself a standard of justice--of right and wrong:

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? ... For many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?

Lewis goes on to give a great analogy:

A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense.

When Lewis realized that his notion of justice had to come from something higher than him, Lewis realized that Someone must have created us with this sense of justice--even if the world itself did not meet that standard:

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creature with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Lynn Summer, discussing C. S. Lewis's relationship with T. S. Eliot:

Lewis detested the Modernist innovations apparent in Eliot's poetry. According to Lewis's friend and biographer George Sayer, "He tended to regard the new poetry with its formlessness and lack of poetic diction as a revolutionary movement deliberately directed against the traditions of English poetry." Although Lewis admired Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), he attacked much of Eliot's poetry and literary criticism, frequently citing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) in which Eliot likens evening to "a patient etherized upon a table." Lewis found Eliot's imagery so distasteful that he later wrote his own poetic response (A Confession). In A Preface to Paradise Lost, published in 1942, Lewis argued that the role of poetry is to teach its readers proper reactions ("stock responses") to universal themes such as love, death, and virtue. He maintained that modern poets including Eliot have abandoned their responsibility to elicit "that elementary rectitude of human response," much to the detriment of contemporary society. Hoping to expose what he termed the "Eliotic" style, Lewis and several friends submitted nonsensical poems to The Criterion, the influential journal Eliot edited, but their poems were never accepted for publication. Not until 1958, when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited both men to serve on the Commission to Revise the Psalter, did they become friends. Indeed, Lewis developed a genuine liking for the man whose poetry he had so long reviled, Ironically, perhaps, Lewis's most personal work, A Grief Observed, was submitted to Faber and Faber in 1961, the publishing house where Eliot served as director. Although Lewis never fully appreciated Eliot's poetry, he recognized that their shared faith ultimately transcended their differences, observing, "I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial."

The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia

These words by T. S. Eliot remind me of C. S. Lewis's concept of chronological snobbery. Eliot would say we live in an age of chronological provincialism. We live in an age when the past is ignored or seen as inferior, an age of the Now, an age of live tweeting, an age when most people are chronological rednecks, people who can't imagine or even understand any time other than their own.

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the people on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism led to greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be more to be said for it; but it seems more likely to lead to our becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in matters which might be left to local or personal preference.

T. S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?"

The Ten Books that Influenced C. S. Lewis Most.

In Book V of Paradise Lost, Milton shows the supremacy of a hierarchical conception of the cosmos to the egalitarian conception. In the scene where Lucifer announces to his angels that he resents God's authority over them and plans to rebel, one of his sub-angels, Abdiel, remains loyal to God, and calls Lucifer out for rebellion.

Lucifer has claimed that he simply wants equality for all--but his motive is selfish. He wants to be equal with God. As a result, he falsely accuses God of being unjust in the way He rules His creatures. But Abdiel reminds Lucifer that hierarchy is simply a God-given reality. Authority begins with God himself, and all of us are creatures under authority. God has the right to rule:

     ... Unjust thou saist,
     Flatly unjust, to binde with Laws the free,
     And equal over equals to let Reigne,
     One over all with unsucceeded power. (ll. 818-21)

Abdiel asks Lucifer a penetrating question:

     Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute
     With him the points of libertie, who made
     Thee what thou art, & formd the Pow'rs of Heav'n
     Such as he pleasd, and circumscrib'd thir being? (ll. 818-25)

By the way, C. S. Lewis discusses this idea of hierarchy in A Preface to Paradise Lost in a passage I've commented on here.

People ask: "Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?": or "May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?" Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important, word.

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - "Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?" They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say 'deepening', the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to he a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

To take a break from paper grading with some light reading in the evenings, I've been reading White Whale, the second of Robert Seigel's Whalesong Trilogy. I read Whalesong, the first novel in the series, a couple years ago, and I absolutely loved it (my review for Redeemed Reader is here).

White Whale is a little over the top in preaching its Greenpeace environmentalism, but it's a great adventure story. It's like Moby Dick from the whale's perspective, and yet somehow Seigel uses this story to show us what it means to be a human being.

I don't know what it is, but these books just absolutely connect with me. Seigel writes novels like a poet, and there is an undercurrent of the Hero's Journey that gives his novels a great depth. It's hard to describe, but it's amazing.

Last night I came across a wonderful passage which almost perfectly describes sehnsucht:

It was sweet, the sweetest music I had ever heard, and it pulled on the deepest strings of desire. The longing was for--I don't know what--and for the longing itself one would give up any number of things. The song seemed to fulfill desire, until a new depth of desire opened under that one, so that the desiring was the having, yet the having was the desiring.

This passage reminded me of the writer who has described sehnsucht the best, C. S. Lewis. (In fact, I'm sure Seigel would have read Lewis, since he was a Wheaton graduate and a good friend of Dr. Clyde Kilby, author of several books on Lewis.) Sehnsucht is the topic of two of Lewis's books: Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim's Regress. In the Preface of the Regress, Lewis defines sehnsucht:

Though the sense of want is acute and even painful, ... the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. 'Oh to feel as I did then!' we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In George Sayer's biography of C. S. Lewis, Sayer discusses Lewis's contribution to The Oxford History of English Literature, in which Lewis discusses British writers of the sixteenth century. Over the years, this book has become a classic of literary scholarship. Sayer's summary of Lewis's views of Renaissance humanism, Calvinism, Tyndale, More, and Hooker is notable:

The study begins with a startling and controversial general survey. In the early part of the sixteenth century English poetry was dull, monotonous, and drab. Then suddenly it seemed reborn, and by the end of the century it was rich in fantasy, paradox, color, and incantation, just the qualities we find in the sonnets of Shakespeare. Literary historians before Jack had given credit for this to the Renaissance. He disagreed. The Renaissance in his view was brought about by the humanists. They recovered, edited, and wrote commentaries on the classics with an exaggerated concern for form, polish, and exactness of language. They killed Latin by refusing to let it develop and grow. They produced a literature remote from the senses and the soil. They hated the Middle Ages, particularly chivalrous romance and scholastic philosophy. Humanism was a Philistine movement. "The new learning created the new ignorance."

After his crusade against the humanists--and it amounted to that--Jack tells us that our view of the Puritans is wrong. The Protestant doctrine of salvation by grace is not gloomy or terrifying; it is joyous. The Puritans praised the marriage bed; it was the Catholics who exalted virginity. As for Calvin, his "was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. . . . The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings were likely to be Calvinists. He was a dazzling figure, a man born to be the idol of revolutionary intellectuals." All this and much more come in the first sixty pages. The controversy provoked by their brilliance has not yet died down.

The rest of the book consists of a review of all the major and many writers of the period. Over and over again we are swept away by his enthusiasms and the quotations he has found to illustrate them. There are new discoveries, such as Tyndale as a great prose writer. He quotes: "Where the spirit is there is always summer. Who taught the eagles to spy out their prey? Even so the children of God spy out their father. That they might see love and love again." In his comparison of Tyndale and More Jack writes: "In More we feel all the smoke and stir of London; the very plodding of his sentences is like horse traffic in the streets. In Tyndale we breathe mountain air." From Richard Hooker, another discovery, he does not quote much, "for very few of Hooker's beauties can be picked like flowers and taken home: you must enjoy them were they grow--as you would enjoy a twenty acre field of ripe wheat."

The figure of Aslan tells us more of how [C. S.] Lewis understood the nature of God more than anything else he wrote. It has all the hidden power and majesty and awesomeness which Lewis associated with God, but also the glory and the tenderness and even the humor which he believed belonged to him, so that children could run up to him and throw their arms around him.

Bede Griffiths, qtd. in Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, by George Sayer