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 Verona, Don Giovanni Calabria (1873-1954). In one of those letters, 5 January 1953, Lewis asks for prayers “about a work which I now have in hand. I am trying to write a book about private prayers for the use of the laity, especially for those who have been recently converted to the Christian faith and so far are without any sustained and regular habit of prayer. I tackled the job because I saw many no doubt very beautiful books written on this subject of prayer for the religious but few which instruct tiros and those still babes (so to say) in the Faith. I find many difficulties nor do I definitely know whether God wishes me to complete this task or not” (trans. Martin Moynihan). In March, he writes to him, “I am still working on my book on Prayer.”

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 15 February 1954, he writes, “I have had to abandon the book on prayer; it was clearly not for me.” A 45-page manuscript of this attempt has survived and is summarized by Walter Hooper in C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, pp. 378-80.

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, 22 April 1963, Lewis wrote, “I’ve finished a book on Prayer. Don’t know if it is any good.” On 16 May he told his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, that the book was being typed. After receiving and reading the typescript, Gibbs wrote to Lewis on 13 June: “Respect and admire you as I do, this Letters to Malcolm . . . has knocked me flat. Not quite; I can just sit up and shout hurrah, and again, hurrah. It’s the best you’ve done since The Problem of Pain.”

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 22 November 1963; the book was published in London two months later, 27 January 1964.

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., 11 November 1964). But Tolkien felt laypersons should not write books on theology and religious practice. As a Roman Catholic, he believed that should be left to priests. A reviewer in The Church Times, on the other hand, called it “as good as anything he ever wrote. . . . It is splendid, glorious stuff, the product of a luminous and original mind, tough and honest in facing the agonizing questions raised inevitably by any consideration of prayer, and yet endowed with an extraordinary sensitivity and tenderness for the fears and foibles of men” (31 January 1964, p. 5). In my book Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis (pp. 173-79), I argue that it is the most fully integrated of Lewis’s books on Christianity, illustrating a full reconciliation and unification of the reason he admired with the imagination he loved.

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 Oxford from 1918-1924, as it andlater books were becoming well known. Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, “The New Psychology was at that time sweeping through us all” and convincing Lewis that his romantic longings were only fantasies (chap. 13).

*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 Church of England Convocations and Church Assembly. However, since the Church of England is a state church, the revision also needed to be approved by Parliament, and the new prayerbook was rejected in December 1927. Further revisions were made in 1928, but this too was turned down by Parliament. Since then no further attempts have been made to revise the prayerbook. Attempts to update the prayerbook have employed a different process, of producing books that can be used instead of, or in addition to, The Book of Common Prayer, such as the Alternative Service Book (1980).

*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 5:16.

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 10 September 1951: “As I told you, I have a scrap book collected for use; a random collection of prayers in English and Latin, psalms or parts of psalms, and other things.”

*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 8:26 (“For we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us”).

*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 London from 1621 until his death. He is known for sensual, passionate love poetry as well as devout, thoughtful religious poetry and prose.

*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 10:31.

*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” – Saint Augustine (354-430), Christian Doctrine, “That man lives in justice and holiness who is an uncorrupted judge of things. He has an ordinate love and neither loves what he should not love, nor fails to love what he should love, or loves one thing more than he should, nor loves two things equally that deserve different loves, nor loves differently two things that deserve equal loves. Every sinner, insofar as he is a sinner, is not to be loved; but every man, insofar as he is a man, is to be loved on account of god. God is to be loved on account of himself” (1.27.28).

*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 12:24 (“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”).

*Paragraph 14, “things requisite and necessary . . .” – From the Order for Evening Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer.

*Paragraph 14, Burnaby – John Burnaby, “Christian Prayer,” in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, ed. A. R. Vidler (1962): “For the present we need only note the complete simplicity or naïveté with which the Apostolic Church did its praying. To make ‘in everything’ our requests known to God was for St Paul the cure for all worldly worry” (p. 224).

*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” – St. Augustine, Confessions, 10.27: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness” (trans. Henry Chadwick).

*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, Cambridge, and Canon of Windsor. He was a long-time editor of Theology. In 1962 he published a collection of essays, Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, mostly by Cambridge theologians, which expressed the need for some major reassessments of Christian beliefs in the light of the impact of secularization and contemporary philosophy. Vidler’s essay in Soundings, “Religion and the National Church,” argues that the church is not a religious organization, but an embodiment of Christian community which should be kept as free as possible from the domination of organizers and legalizers.

*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, London, and he was asked to resign from his position as Professor of Theology. He was later appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University.

*Paragraph 2, Bonhoeffer – Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German theologian. He was a leader of the Confessing Church in Germany that openly declared opposition to Nazism, and was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, for which he was imprisoned for two years and executed a few weeks before the end of World War II. The letters he wrote from prison were edited by Eberhard Bethge and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft (English translation, Letters and Papers from Prison, by Reginald H. Fuller, 1953).

*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 National Church,” Soundings, 262).

*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 National Church,” p. 254.

*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 Gethsemane made a petitionary prayer – Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42.

*Paragraph 2, “nevertheless, not my will but thine” – Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42.

*Paragraph 2, The servant is not greater – John 13:16, 15:20

*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 Highland articles.

*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, Burnaby – For Burnaby, see the note to Letter 5, paragraph 14. Lewis refers here to the following sentence: “The thoughtful Christian . . . will have learnt to take for granted the observable uniformities of the natural world, and to attribute the unpredictable character of human history to the existence in men of a real power of deliberate choice and effective action” (“Christian Prayer,” Soundings, ed. Vidler, p. 225).

*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 Arnold” occurs in the final chapter of Ethical Studies, “Concluding Remarks,” where Bradley disputes Arnold’s claim that it is “verifiable” that virtue always leads to and goes with happiness.

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 Gethsemane – See note to Letter 7, paragraph 1.

*Paragraph 6, Isaac had been spared – Genesis 22:1-14.

*Paragraph 8, an angel appeared “comforting” him – Luke 22:43.

*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 14:37; Luke 22:45. “The prayer recorded in Matthew is much too short to be long enough for the disciples to go to sleep! They record the bit they heard before they fell asleep” (Letters, 23 February 1947).

*Paragraph 3, astonished St. Augustine was – Augustine, Confessions 6.3: “When he [Ambrose] was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent” (trans. Henry Chadwick).

*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 2:12.

*Paragraph 11, Pelagianism – Pelagius, British monk living in Rome (360?-420?), denied original sin and believed in freedom of the will, in opposition to the positions of St. Augustine.

*Paragraph 11, “For it is God who worketh in you” – Philippians 2:13.

*Paragraph 11, Augustinianism – St. Augustine (354-430) held that humanity was corrupt and helpless, totally dependent on God’s grace.

*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 3:25 (“For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me”).

*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 Mount Carmel, Dark Night of the Soul, and the Spiritual Canticle of the Soul.

*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 4 April 1934 (see Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 137).

*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, “Arnold speaks of us as ‘enisled’” – Matthew Arnold, English poet (1822-88), in his poem “To Marguerite” (1852), line 1.

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 County Westmeath, about fifty miles west of Dublin. A priory was founded there in 1227; it is now a thriving commercial center for the surrounding area.

*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 Victoria’s reign in England (1837-1901). Lewis’s point is that such revivals do not embody the full dimensions of the original movement.

*Paragraph 4, St. François de Sales – St. François de Sales (1567–1622) was a French priest who became Roman Catholic bishop of Geneva in 1602 and was active in the struggle against Calvinism. His best known publication is Introduction to a Devout Life, which teaches that spiritual perfection is possible for people involved in the affairs of the world and not only for those who withdraw from society. He was canonized in 1665.

*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 U. S. edition of Letters to Malcolm).

* Paragraph 3, people of our type – Here, people oriented to think philosophically.

*Paragraph 6, St. Ignatius Loyola – Inigo de Loyola was born in Spain in 1491 and died in Rome in 1556. He was founder of the Society of Jesus, which came to be known as the Jesuits and was particularly important for founding schools and fostering education. His teachings included Spiritual Exercises for the mind, memory, will, and imagination. Analogous to running and swimming for the physical improvement of the body, these exercises of the spiritual faculties would enable one to find the divine will and to conform one’s will to the will of God.

*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 Forest of Dean – one of England’s few remaining ancient forests, it lies between the rivers Wye and Severn in western Gloucestershire, on the border of Wales.

*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 16:11 (“In thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”).

*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 Golgotha, along which Jesus Christ walked on his way to be crucified. The name via crucis dates from the sixteenth century.

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 1:20 (“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteous of God”).

*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 Oxford whose car Lewis frequently used for transportation within Oxford and between Oxford and Cambridge or London. Morris has written, “I also was instrumental in introducing him to the works of the great Alexander Whyte, the famous Puritan preacher of Free St. George’s, Edinburgh” (“A Christian Gentleman,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James Como, p.198).

*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 3:13.

*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 England rejected the Catholic practice of praying for the delivery of the dead from the suffering their souls endured in Purgatory. But praying for the rest and refreshment of the souls of the faithful is part of ancient Christian practice, and has continued among Anglican believers. The Catechism of the Episcopal Church (in The Book of Common Prayer, U.S., p. 862) includes the question “Why do we pray for the dead?” The answer given is, “We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.”

*Paragraph 3, At our age – Lewis was 63-64 when he wrote this book. He died 22 November 1963, a week before his 65th birthday. This book was published two months later.

*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 22:36-40, expanding upon Deuteronomy 6:5).

*Paragraph 12, “Ye must be born again” – John 3:7.

*Paragraph 12, as St. Paul says – Galatians 3:24.

*Paragraph 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. Milton’s heaven, in Paradise Lost, is shown mostly during the preparation for the war against Satan and his followers and during the war itself, and thus is depicted in militaristic terms.

*Paragraph 13, to pick up an earlier point – See Letter 17, paragraphs 16-17.

*Paragraph 15, the longer one’s prayers take – See the note above, to page 113, paragraph 2.

*Paragraph 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.”

*Paragraph 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.

*Paragraph 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 12:28-31)? What does Lewis mean by rephrasing it as “Ye must be born again” (p. 115)?

--What do Lewis, and St. Paul, mean by saying the Law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ?--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, St. Paul’s words imply – See I Corinthians 15:42-57 (“It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body”).

*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 England,” eternal, unchanging, and “in that inner England no good thing is destroyed” (chap. 16).

*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 Battle.

*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?