Quotations and Allusions to C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Quotations and Allusions to C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

compiled by Arend Smilde, Utrecht, TheNetherlands

C. S. Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer was published posthumously in 1964. Like most of his books, it contains a great number of allusions to often unspecified sources, including literal quotations. It is perhaps never vitally important to know these sources; yet tracing them can be a rewarding enterprise. What follows is a listing by chapter of many such words and phrases with brief references to what I have found to be their sources and, occasionally, notes suggesting their relevance to the context in which Lewis uses them. I have also included a few other items where a short explanation may be useful to some readers. I have tried to serve a worldwide public of all educational levels and invite every user to kindly skip those details or explanations which seem superfluous. Double question marks in bold type – ?? – indicate my failure to find the information I wanted to give. Corrections and additions including proposed new entries are welcome.

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the Republic:One of the main works of the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 b.c.); its theme may be very briefly described as Virtue and Justice. There is much variation in the way the Greek title, Politeia, is rendered in different languages and even within some single languages – or indeed between different editions of the same translation. Thus in Dutch the book has been published as De Staat, Constitutie, Het bestel (i.e. ‘The System’) and also as Politeia.

the Grail:In Arthurian legend, the Grail or Graal is a mysterious object of great significance and infinite value, often conceived to be a bowl or chalice.

“’Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god”:Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida II.2. “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god.”

Feed my sheep:Gospel of John 21:15–17 (Christ speaking to Simon Peter).

habito dell’arte:“The practice of [one’s] art”. Dante, Paradiso XIII, 78. “Ma la natura la dà sempre la scema, / Similemente operando all’ artista, / Ch’ ha l’ abito dell’ arte e man che trema.” (“But nature always gives it defective, working like the artist who has the practice of his art and a hand that trembles.”) Habito is just possibly a variant spelling of abito, but more likely it is a typo or writing error.

“every one to his own way”:Isaiah 53:6. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

a new Book:i.e. a new manual of church services for the Church of England, replacing the Book of Common Prayer which was introduced in 1662. The Alternative Service Book (ASB) was introduced in 1982.

“truly and indifferently administer justice”:From the Book of Common Prayer, “The order for the administration of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion” (i.e. the Offertory); a prayer “for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth”. “And grant unto her [i.e. the Queen’s] whole Council, and to all that are put in authority under her, that they may truly and indifferently administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of true religion, and virtue.”

Cranmer:Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), principal author of the Book of Common Prayer. As Archbishop of Canterbury he was a very loyal servant of Henry VIII; after the accession of Mary Tudor he more than once recanted his long-time support for the Reformation but in the end withdrew these recantations and was burnt at the stake for heresy. “Like many figures of the Reformation, Cranmer would seem to belong to history rather than literature. But his influence was considerable and the majestic language of The Book of Common Prayer is also an object lesson in precision and economy” (Michael Stapleton, Cambridge Guide to English Literature, 1983).

“Let your light so shine before men”:Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” In the Book of Common Prayer, this is the first of a series of “Sentences” (i.e. Bible passages) in the Offertory, to be read while “the Alms for the Poor, and other devotions of the people” are received “in a decent bason to be provided by the Parish for that purpose.”

that they may be seen by men:Matthew 6:5. “They [the hypocrites] love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” This passage in the Sermon on the Mount is preceded by similar admonitions about alms-giving, and leads up to the Lord’s Prayer.

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the Imitation:i.e. The Imitation of Christ, or De imitatione Christi, an early-15th-century devotional tract by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471). It is unclear which passage Lewis had in mind; he may have been imperfectly remembering passages in Book I.10, De cavenda superfluitate verborum,“Of avoiding superfluity of words”, e.g. “We very willingly talk and think of such things as we most love and desire, or which we imagine contrary to us ... If it be lawful and expedient to speak, speak those things which may edify.” – ??

Rose Macaulay:English novelist, essayist and travel writer (1881–1958).

objets d’art:(French) “object of art”; any small man-made thing that is cherished for its beauty.

Pascal, “Error of Stoicism”:Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Pensées, No. 350 (Brunschvicg edition).

Solomon said ... each man who prays knows “the plague of his own heart”:I Kings 8:38.

“sound doctrine”:From Paul’s epistles to Timothy and to Titus, here especially II Tim. 4:3 and Titus 1:9.

“the faith once given”:Epistle of Jude, 3; cf. first note to Letter 22, below.

“what things I ought to ask”: Lewis might have been thinking here of the phrase in Romans 8:26, “we know not what we should pray for as we ought...”

Petrarch or Donne:The Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) and the English poet John Donne (1573–1631) are both chiefly famed for their love poetry.

“the Wholly Other”:An ancient theological term of unknown origin (??). The original Latin phrase is totaliter aliter and has been variously used to describe God as well as Heaven or the afterlife in general. The great twentieth-century champion of the idea of God’s total otherness was the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), but it was also affirmed by Rudolf Bultmann (cf. second note to chapter 10, below).

However, Lewis may also have been thinking here of a passage in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (part three, section four): “Of course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the sef-evident, nearer to me than my I.” But in so far as Lewis later on develops Buber’s view, he takes his cue from his friends Owen Barfield and Charles Williams rather than from Buber (cf. note to chapter 14, below, “This also is Thou” etc.). All the same, it is interesting to note that Buber’s original German reads “das ganz Andere” not “der ganz Andere”, i.e. “something different”, not “someone different”.

“I fell at His feet as one dead”:Revelation 1:17. “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the last.”

“low” church milieu:i.e. those people within the Anglican Church who are the most explicitly Protestant or Evangelical, and the least inclined to assimilate Roman Catholic teachings or liturgical forms.

Sion:In the Old Testament, Sion or Zion is often used as an alternative name for Jerusalem; in the New Testament and afterwards it came to function as a name for “the Heavenly Jerusalem” or, simply, Heaven.

the great apostles ... affected him [Dante] like mountains:Dante, Paradiso XXV.38, “...ond’ io levai gli occhi ai monti, / Che gl’ incurvaron pria col troppo pondo” – “Wherefore mine eyes I lifted to the hills, / Which bent them down before with too great weight” (transl. Longfellow). Dante is thinking primarily of the three apostles Peter, James and John as representatives of Faith (Canto XXIV), Hope (XXV) and Charity (XXVI) respectively. In the present Canto it is thus the apostle James who is really “starring”: his encouraging words in the preceding stanza (“Leva la testa” etc.) have caused Dante to lift his eyes. The Italian phrase is of course very close to Psalm 121:1 in Latin, Levavi oculos meos in montes etc., “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”; but the Medieval idea to think of these mountains as apostles, or of the apostles as mountains, was perhaps more readily drawn from places like Psalm 87:1 and Matthew 5:14.

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a Manichaean:Manichaeans were, originally, the followers of a third-century Persian prophet called Mani. His teachings were based on the idea that the universe is basically composed of two equally strong and eternally competing elements, Good and Evil.

“whether we eat or drink”:cf. I Corinthians 10:31.

the poor Bishop of Woolwich:i.e. John A. T. Robinson (1919–1983), Anglican bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969. His book Honest to God was published on 19 March 1963 after a summary under the title “Our Image of God Must Go” had been published in the Sunday newspaper The Observer on 17 March. A reply from C. S. Lewis – “Must Our Image of God Go?” – followed on 24 March and was soon reprinted in a collection of various replies to Robinson published as The Honest to God Debate (1963). Lewis’s piece was later reprinted again in various posthumous collections of his essays. It was during this time, March and April 1963, that Lewis wrote Letters to Malcolm.

Aphrodite:ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty; the Romans called her Venus.

“With angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”:Hymn of Praise to conclude the “Proper Prefaces”, i.e. prayers immediately preceding the Communion, 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. Amen.”

“work is prayer”:A common inversion of the Latin phrase, ora et labora, “pray and work”. The latter maxim is sometimes attributed to St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine monastic order; but its real origin may be a nineteenth-century popular book on Benedictine life written by a German abbot called Maurus Wolter.

oratio:(Latin) prayer.

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“making your requests known to God”:Philippians 4:6. “Let your request be made known to God.”

“for your heavenly Father knows you need all these things”:Matthew 6:31–32. “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (...) For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.”“”

“freedom is willed necessity”:??

it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry “Father”:Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6.

Buber:Martin Buber (1878–1965), German-Jewish philosopher of religion; author of Ich und Du (1923), which was published in English as Iand Thou in 1937. See note to chapter 2, above, on “the Wholly Other”.

“Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou”:cf. note to “This also is Thou” etc. in chapter 14, below.

what old writers call our “frame”; that is, our “frame of mind”: The Oxford English Dictionary (i.v. Frame sb. II.6) “Mental or emotional dispotition or state (more explicitly, frame of mind, soul etc.)” One example comes from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), “In this thankful frame I continued”. The word, or phrase, appears to have acquired this meaning in the second half of the seventeenth century.

St. Augustine ... “ordinate loves”:The City of God XV.22. “So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love...” The original Latin runs “Unde mihi videtur, quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est amoris”; thus the original phrase is ordo amoris. When Lewis used it twenty years earlier in The Abolition of Man (ch. 1, note 11), he gave a precise reference and indeed mentioned two other places in De civitate Dei (IX.5 and XI.28) where the same idea is expressed.

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Queen Victoria didn’t like “being talked to as if she were a public meeting”:The British queen Victoria (r. 1831–1901) is reputed to have said this – “he speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting” – with reference to her conversations with William Gladstone, one of Great Britain’s famous prime ministers during her reign. The alleged quotation appears in G. E. W. Russell’s Collections and Recollections (1898), chapter XIV, where it is in fact pointed out how unlikely it is that Gladstone should ever have behaved uncivilly towards the Queen.

“the same mind which was also in Christ”:Philippians 2:5.

Lycidas:A poem of John Milton, on the early death of a friend who perished at sea (1637).

“Unless a seed die...”:John 12:24. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

“things requisite and necessary as well for the body as for the soul”:Book of Common Prayer, “Morning Prayer”; opening address after the first Sentences. “Dearly beloved brethren ... although we ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God; yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul...”

what Burnaby calls the naïf view of prayer:Lewis is referring to an essay Soundings,a book he mentions in the next two chapters (see notes there). John Burnaby, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Regius Professor Emeritus of Divinity, contributed an essay on “Christian Prayer”. He argued that “a Christian theology of prayer must be grounded not on metaphysical assumptions but on the nature of the Gospel” so that, if we understand “God’s saving work as the work of love, taking effect through men who are untied to God by the Spirit of Christ”, then prayer ought to be seen as “affirmation of this union, not appeal for God’s action conceived as separate from all that man can do” (Soundings, p. 220, “Synopsis”).

The idea of “naïvety” appears in the following passage (pp. 223–224): “All the evidence of the Acts and the Epistles goes to show that prayer in the primitive Church was what we should expect it to have been – in St Paul’s words, the making of our requests known to God, requests which there was no thought of confining to ‘spiritual’ blessings (...) This at least was what the erly Church meant by proseuché, though we can be sure that thanksgiving and praise had their due place in its devotions. (...) For the present we need only not 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 (...) and no more for Paul than for Jesus himself was the belief that the Father knoweth what things we have need of, before we ask, the least discouragement to prayer.”

Juvenal ... numinibus vota exaudita malignis:From Satire X, 111, by the Roman author Juvenal (c.60–140). Lewis quoted this same line in his essay “Petitionary Prayer: A problem without an answer” (1953).

de jure :(Latin) according to law, by right, legally.

de facto : (Latin) according to the deed, whether legally recognized or not.

“beauty so old and new”:Augustine, Confessions X.27 (38).

“light from behind the sun”:from “The Calling of Taliessin”, a poem in The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) by Charles Williams. “In a light that shone from behind the sun; the sun / was not so fierce as to pierce where that light could”. Lewis quoted these lines as his motto for chapter XIV, “The Grand Miracle”, in his book Miracles (1947).

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Vidler:Alec R. Vidler (1899–1991), Anglican theologian, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

the programme which created all that scandal:A television programme on Sunday 4 November 1962, mentioned by John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich (see note to chapter 3, above) in the preface of his book Honest to God: “I believe, regretfully, that Dr Alec Vidler’s conclusion in a recent broadcast, which was bitterly attacked, is only too true: ‘We’ve got a very big leeway to make up, because there’s been so much suppression of real, deep thought and intellectual alertness and integrity in Church.’”

Soundings:This book, subtitled Essays concerning Christian understanding and edited by Vidler (see notes above), was published in 1962. After four reprints a paperback edition appeared in 1966. In the introduction Vidler placed the book in an Anglican tradition that includes Essays and Reviews (1860), Lux Mundi (1889), Foundations (1912) and Essays Catholic and Critical (1926). He defined the task of the present group of authors as “to try to see what the questions are that we ought to be facing in the nineteen-sixties.” Soundings contains eleven essays by nine Anglican theologians, most of them from Cambridge: John Burnaby (mentioned by Lewis in chapter 5, above, and chapter 7, below), J. S. Habgood, G. W. H. Lampe, Hugh Montefiore, Howard Root, J. N. Sanders, Ninian Smart, H. A. Williams, G. F. Woods and the editor. Afterwards Vidler wrote about the backgrounds and effects of both Soundings and Honest to God in a little book published in 1965, 20th Century Defenders of the Faith, chapter 5, “Christian Radicalism”.