Transcript
Hey, well this is a great honor to talk on one of my favorite, one of my favorite, the
influences you might say in my life or mentors that I've had.
I never met him personally.
I wish I had.
By the way, anybody in this room ever meet CS Lewis personally, or are you curious?
Well, I, of course, wanted to put him and be very grateful for his fondness.
Yeah.
So, as, I mean, when she was a girl, she wrote to me.
She was in the University of writing a paper on him, she wrote, and he sent some ideas back.
You know, that is, that is very interesting, Rob, because I have, I gave a speech, similar to the one I'm going to give you now,
talk at Regent College on CS Lewis, and just in the question answered period afterward, I just asked,
because Lewis was a prolific letter writer.
He hated to write letters, but every more, because his, he had a, his, his thumb.
Write thumb was not, well, something congenital, congenitally wrong with his thumb, so it was always painful to write.
Yet, he always wrote everything longhand, and he wrote these letters every morning for two hours to people
and answering their letters.
And he faithfully answered every letter that was ever written, who up till literally two or three days before he died.
And so I just asked this audience, there were about 800 people there, I said, just for the fun of it,
is anyone here ever received a letter from CS Lewis, and four people stood up.
This is in Vancouver, Canada, and it turns out they all had written as kids in connection with doing papers at school,
and Lewis answered their letters.
So, I mean, it's just one of those things that you, now here I run to somebody else who had the same experience.
Well, let me tell you about him, he's quite a guy, and I want to come at his life in sort of a special way here in a few moments.
Just a few vital statistics that maybe some of you probably know, maybe some of you don't know.
He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, November 29, 1898.
Now, that will give you his, or early date.
His brother and his closest friend was Warren, and his only brother, who was three and a half years older.
So, I should say a word about Warren Lewis, who was a military man, and a career military man left the British Army as a major,
and was a writer in his own right, wrote a lot of books on military history, and he never married, and he lived with Lewis,
a great part of their adult life together, so they were not only brothers, but they were very close friends.
The first 10 years of Lewis's life was very carefree, and really a thoroughly happy time in his life, that was the years when his mother was still alive.
She, evidently, was a very, very outgoing and warm, affectionate person, just the opposite of her husband, who was quite a severe and sort of unhappy man, but a good man.
But, in fact, some of the most interesting correspondence we have of Lewis, is correspondence between his brother about his dad.
This strange sort of lawyer, who was his father, but the mother was very warm, and these will be interesting facts, I think, in later understanding the way Lewis wrote.
Then, the first catastrophic experience in Lewis's life was when he was only nine or ten years old, and his mother died.
After about a one-year illness, a very sad illness, you see hints of this in his book, Magician's nephew, where there's the sick mother, and the child always watches this mother in the room, and all the hushed whispers when they're near her room, and she's dying.
But she died, and then it was a very unhappy period of Lewis's life, because on the one hand, you have this warm, spontaneous mother,
and the severe and withdrawn father. In fact, in this book, Letters of C.S. Lewis, Warren Lewis has an incredible memoir at the beginning with a description of his father, which may give you some clues to some of the father figures that appear in Lewis's novels.
He tells about the many happy holidays they had when their mother was still alive down to beach.
But the first, he says, of my father, my memories of my father are my father's gloomy detachment. This is the way Warren describes his father.
He would sometimes come down for the weekend, but he never stayed with his wife and children throughout the summer holiday.
Urgent business was his excuse. He was a solicitor, quite a prominent lawyer, I guess, in his own right.
And he may have also felt that 11 months of our company every year was more than enough. It may have gone deeper than that.
I never met him. Here's a listen to this line. I never met a man more wedded to a dull routine, or less capable of extracting enjoyment from life. What a description of a father.
A night spent out of his own home was penance to him, a holiday he loathed, having not the faintest conception of how to amuse himself.
I can still see him on his occasional visit to the seaside, walking moodily up and down the beach, hands in trouser pockets, eyes on the ground, every now and then giving a heart-rending yawn, and pulling out his watch.
That's Lewis's father. With that kind of childhood, you can see why Lewis and his brothers spent so much time in the attic of their house, called Lee, House Great Lee in Belfast, and created their own empire, in their own world, their box and empire inside the house.
Anyway, after the death of his mother, Lewis's father felt that he had to send both his boys away to prep schools, the English public schools, which were boarding schools for boys.
And these, if you've read Surprised By Joy, Lewis in great detail tells of the excruciating unhappiness of this period of his life, as he was sent off to a first one school where the headmaster was a sadist, actually, and ended up in an insane asylum, and actually whipped the boys, and that was a very bad scar on Lewis's memory.
And then the finally pleading with his father to move him, and he moved to another school, and then finally not happy in that school.
And then finally, when he's in his early teens, his dad then relents and sends him to a private tutor for his, you might say, those critical years of 15, 16, 17.
And the private tutor, if you've read Surprised By Joy, is a very important influence in Lewis's life, a man named Kirkpatrick, Mr. Kirkpatrick, Lewis goes to study with his private tutor, and with Kirkpatrick, Lewis loses his faith.
Now, it sounds terrible, but don't feel too badly about it, because he probably didn't lose too much, because he had his sort of Presbyterian upbringing with his father.
But the father's faith was so severe and so stolid.
His dad was a kind of man that when the boys would come home from prep school, here he had these two very bright boys.
He would start a conversation, and they would start to speak, and then he would interrupt them after a few moments and say, yes, I see it all clearly now.
That was his famous statement. But of course, he never did see it clearly. He just interrupted the boys, and then he would pontificate for the next 20 minutes, and then that would be the end of the conversation.
And so, on any matter of faith or any other question the boys had, they would start a discussion with their father,
he would stop it in about five minutes saying, yes, I see it all clearly now, and then he would give the answer.
So, Lewis under Kirkpatrick had a mentor who taught him to think, and Kirkpatrick must have been a remarkable man, because he really gave Lewis that razor sharp critical edge, which I think is so critical,
or so important in understanding Lewis later as a writer. Kirkpatrick would stand for no nonsense at all.
He taught him how to think, and he taught him how to think with that razor sharp questioning mind, and also he persuaded him to be an atheist too.
And if you're interested in all of this period of Lewis's life, the best book, I can recommend, is the big volume that's just come out called They Stand Together, which is the book about the correspondence between C.S. Lewis and his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves.
Arthur Greeves was the boyhood friend of Lewis's, lived across the street in Belfast. Interestingly enough, the son of a Plymouth Brethren family.
The extreme fundamentalist family, his father could not endure the father of Arthur Greeves, because he was too fundamentalist, and then here's Lewis's father, who's too stuffy, and the two boys have something in common, they both dislike their fathers, and they start a correspondence, which goes on through their entire life.
And in the early period, you see in that correspondence, Lewis arguing with Greeves, in fact some of the most eloquent arguments against the Christian faith come, they're a little bit, they're heavy-handed to be sure, but they're Lewis arguing with Greeves in this period of 16, 17, and 18 years of age, about how much nonsense he feels Christianity is, and Greeves, we don't have Greeves's letters in the they stand together volume.
But Lewis is such a good letter writer, that he always recounts the argument of the person he writes to, and describes what he saw that person write, so that you don't even need Greeves's letters, because Lewis, always in every letter, restates what Greeves had said.
And then these letters with Greeves continue all the way up until, really about two weeks before Lewis died.
And the irony of the two men is that in this early period, when Greeves is still the Christian, trying to argue with Lewis, then in 1931, when Lewis becomes a Christian, then Greeves begins to lose interest in Christianity, and then the letters shift, and now for the rest of the letters, Lewis is trying to win Greeves back to Christianity, as Greeves drifts off into Baha'i and Rosicrucianism, and finally just sort of the wastelands of nothing.
And so you see Lewis still holding on to this friend, trying to convince him, but they have, so they just have literally that kind of a journey together.
And that is a very interesting book to read, they stand together, gives you some great insights in Lewis's conversion, because it's in that letter where he tells about his long night talk with JRR Tolkien, I'll come to that in a minute.
So anyway, with Kirkpatrick, he lost his faith, he almost became a communist at that time, then the war came out, and he was drafted into the war, this was World War One, he goes to the French front, he makes a friend there who is a young man that his name is Moore, Patty Moore, who is a very good friend of his.
Lewis had a capacity to make very good friends, Patty Moore though was killed in the war, and Lewis was wounded, and he came back to London, and in London then, he's in the hospital, he decides to reestablish his relationship with his father, and he writes all these pathetic letters to his father saying, I've been a very bad son, I repent now, I want to be a good son, thank you, please come and see me, and his dad doesn't come.
So then he writes another letter saying, I wish you'd come and see me, in fact the people in the hospital are making jokes now, and they think you're a figment of my imagination, that letter is in this book, and still his father doesn't come.
Would you believe it, Lewis was in that hospital for six months, and his dad never made that simple trip across the English Channel, I mean across the little channel from Ireland, Northern Ireland, to come over and see his wounded son in the hospital.
When this happened, something died in Lewis toward his father, and this will explain why he adopted Mrs. Moore, the mother of Patty Moore, his best friend in France.
It's almost as if he felt now Mrs. Moore had no son anymore, I must be her son, he had to have somebody, and Lewis started that strange relationship that some people have criticized him for, but they're really people who don't understand it.
Lewis, in effect, became like a son to Mrs. Moore, and he took care of the rest of his life, of her life.
And she was an insufferable woman, Warren Lewis has nothing good to say about her in this book.
He hated her, she had, she was bossy, she never read a book in her life, she never read anything Lewis wrote, she never cared, she was angry and cantankerous, and Lewis took care of her dutifully toward the end of her life, she lost her mind in the last four years of her life,
she was completely without her mind, and yet Lewis put her in a hospital, paid for her care, and went to see her every single week till the day she died.
Isn't that incredible? It's almost as if he borrowed her as a mother, and then he decided to stick with her, and actually she stayed in his home until he took care of her all the time he was at Oxford.
And he and his father were later reconciled before his father died, but there was still something that was lost, as you can imagine.
He then went to Oxford, and he had, he went into Oxford as a brilliant scholar, in fact he went in with what is considered by Oxford standards quite unprecedented in three honors programs, he was a three honors student, which is really amazing.
In the field of philosophy and literature and history, so then he at Oxford did his honors in mainly medieval literature and medievalist, after graduate from Oxford he became a tutor at Oxford, and while he was at Oxford, a whole series of new influences began to come in his life.
And I'm going to, these are really, these, they might say the culmination of his Christian influences, I should mention one Christian influence, so the came into his life before Oxford, it's very important.
And that was, when he was 16 years old, he was in a train station in London, and he picked up a book by George MacDonald called Phantastes, and he writes to his friend Arthur Greeves, I have just read the greatest book in my life.
And that was a Christian book, but Lewis of course was not a Christian, but that book made an indelible mark, and he wrote to Greeves, and there's several letters to Greeves, because Greeves never buys the book, and he keeps scolding him, you must get this book, it's the best book.
And so Lewis, you can just see the beginnings of the Christian influence in Lewis with the picking up of that book.
Then he went to Oxford, and Lewis was very interested from his early childhood in fantasy stories, and folk stories, especially what he says of the northern kind.
He loved stories having to do with northern folk stories, and he had a whole series of favorite authors, and he and Arthur Greeves, that was their big thing they had in common, so they were sort of dungeons and dragons kids of that period, and that was the dungeons and dragons he was interested in, the northern folk stories.
Well, when he got to Oxford, he finally found his mentor, who was also interested in northern stories, and it was a man who was professor of philology, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Now this man now is going to play a key role in Lewis's life. J.R.R. Tolkien was older than Lewis, and was also very interested in northern folk stories, especially Icelandic ones.
So he had an Icelandic, now you aren't going to believe this, but it's true, he had an Icelandic folk story study group, and since Tolkien was a philologist, he insisted that everybody that came to that group had to learn the Icelandic language.
Can you believe it? So they could read these stories in Icelandic, and he wouldn't allow any cheating, you couldn't crib sheet and have a little crib sheet of Icelandic words in front of you, because he insisted on this.
And so Lewis learned the Icelandic language just so he could be in that group, and in that group he met Tolkien, and that's where they studied about the orcs, which later come into the Lord of the Rings, and a lot of these Icelandic mythological figures, and Lewis was now in that group.
And by the way, he's still very much a non-Christian during this period, he writes a whole series of poems under pseudonyms, his first book of non-Christian poems were written under the name Clive Hamilton, which you see is a little play in his own name, his name is Clive, and his mother's name was Hamilton, so he took the two names, and wrote this first set of poems that were very bitter poems.
And then he wrote his famous Dymer poems, which are also very bitter anti-Christian poems during this period in Oxford, but all the time he's doing this, there are things that are whittling away at his anti-Christian, you might say, as atheism.
Finally, through conversations with his good friend Owen Barfield, who's also a friend he's made Oxford, he begins to finally conclude that there must be a God, and if you can read about this in Surprised By Joy, where he says, I was the most unwilling convert in all of England, I was drugged by my heels, to finally accepting that there was a God, but still he could not accept the deity of Christ.
And so he, in the folk group, in the study group with Tolkien, and now being persuaded by what Owen Barfield that there is a God, he continues in this journey for a while, and then one night he has a great conversation with a man named Dyson and Tolkien, in which Tolkien proposes a thesis to Lewis, that in all of life there is the need and fantasy stories for a catastrophe, all fantasy stories surround, move around a catastrophe.
The sense of catastrophe. And in every good fantasy story, there must be a eucatastrophe, that's Tolkien's coined word, a good catastrophe.
And Tolkien then made the point with Lewis that Jesus Christ is like all these mythological characters that we've been studying, he says, in these fantasy stories you so love.
In fact, these stories you so love are really about catastrophe. But he said, he's the good catastrophe of all time, the only difference is he's true. It's the true catastrophe.
And Tolkien was able to convince Lewis that night of the reality of Jesus Christ, so that the next day on a motorcycle ride with his brother to Whipsnade Zoo, he tells this in Surprised By Joy, he says, at the beginning of the motorcycle ride, and this is an actual quotation from his letter to Arthur Greeves, you can find it in the Arthur Greeves letters.
I found this, I was so excited when I found this actual quotation and there are those letters. In fact, I found those letters before they were published when I was at the Wheaton Wade Collection, I read those letters in their collection, and I found this quotation was fun to find it, because it's also in Surprised By Joy.
He said, on a motorcycle ride from Whipsnade Zoo, in the side car of my brother's motorcycle, at the beginning of the ride, I did not believe in the deity of Christ. And at the end of the ride, I believed in the deity of Christ.
And nothing happened on the ride, but the long talk with Dyson and Tolkien had much to do with it. That's the actual quotation. That was to talk the night before.
So the next morning, the pieces of the puzzle came together, and that's all the help he gives us, is that finally it came together for him that Jesus Christ was indeed the divine Son of God.
He never wavered from that conviction. There are many theological things that were fluxed in flux in his life, but that was one anchor in his life that never wavered for the rest of his career.
So now, in 1931, he's now become a Christian, he comes out of the closet, he might say immediately, by writing a book. In fact, this is so funny in light of a line that he puts in Screwtape Letters, where he says, where Screwtape says, the best way to, well, if I can find that, I wish I could find, let me see if I can find that quotation.
And it'll make, it's kind of funny in light of it, Lewis. Oh, dear, I'm not sure I can find it. I think it's chapter 13 where the patient becomes a, it has a, you know, conversion experience, you might say. And then, oh, yes, here it is.
Oh, yes, here it is. It remains to consider now a Screwtape, speaking how we can retrieve this disaster of the person who's just had, you know, this conversion.
The great thing is to prevent him from doing anything as long as he does not convert into action. It doesn't matter how long he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it.
Let him, if he has a bent that way, write a book about it. That is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds, which is the enemy plants in a human soul.
Well, maybe Lewis wrote that from experience because the first thing he did after he became a Christian was to write a book about it.
And it's a book that was a disaster. It's called Pilgrim's Regress. It's really a great book. In some people, it's controversial.
Lewis regretted having written that book. He should have because that book caused him no undue amount of pain for the rest of his life.
But right away, after becoming a Christian, he felt, I must write a book about my Christianity. And so he wrote Pilgrim's Regress. How many of you read Pilgrim's Regress?
Well, you have, Arch, you have him? Well, I thought your hand was up. You just hold your door.
Well, Pilgrim's Regress, you certainly should read it because it's the early Lewis. It's very sophomoric.
I don't want to make, I hope no sophomorics here are offended. But it's very sophomoric book in that it's heroes are too heroic and its villains are too villainous.
I mean, and every professor at Oxford saw themselves in that book for sure. And Lewis is so hard on everybody in that book.
And he makes his heroes too heroic and his villains too villainous. That's really the book. It has none of a subtly that was later the mark of Lewis.
It was just a big heavy meat cleaver, battering, sort of like Francis Schaeffer's last book, just battering, battering everybody.
And so you wrote that book and I want to tell you something that's very interesting about that book. Lewis never received a professor ship at Oxford because of that book.
If you want the whole story of that, read the book The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter who is the official biographer of JR Tolkien.
And he tells the whole story three times Tolkien proposed Lewis to be professor of medieval literature and three times he was defeated in a vote by the faculty.
They never forgave him for writing that book. His name was mud at Oxford. Even though by 1939 he was the most famous teacher in the whole school.
But do you realize that Lewis had his entire career from 1931 as a tutor up until 1954 when he went to Cambridge as professor of medieval literature.
He was tutor at Oxford. If you read Screwtape Letters, which was his most famous book written in 1941 and you look at the name Screwtape C.S. Lewis, it doesn't say in this new edition.
But in the original first edition it says C.S. Lewis tutor Oxford, modern college Oxford.
That is like being an assistant professor at Princeton or that's a non-tenured position. Of course you are an American university.
You can't hold a non-tenured position more than seven years because of the rules of the American Association University professors.
But he was there all those years as a tutor. And Tolkien of course was furious about this. He was trying to get him promoted but he was always defeated.
And as a result of it Lewis himself wrote, the result of being tutor meant that he did not have a secretary.
He did not get to teach the full professor courses where he did not have to read all his own papers. So he did not have readers.
He had to keep office hours for the students and he had to live on campus and he had a very low salary. He said he was always suffering from flashes of poverty.
So that meant he could own very few books. And Lewis wrote later all these things did much good for me.
One of the reasons that Lewis was so great in my opinion is that he did not suffer from the Peter Principle.
He was not promoted to the area of his incompetence.
If more professors were held down, not allowed a secretary, not allowed to teach very few courses, not allowed to live off campus,
were forced to read all their own papers that their students wrote and had to keep office hours. You'd have more CS Lewis's.
That's an aside. But you think about it for a minute. He said later all those things didn't be much good because the thing that Lewis became so great for was being able to really perceive where people were at.
And to accurately address students. And one of the reasons he read so many of their papers, stupid papers, probably a lot of them.
But he had to do it. And he had to. And also because he did not have much money, did you know that Lewis in his life owned very few books?
That when he died, the CS Lewis library was very, very small. Because he owned very few books, he had to develop methods of memorizing books he read and keeping them in his head.
And so at the poverty, you might say that he suffered with until he started to write, well, in this row, he wrote this book, he became instantly wealthy.
But he never handled his money. He had the estate, he had established funds that took care of his money. And he gave, he lived very modestly all his life.
He never traveled anywhere except after his marriage to Joy Davidman. They made one little trip to Greece. It's all he ever did. Never came to America.
He had no desire to come to America or anything. He just simply lived modestly, always wore clothes that looked like he'd slept in them for about three days.
But that's the way he was. But the point is that because he didn't have much money, he had to remember everything he read.
So he developed his own methods of keeping notes on what he read. And as he said, all these things didn't be great good.
Well, he wrote that book. He was duly repentant for writing grief observed. And he didn't write anymore books and no more Christian books for ten years.
He decided to sit and, and by the way, if young Christians would learn this lesson, it'd be a good lesson. If I could make another aside, I don't believe in young Christians giving their testimonies and church services too soon.
Because look at Lewis's experience. He should have kept quiet for a while, though I'm grateful we have Pilgrim's Regress, frankly.
But anyway, his next book was a strictly technical work. He wrote in 1936 called Allegory of Love, which many critics called his greatest work as a scholar. It was his great work on literary criticism.
Then in 1939, the war was on. He was now giving speeches to students in great St. Mary's Chapel.
Students would come and sit and jam that he was the most famous professor, though he was only a tutor.
He was now getting well known among students. And when he gave one night, he gave a lecture in St. Mary's church and the place was literally jammed to the gills.
And he gave his great sermon, A Weight of Glory. If you want to read a great message, read that great sermon, The Weight of Glory.
And then he decided he was going to write another book, Christian book. So his first Christian book was the book, The Problem of Pain.
A bold, daring, dramatic book to write at the time of the beginning of World War II. And it had a good reception.
And then in 1940, he wrote to his brother that he was concocting a brand new idea, he said, where a senior devil writes to a junior devil.
And that, of course, was Screwtape Letters. And he brought out the Screwtape Letters in 1941, interestingly enough, dedicated to JRR Tolkien, his great mentor.
JRR Tolkien is the recipient of this letter, these books. And of course, this, the New York Times call, the most brilliant piece of religious satire of the 20th century.
It was just a masterpiece. It really, in my opinion, is Lewis's masterpiece, except for the Chronicles of Narnia, these and the Chronicles sort of stand at the apex.
And they have been in so many editions, and millions and millions of copies of this book have been written.
By now, after this, after this book, he is now world famous, and he is, he's now writing prolifically, and he's writing all kinds of books.
He's writing apologetic books. He gives lectures on radio, and those lectures become probably his most famous book, Miracle Shanty.
And then he writes the book Miracles on 1947, a preliminary study, another brilliant work, though uneven, but still, where he's brilliant, he's brilliant, when he's bad, he's still good.
I mean, that's Lewis. And there's a timelessness about the man. He doesn't seem to get bogged down. He doesn't get victimized by his own cultural setting. He has a way of breaking beyond that.
And then, in 19, he's writing, continuing to write literary criticism. He starts to write adult novels.
In adult novels, of course, with the Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet, and That Hideous Strength. I think the best of those is That Hideous Strength.
Every university student should read that hideous strength, just for the fun of it, how many of you have read The Space Trilogy?
Hey, good. Do you agree that that hideous strength is quite a novel?
It's wild, it's right. And anybody, its setting is a university, like an Ivy League University, only its England in the setting.
And it's a university town, and anybody university professor or student should read that. It's really great.
And then, Lewis, those were well received. Everything he's doing now is, of course, well received. He's writing biblical expositions like his studies in the Psalms.
He wrote letters to Malcolm chiefly on prayer, which is another kind of satirical work, like the Screwtape Letters.
And then he decides in 1954, seven years before he, 54 to 60, he decides to relax and write the stories he always wanted to write.
And in fact, I'm going to read you what he says about these stories, because this is really cute.
He says, I turned to fairy tales, because that seemed the form, which certain ideas and images in my mind seemed to demand.
As a man might turn to fugues, because the musical phrases in his head seemed to be good, fugal subjects.
When I wrote Lion, that's A Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I had no notion of writing the others.
Now this is interesting for some of you, if you wondered about the Chronicles of Narnia.
He wrote first The Lion, and you know, he wrote it for his godchild, Owen Barfield's daughter, Lucy.
You can see all the names of all his favorite children appear in the Chronicles of Narnia.
And so he wrote it for her, and of course, Lucy's the hero of Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
And he gave that as a gift to her for her baptism.
When I wrote The Lion, I had no idea of writing the others.
Writing children's stories certainly modified my habits of composition.
Thus, A, it imposed a strict limit on vocabulary.
B, it excluded erotic love.
C, it cut down reflective and analytical passages.
D, it led me to produce chapters of nearly equal length for convenience in reading aloud.
That's a very important clue. He wanted them to be read aloud.
That's where they should be read to.
And he says, all these restrictions did me great good, like writing in strict meter.
Just like not being made professor did him great good.
Now we see this constraint also did him great good.
You can see that he had a, oh, by the way, the book when it first came out was not well received.
Here's another letter from Lewis that he wrote in 1951, right after Lion has come out.
So it's 51, they start coming out.
He said, I'm glad you all like The Lion.
A number of mothers and still more school mistresses have decided that it is likely to frighten children.
So it is not selling very well.
But the real children like it.
And I am astonished how many very young ones seem to understand it.
Which shows, of course, Lewis.
And I'll tell you, I'll read you another, where Lewis tells what he was trying to do in it.
I think it frightens some adults, but very few children.
And in another place, he said, he told what he was trying to do in The Chronicles.
I wonder if I can find that quote.
I can't, I'll remember it.
He says in another place that what he was, somebody asked him what he was trying to do in The Chronicles.
Was he writing allegorically?
And he answered by saying, no, I was not writing allegorically when I wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.
But rather, I said to myself, given a place like Narnia, I wondered what the Messiah would be like.
Given a place like Narnia, I wondered what evil would be like.
What love would be like.
Given a place like Narnia.
And of course, he was heavily influenced by Tolkien, you know.
Because Tolkien had written this great, you know, Tolkien's written the great article on fantasy literature
that's in the letters to Charles Williams.
That's a very great piece on fantasy literature, if you want to read Tolkien's impression.
And Tolkien says the great advantage of fantasy literature is it creates a world alongside of your world.
And he maintains that children never get confused with fantasy literature.
Adults might get confused with it.
In fact, Lewis, in his book Experiment in Criticism, says, fantasy literature is not dangerous to children.
What's dangerous to children is realistic literature that makes it like a soap opera is more dangerous to a child than a fantasy story.
Because a soap opera features itself as if it is real life.
But a fantasy story, it's very clear that new rules are set.
And a child has no problems and there's no confusion on a child with the fantasy story.
So Lewis said, given a place like Narnia, I wondered what the Redeemer would be like.
And so he wrote his Chronicles of Narnia.
And he wrote those over seven years, one volume a year, just relaxed and wrote these stories.
As he said, I wrote stories like I always wanted to read as a kid.
And in my opinion, by the way, they did finally begin to sell.
They sold well.
I was talking to Charles Woolard over here at the Robert E. Speer Library about four or five years ago.
And he told me then that in a meeting he was at in New York City of Librarians, the director of the New York Public Library said that the largest circulation of any book in New York Public Library was the Chronicles of Narnia.
That was five years ago.
I mean, I don't know what they're still true, but the unprecedented popularity of the Chronicles of Narnia among children and adults has been really an amazing fact.
Lewis struck a chord there, a resonance that just, has had a tremendous impact.
The seven stories, just for the fun of it, how many of you read all seven stories the Chronicles of Narnia?
Have any of you read any of the Chronicles of Narnia?
All right, well, let me tell you.
I envy you that did not raise your hands because now you get a chance to read those stories for yourself.
And they are masterpiece, in my opinion, and what you are in for is a great treat.
Lewis, as he relaxed and wrote those novels, in my opinion, achieved his high water mark.
In fact, I would, for me, I would put his greatest work as the Chronicles of Narnia and his Screwtape Letters.
I think those humorous books, just like Mark Twain's The Huckleberry Finn, remember that great authors never get their humorous books ever see or children's stories.
The best way for an author not to be taken seriously is to write children's stories.
We have Mr. Patterson.
Here's wife has written children's story, but she's got new very awards, so she's me taking seriously.
But children's stories are not taken seriously by the average adult critics.
And like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was never considered a masterpiece until later.
Now, if you take a course in American literature, it will be listed as one of the two or three greatest novels ever written in American writer.
But at the time, they were just written off his children's stories.
But the same thing is true of Lewis.
Lewis achieved something in the Chronicles.
And in those seven books, he relaxed and wrote really magnificently.
Now, the last, just to finish up his story, he died in 1963, October 23rd.
Before he died, though, just as a matter of fact, just a few years earlier in 1956, he married Joy Davidman, who herself was a great writer.
And that is quite a story that is a little clouded story because it shows you Lewis is not a pretty predictable guy.
But Joy Davidman was a divorced woman.
Her husband, her name was originally Gresham.
She had two sons by her husband.
And they were both American communists.
It's the truth.
And they both were converted to Christianity by reading Mere Christianity.
And they started corresponding with Lewis, like lots of people did.
And Lewis answered their letters.
Then they were divorced.
And then Joy Davidman came to England with her two sons.
And she was there for some reason or other.
And she made contact with Lewis because she had been writing to him.
And Lewis had great respect for her.
And then the British government, discovering that she was a member of the American Communist Party,
though she now has left communism and is a Christian, they are going to deport her.
Now, hold your breath.
If any of you know Lewis's story, you know this part.
Lots of people have raised their eyebrows at this part.
Lewis, hearing that this innocent woman is going to be deported from England,
goes down to the civil magistrates office and marries her.
They have, it's not a marriage.
And he was highly criticized for this.
He doesn't know the woman very well.
It's not a romantic thing at all.
He just marries her as a marriage of convenience so that she won't be deported.
Then he falls in love with her.
In the meantime, she's got cancer and she's dying of cancer.
And on a hospital bed, he marries her, this woman dying of cancer.
Then a remission occurs.
And Joy Davidman's, by the way, Tolkien and Lewis's friendship was sort of ended at this point.
Tolkien would never forgive him for this.
He was a very strict Catholic.
And he had married this divorced woman under these circumstances.
And Tolkien had a kind of ramrod, straight sense of righteousness.
And so they were very strained at this point.
It didn't end their friendship, but Tolkien was very, very disapproving of this.
But he did it.
Then he fell in love with this woman.
And he was married by a church of England priest.
He found a church of England priest who had married them on her hospital bed.
Then she had the remission.
And then he had two of the happiest years of his life.
He says in a letter that I thought that what had passed me by in my youth,
I would never experience and now I've experienced it in my later years.
And then he took the one trip.
They went to Greece.
Wonderful time.
She came back.
And then she died a terrible death of great pain.
And he was by her during all that time.
And then after she died, Lewis wrote another book under a pseudonym.
He only, remember I told you earlier, he wrote the book under...
under Clive Hamilton, his atheist poems.
By the way, I just bought that book of poems.
I haven't read them yet.
But it's just come into print.
And he wrote those under Clive Hamilton.
And now his wife died, Joy Davidman.
And he wrote another book under a pseudonym.
CN Service.
I think it's the name that he used for the pseudonym.
He still had the CN there.
A little hint of who it was.
And he wrote...
And he called this book a grief observed.
Some people rank this as one of the great, all-time great books of Lewis too.
And so many people came up to him and said,
you must read this book.
It will help you in your grief.
That he finally admitted that he had written the book.
And it really is a great book.
It's a modern joke.
And I don't know if you've read it, but it'll be a very moving book.
And I could tell you stories of people I know who have gone through terrible grief experiences
where they were really...
In fact, let me tell you one little thing yet to show you the power of Lewis.
I have that book.
I had a man with Professor at Cal whose wife died suddenly just one week before he was to retire.
And in fact, he walked into the house.
They were just getting ready for a big trip across America.
They bought a camper and everything to make this trip.
He was a professor of civil engineering at Cal.
He walked in the door and his wife was in the floor dead.
He was absolutely shattered.
He loved his wife so much.
His whole life was...
And he was not a Christian.
His wife listened to us on the radio.
That was her connection to our church.
But his daughter was in her choir.
So the daughter asked if I would do the service.
I couldn't because I was somewhere.
So Vince Mong(?) my colleague, went down to the service.
And Jim was so angry that he treated Vince as if Vince was responsible for her death.
My colleague had never been treated so shabbily at a funeral.
Jim, the husband was actually furious at him.
Everything was wrong.
It's terrible service.
And I don't know what you think you're doing here.
And all that sort of thing.
He just was trying to do the service.
And so the daughter was quite embarrassed about that.
And Jim then went into this terrible depression.
And he was going through her library.
And he saw this book Miracles by CS Lewis.
So he took the book down and he could not make heads or tails on it.
So his daughter, who was trying to think of some sort of angle
to get him to come in and see some minister.
Because she was really worried about it.
She finally said to Jim.
His name is Jim Shoen.
He's become one of my very best friends.
She said, Jim, or Dad,
Why don't you go see Reverend Palmer.
He is an expert on CS Lewis.
Maybe he can help you make sense out of this book.
So he called me on the phone.
I got this strange phone call from this guy.
He said, he's very rough.
And he said, Reverend Palmer, I want to come see you.
I said, okay, great.
I'd like to.
You name a time.
We set up a time.
I said, can I write down who he is?
I don't want to say who I am.
I mean, I never in my life had anybody make an appointment like that.
I don't want to say who it is.
I'll just be there.
And he was afraid I would report to his daughter, I guess.
So he came in.
I'll never forget this.
He came in by office.
And he sat down.
He's a matter of fact guy.
And he said, I am very depressed.
But I'm not going to commit suicide.
I'm not the type.
So don't worry about that.
That was his first sentence.
I mean, that's the kind of guy he was.
And then he told me.
He said, I don't believe anything like all this stuff.
And he told me a little about his background.
So my wife Harriet just died.
And I'm very depressed.
And she had this book in her library.
And it's all marked up.
And I can't make any heads or tails out of it.
And that was the way our conversation started.
So I listened to it for a while.
And I said, hey, look at, I want to get to know you better.
So I said, look at it.
Would you do a favor for me?
To understand this book, because you know, the grand miracle
is about the intervention of God in history.
You have to read a book behind this book.
So I want you to start reading the New Testament.
And I said, please start reading.
And I said, it's one of the gospels.
I think I want to start in Mark.
And I said, and by the way, I'm going to write you a prescription.
There's one other book I want you to read alongside this book.
And so I wrote down A Grief Observed CS Lewis.
I said, take this up to Logos Bookstore and get this book.
I've made it a rule never to give any books to anybody
but to write prescriptions for them, to go to bookstores.
And get a book there.
Buy it themselves.
I'll read it.
So he went right up to Logos Bookstore and he bought this book.
And because then he was going to come in and see me
the next week, we were going to talk about this book
and The Miracles and then the New Testament.
Because he was really searching.
I got a phone call one day later.
And I'll never forget this phone call.
He said to me in the phone.
He said, I've got to see you right away.
And I said, hey, yeah, let's do it.
And then he said, everything that man wrote, I felt.
Or I feel.
I feel everything he wrote.
Lewis had completely come alongside Jim Schoen.
Every feeling of grief that Jim Schoen had.
Lewis had shared with him.
It's a most sort of amazing book if you've read it.
And so that was the beginning.
And within a matter of weeks, I want to tell you about this guy,
Jim Schoen, he's civil engineer.
He told me that he never read anything
but a technical book his entire life.
Except for the newspaper.
And then he got hooked on Lewis.
And do you know that within three months that man had read
every single book of Lewis?
And he's become an authority on CS Lewis.
He leads discussions on CS Lewis.
And then he's now got into all the inklings.
He's read Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams
and everybody.
But every book, and he's become such a fascinating,
a literary person just because of that first introduction.
And then he became a Christian too.
A wonderful, one of my favorite guys.
Anyway.
Then in 1963, he died.
And he has continued to have a tremendous impact ever since then.
I think we ought to cut it off.
But maybe you'd like me just to give a couple of readings from Lewis.
Sort of fun readings that just give you a little more feeling for the man.
And maybe you'd like to ask questions too.
But this is the book Letters of CS Lewis,
which is just a few of the favorites that his brother has collected.
And it does have some really good things in it.
So let me just read you a few of the few things here.
Here's a letter just to a friend.
Would you believe it?
A schoolgirl has been expelled from her school for having inter possession,
a copy of my Screwtape.
I asked my informant whether it was a communist school,
or a fundamentalist school, or a Roman Catholic school,
and got the shattering answer.
No, it was a select school.
That puts a chap in his place, doesn't it?
I mean, I just love him.
He's so funny.
I'll give you another one of his reading that...
Uh...
Okay.
Let me give you...
Here's a little something on Charles Williams.
He had a great respect for Charles Williams.
Any of you Charles Williams fans?
He's having a great revival now of interest.
On Monday, Charles Williams.
He was an editor at Oxford University Press,
and Lewis absolutely adored the man.
By the way, this was another point of difference between Lewis and Tolkien.
Tolkien never liked Charles Williams.
Tolkien suspected Charles Williams of being dabbler in occult.
And if you've read Charles Williams, you know there is something to that.
Charles Williams is very interested in the occult.
And that, again, bothered Tolkien.
So there again, Lewis and Tolkien didn't agree on this.
And see, Charles Williams was invited by Lewis to the Inklings group.
And that's where there was some tension.
If you read the Humphrey Carpenter's book, he goes into this in great detail.
But Lewis had such respect for Charles Williams.
On Monday, Charles Williams lectured nominally on Camus,
but really on chastity.
Simply as criticism, it was superb.
Because here was a man who really cared with every fiber of his being
about the sage and serious doctrine of virginity,
which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously.
But it was more important still as a sermon.
It was a beautiful sight to see a whole roomful of modern young men and women
sitting in that absolute silence which cannot be faked.
Very puzzled, but spellbound.
As Charles Williams dared to give a sermon to a bunch of Oxford students on chastity.
What a wonderful power is in the direct appeal,
which disregards the temporary climate.
Now, isn't that a great line?
I'll read that again.
What a wonderful power is in the direct appeal,
which disregards the contemporary climate.
Again, just a line.
There was one absolutely hilarious reading here that I hoped I could find
that he wrote to his brother that is just sheer fun.
And before I read you one from Screwtape Letters, it's a darn it.
If I can't find it, I don't want to hold you up, but it is so funny.
However, what I think is funny, my kids,
I have read sometimes these things to my kids.
And my family makes a lot of fun of me because I'll say,
oh, you've got to hear this.
This is absolutely hilarious.
And then I read it and nobody is laughing at all in the room.
I'm the only one.
I'm an hysterical.
And they don't see what's so funny about it.
But this one I guarantee you is very, very funny.
Just a second.
I didn't mark it because I didn't think I would.
I think I would read it.
Oh, wait.
Nope.
I know it's right down here somewhere.
Well, it's about a...
Sorry.
I know right on the side of the page it is, too.
See, I remember everything on what side of the page it is.
Oh, there it is.
I found it.
This is about- this is about- this is about a,
this letter to his brother in 1932 from Oxford.
He says, you asked Mrs. Moore in a recent letter about that Crashaw man.
I had to go for a walk with him.
Lewis took a walk every single day.
He was a victim of that.
He just had to have a walk every day.
Have tea, you know, four o'clock.
He drove everybody crazy on his walks,
so he had to always stop at a pub.
Exactly at four, you know, for a tea or beer.
It seemed good to him to take a bus to the station,
start our walk along a sort of scrubby path
between a factory and a greasy strip of water.
Great, he has a great building to describe.
He is a lady-like little man of about 50.
And is to a tea that, quote,
sensible, well-informed man, unquote,
with which lamb dreaded to be left alone.
I blundered it once by referring to the water as a canal.
And he said, oh, could it be possible that I did not know
that it was the Thames?
Perhaps I was not a walker, unquote.
I foolishly said that I was.
He gave me an account of his favorite walks
with a liberal use of the word picture-esque.
You know, Lewis is a literary critic.
He hates words like that.
True poet never uses the word picture-esque or beautiful,
because what does it say?
It doesn't say anything.
So it says it was a liberal use of the word picture-esque.
He then called my attention to the fact
that the river wasn't usually low.
And would I like to know how I explained that?
Oh, and he would like to know how I explained that.
I scored a complete plot and was told
then how he explained it.
By this time, we were out on Port Meadow
and a wide prospect open before him.
A number of hills and church spires
required to be identified together
with their picture-esque mineral and chronological details.
A good many problems arose.
And again, I did very badly.
As his map, though constantly brought out
was the geological, it did not help us much.
A conversation on weather followed
and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact.
I love that line, though.
The escape, however, was quite illusory.
And my claim to be rather fond of all sorts of weather
was received with the stunning information
that psychologists detected the same trait in children
and lunatics.
And just to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact,
he begged my opinion of the various changes
which had recently been made in the river.
Indeed, every single rock, every single lock, bridge,
and style has apparently been radically altered
in the last few months.
As I had never seen any of the places before,
and then he says, but I thought you were a walker, unquote,
this bold me middle stump again.
The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble.
He could not conceive how it had been done.
What did I think?
And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace
and hoping that the infernal weir was done with,
I found that the problem of how it had been removed
was being raised only as a preliminary
to the still more intricate problem of why
it had been removed.
For a mile or so after the weir,
we got along famously for Crashaw began, quote,
I was once passing this very spot, or no, let me see.
Perhaps it was a little further on.
No, it was exactly here.
I remember that very tree.
Almost sounds like what's the guy in the Magnum PI?
The guy that owns the estate or runs the estate
who's always got stories to tell Magnum,
which are never quite true.
They're just like this though.
Maybe that's where he got this idea.
He says, or whether it was a little further,
let's see, I remember this very tree
when a very remarkable experience,
really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.
The experience, remarkable in a small way,
with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part,
was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk.
When we had the horrible misfortune
of passing a paper mill, no, not a paper mill,
but the paper mill, a Clarendon Press.
Of course, had I been over to it?
No, really, et cetera.
He said, well, I must stop my account
of this deplorable walk somewhere.
It was the same all through, sheer information.
Oh, I thought you'd give a kick up.
That's Lewis.
He had his ability to write.
I should read one.
We got to stop now, man.
Oh, do you have to go on and on?
Yeah, but not everybody else can go on and on.
There are some magnificent readings
in the Screwtape Letters.
And as you know, the Screwtape Letters
are individual letters written by a senior devil
to a junior devil.
And Lewis overhears them in a sense.
And so, of course, the enemy is God.
And our father below is the devil.
And so you have to reverse everything.
But Lewis then takes on a whole series of subjects
in the Screwtape Letters.
And they are really quite magnificent.
First is one letter.
He takes on the church.
And of course, that is kind of fun.
Let's just take that one on.
He says, I know with my dear woman,
I know with grave displeasure that your patients
become a Christian, do not indulge in the hope
that you will escape the usual penalties.
And then he says, I trust that you
would hard to even wish to do that.
In the meantime, we must make the best in the situation.
There's no need to despair.
Hundreds of these adult converts have been
reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the enemy's camp
and are now with us.
All the habits of your patient, both mentally and bodily,
are still in our favor.
And one of the great allies at present is the church itself.
Do not misunderstand me, I do not mean the church.
As we see her spread out through all time and space
and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.
That I confess is a spectacle which
makes our boldest temperatures uneasy.
But fortunately, it's quite invisible to these humans.
All your patient sees, and now this
has got to be one of the funniest descriptions
of a church you've ever heard in your life.
Here it is.
Fortunately, it's quite invisible to these humans.
All your patient sees is the half finished sham
gothic erection on the new building of state.
And when he goes inside, he sees the local grocer
with a rather oily expression on his face.
Don't you love that?
I always try to wonder, what is a rather oily expression
on his face?
It's sort of, you know, Lewis is great.
It's like he has a description of Aslan.
Oh, I love this description of Aslan.
Where he says, Aslan had a voice.
It was not like, wait, it might be in here
in the horseman's boy, that description of Aslan.
Oh, well, anyway, where he talks a heavy golden voice.
A heavy golden voice.
What's a heavy golden voice?
But I mean, it's just that marvelous use of language,
rather like an oily expression on his face.
It's just wonderful.
Anyway, in his face, bustling up to offer him
one shiny little book containing a liturgy
which neither of them understands.
And one shabby little book containing corrupt texts
of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad,
and in a very small print.
Of course, that's the Church of England song book.
It's true, a very small print.
And when he gets to the pew, this is the best line of all.
And when he gets to the pew and looks around,
he sees just that selection of his neighbors,
whom he has hitherto avoided.
Oh, that's great.
Anyway, what happens to the patient?
Every letter in here, he takes on a different subject.
Oh, it's so funny.
He takes on the subject of prayer, sex, lots on sex.
The relationship with your parents,
his mother gets on the patient's nerves.
So he takes that on.
Finally, the patient falls in love.
And that's got to be the classic Lewis.
That's Lewis at his best when the patient falls in love.
I'll read that one.
That's chapter, I hope, it's chapter.
Oops, it's chapter 22.
I'm sure it's chapter 22.
Oh yeah, good.
So your patient is in love.
And the worst kind, you could possibly have fallen into.
A girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me.
You may be interested to learn that little
misunderstanding with the secret police,
which you tried to raise over some unguarded expressions
in one of my letters has been tidied over.
If you were reckoning on that to secure my good offices,
you will find yourself mistaken.
You will pay for that as well as all your other blunders.
Meanwhile, I'll enclose a little booklet just issued
on the new house of corrections for incompetent tempters.
It is profusely illustrated, and you will not
find a dull page in it.
I have looked up this girl's dossier
and am horrified at what I find.
Not only a Christian, but such a Christian,
vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic,
mouse-like, watery, insignificant,
virginal, bread-and-butter-miss.
The little brute she makes me vomit.
She stinks and skulls to the very pages of the dossier.
It drives me mad the way the world has worsened.
We'd of hatter in the arena in the old days.
That's what her sword is made for,
not that she'd do much good there either.
To face little cheat, I know the sort,
who looks as if she'd faint at the side of blood
and then dies with a smile.
A cheat.
I tell you, this is Lewis at his best.
A cheat in every way looks as if butter
wouldn't melt in her mouth, and yet has a satirical wit.
The sort of creature who finds me funny,
filthy, insipid, little prude, and yet ready to fall
into this boobie's arms like any other breeding animal.
Why doesn't the enemy blast her for it?
He's so moon-struck by virginity,
instead of looking on their grinning.
That's great, isn't it?
And now comes some of the profoundest things Lewis ever wrote.
He's a hedonist at heart.
Now, Screwtape's talking about God.
He's a hedonist at heart.
All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses
are only a facade, are only like the foam in the seashore.
Out at sea, out in his sea, there is pleasure and more pleasure.
He makes no secret of it.
And his right hand are pleasures forever more.
Oh, I don't think he has the least inkling
of that high and austere mystery
to which we rise in miserific vision.
He's vulgar, Wormwood.
He has a bourgeois mind.
He has filled his world full of pleasures.
There are things for humans to do all day long
without his minding in the least, sleeping, washing, eating,
drinking, making love, playing, praying, working.
Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us.
By the way, the word porno, for which evil comes,
and the word for the devil, poneros,
is the Greek word, the evil one, the devil,
means in its literal sense to twist.
So Lewis is a master of Greek.
He knows this.
Everything has to be twisted before it's of any use to us.
We fight under cruel disadvantages.
And then this next line is fabulous, too.
Then, of course, he gets to know the woman's family,
the whole circle.
Could you not see that the very house she lives in
is one he ought never to have entered?
The whole place reeks of that deadly odor.
See, remember the line where the Paul,
there's so many illusions to the Bible in Lewis.
Remember that line that Paul says,
we are the aroma of Christ.
Now, see the devil, for the devil, it would be a deadly odor.
The whole house reeks of that deadly odor.
The very gardener, though he's been there only five years,
is beginning to acquire it.
Even guess, after a weekend visit,
carries some of the smell away with him.
The dog and the cat are tainted with it.
Well, that's Lewis.
He is so great.
I guess one last line that I'll read would be from chapter 13,
which is a favorite of mine, too, if I can perform.
That is Lewis, again, this is vintage Lewis,
I think, in chapter 13.
What happened in 13 is the patient, he became a Christian.
It was chapter two.
And then the Screwtape begins to, or the Wormwood,
begins to woo him back through some cynical friends he makes.
The Christianity and the crowd,
the Christianity and cyclical research,
the Christianity and vegetarianism.
And that crowd began to woo him away from his faith in Christ.
And he gets, you might say, entrap in non-essentials
and is just becoming cynical now,
and is beginning to be retrieved.
And then he has a kind of another conversion experience.
And that's the chapter 13's about.
My dear wormwood, it seems to me you take
great many pages to tell a very simple story.
The long and the short of it is this,
you have let this man slip through your fingers.
Situation is very grave.
And I really see no reason why I should try to shield you
from the consequences of your inefficiency.
A repentance and renewal of what the other side calls grace,
on the scale which you describe is a defeat of the first order.
It amounts to a second conversion
and probably on a deeper level than the first.
And so then he goes on and says, and now for your blunders.
On the first you showed, on your own showing,
you first of all allowed the patient to read a book
you really enjoyed.
This will tie, by the way, this will tie into my little group
from the Princeton Center continuing education
because we've been talking about being literate.
And so here's Lewis getting another crack at you.
You allowed him to read a book he really enjoyed
because he enjoyed it and not in order
to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.
In the second place, I have to tell you this,
in experiment in criticism, he starts off
experimenting criticism, his great book on criticism.
And he says, you walk into a house
and there's a cocktail party going on.
And everybody downstairs is talking about the latest rage
of the latest in book.
But the only literate person in the house
is a little boy in the attic with his flashlight on,
reading Robinson Crusoe.
Because he's reading a book he really likes.
That's the literate person.
That's the way he starts experimenting criticism.
And so here you have it coming in again here.
So he says, on your own showing, you first of all
allow the patient to read a book he really enjoyed.
Because he enjoyed it and not in order
to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.
In the second place, you allowed him to walk to the old mill
and have tea there, not with Crashaw, of course.
But to have tea there, a walk through country he really
likes and taken alone.
You especially a view of that Crashaw incident
that becomes the interesting Lewis love to be by himself.
He loved to have time alone.
In other words, you allowed him two real positive pleasures.
Were you so ignorant as to not see the danger of this?
The characteristic of pains and pleasures
is that they are unmistakably real.
And therefore, as far as they go,
they give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.
That's heavy theology from Lewis.
It's a very good Karl Barth theology, too,
on the fact that word and work must always
be inseparable, act and being.
The thing about pleasure and pain is it's real.
Christian faith always wants reality.
The devil always wants fantasy in a sense
if he wants his unreality.
So notice how he works with this.
The characteristic of pains and pleasures
is that they are unmistakably real.
And therefore, as far as they go,
they give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.
Thus, if you had been trying to dam your man
by the romantic method, by making a kind of person
submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses,
you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain.
Because, of course, five minutes of a genuine toothache
would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense
they were and unmask your whole strategy.
That's pretty true.
During the bombing raids, there were very few neurotics
in London.
Nobody went to psychiatrists for neurosis
during a bombing raid, because you had real pain
to worry about.
And he says, five minutes of real toothache
will take away your romantic sorrows
and everybody at Princeton is persecuting me.
Because the tooth is persecuting you.
OK, but you were trying to dam your patient by the world.
That is, by bombing off vanity, bustle, irony,
and expensive tedium as pleasures.
In other words, a weekend at Las Vegas.
You were trying to pawn that off as pleasures.
How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure
was the last thing you ought to have let him meet?
Didn't you foresee that it would just
kill by contrast all the trumpetry which
you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?
And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk
gave him was the most dangers of all.
That it would peel off from his sensibility,
the kind of crust that you've been forming on it,
and would make him feel that he was coming home,
recovering himself.
As a preliminary to detaching him from the enemy,
you wanted to detach him from himself.
And you had made some progress in doing so.
Now all that is undone.
Of course, I know that the enemy also
wants to detach men from themselves.
But in a different way, remember always
that he really likes the little vermin
and sets an absurd value on the distinctiveness of every one
of them.
When he talks of their losing themselves,
he means only abandoning the clamor of self-will.
Once they have done that, he really
gives them back all their personality.
And both, I am afraid sincerely that when they are wholly
his, they will be more themselves than ever.
See us, Lewis.
Well, there he is.
And thanks for letting me lead this little time with you guys.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
Thank you for having us.
Oh, gee.
Yeah, for letting me invite my friends.
They're really sure about it.
Yeah.
I heard that.
Yeah.
I don't mean to keep it.
No.
I heard Lewis, for instance, you have women.
Are you having to go with those critics who are talking about it?
Some people have been banned and respond to them.
I didn't mean that.
I heard Lewis, for instance, I have been banned.
I don't know.
I didn't mean that.
I heard Lewis, for instance, I have several times
that there was a few women that had been banned, perhaps.
Well, related to the priesthood, no way ordination could
also be said in these sort of long and different marks
about it.
For the frivolousness or sort of a intellectual,
it's second class.
Well, I know that they're, you got to be careful, though,
in our generation about criticisms like this,
because the same criticism could be leveled to Bonhoeffer.
Again, products of his time, like you read Bonhoeffer's wedding
sermon, that he wrote to his brother-in-law,
Eberhard Bethge, his marriage.
And gee, any modern woman reading that would absolutely reject Bonhoeffer's
view of marriage.
And yet, it's a great thesis on marriage, except that, you know,
he talks about the wife being the fraught and being in the
husband's kingdom.
Oh, wow.
Can you imagine trying to sell an American girl on that today?
I couldn't sell my daughter on that.
You know, for getting married to a guy.
But so you have to criticize Bonhoeffer and Lewis out of that.
Yeah, Lewis, he didn't want any women in the England, for instance.
He felt that the women would dilute the conversation.
And so he was very sexist.
But then when he married Joy Davidman,
everything changed.
It's really true.
And it is true that Lewis did have that, you know,
he didn't want women in the England's group that met every week in his
house.
And yet, I don't know.
I would say that Lewis is complex there.
Because, by the way, some said he was a homosexual.
Lewis was not a homosexual.
And he himself denied it.
In fact, if anything, Lewis had almost a homophobia.
Because if you've read the Surprised By Joy,
and you ought to read Warren's memoir here,
because he takes his brother on for what he says about Surprised By Joy.
Because Lewis makes it look like it was absolutely a
den of homosexuality.
And Warren says that's not true.
He says Lewis pours it on too much.
The prep school that Lewis was in.
And so Lewis, he's complex.
Because the way he treats women,
in the fact that he so faithfully corresponds with women,
and honors them so much in his correspondence,
is certainly not sexist.
I mean, he really respects, you know,
the most remarkable example is the famous letters to an American lady.
Have any of you read those letters?
You know, that's a lady in Los Angeles.
who started writing Lewis.
And really, her letters evidently all of them were about her illnesses.
And Lewis in every letter has to speak to some illness the ladies got.
And he's not a doctor, of course.
In fact, he doesn't even like doctors.
He says to her several times that my rule is to try not to go to doctors,
if possible.
Because as far as I can tell, people generally get worse when they go to doctors.
And I mean, that's terrible thing to say.
But that's what he said.
And he, yeah, he faithfully writes that lady all through.
And, you know, answers all these letters.
And he writes to so many women and had such a fine relationship.
And, of course, Dorothy Sayers was a great hero of his.
He had great respect for her.
I don't know.
I just think, and in The Chronicles of Narnia,
the women play key roles.
The little girls are not made subservient to the boys.
The boys and the girls are re-equals in that story.
I don't see where the criticism lies.
Except that it's true, he was quite chauvinistic about his Inklings group.
He did not want women in the Inklings.
And he was criticized for that.
Because there are a couple evidently wanted to get into that group,
and he would not let them in.
Yeah.
The thing is about, about, about, about,
is that your church is a Catholic.
It's not a church.
It's a church.
What was he supposed to do with the church?
He was buried by an ancient priest.
He joined the church of England.
He was in the church.
A very faithful member.
I mean, he attended.
He was raised Presbyterian, of course, as a boy.
But after his conversion, he toyed with becoming a Catholic.
Because, of course, Tolkien was Catholic, and quite devout.
But he decided to go into the church of England,
and was very happy in that.
Through his whole career.
Another interesting relationship, if you're a literary buff,
is the rather interesting relationship between Lewis and T.S. Eliot,
which is quite curious.
Because Eliot's one of my heroes, too.
I absolutely, now Lewis did not like Eliot, though,
until he met him personally,
and he fell in love with him then.
They had a great relationship after he met him,
but before he just fell, he was a stuff shirt.
And, of course, Eliot was a stuff shirt.
And Lewis just wanted to...
You see, Eliot was the peak.
He was the top of the literary establishment.
And Lewis always felt that he was kind of a bluff.
And, in fact, in these letters,
are some hilarious letters,
where Lewis and some friends were going to create a spoof.
No, it's in another book I've got of letters of Lewis,
where he and his friends were going to create a spoof on Eliot.
And they were going to create this poems by this...
The brother and sister in Vienna,
who were going to write poems,
just like Eliot's poems.
And they were going to be submitted in a literary journal.
And they were going to...
And they had it all worked out.
They had these hilarious meetings,
where they concocted how the Eliot was going to meet
this famous writing team from Vienna,
and who were in his school of writing.
And so Lewis took great delight in making fun of Eliot.
And Lewis had no respect for Eliot's great work.
And I can understand that myself,
because I think, J. Alfred Prufrock,
the Waste Land and Hollow Men,
are absolutely apex poems, in my opinion.
But Lewis did not like those poems.
Now, I don't know why.
As a literary critic, he did not like Prufrock
and Waste Land and Hallow Men.
And I think, frankly, that there...
I think I would call Prufrock in my opinion
the greatest poem of the 20th century.
But he did not.
So you see, his tastes were different.
But then when he met Eliot,
he realized Eliot was a really great...
And Eliot had a great respect for Charles Williams.
In fact, Charles Williams' novel, All Hallows' Eve,
the introduction of that novel is by T.S. Eliot.
And Eliot says that Charles Williams is the most underrated author
of the 20th century.
He has great respect for it, Williams.
So that's another interesting set of relationships.
And Eliot, of course, was a Christian, too,
and also an adult convert to Christianity.
After...
Do you all know the story of Eliot?
That's quite interesting.
But he had been a student Harvard and at Harvard.
As a junior at Harvard, he wrote Prufrock.
Can you believe that?
And then he went on and then he wrote later,
Hallow Men, Waste Land, his non-Christian poems,
just like Lewis wrote non-Christian poems.
Then he was converted and wrote Journey of the Magi.
And then, of course, his Christian period.
And so Eliot's another fascinating story
to put alongside of Lewis.
But they were not close friends except it.
When they finally met personally,
and became very good friends at the end.
So it's a lot of...
You know, isn't it amazing from a Christian standpoint
how many great writers converge
in that little locale
who were the very top of the literary achievement
of the 20th century in the English language.
And they all were Christians, many of them adult converts.
And I'm thinking of Charles Williams,
C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers,
and J.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot.
And then in his own outlandish way to W.H. Auden,
who was Christian to, again, very unconventional.
And then, of course, now Malcolm Muggeridge
in these later years.
But they were all literary people.
They all convert.
And, of course, they were all influenced by G.K. Chesterton,
who died in 38.
So he wasn't in that 40s period.
But Chesterton is a profound influence on Lewis.
In fact, if you read Chesterton,
you will see many of Lewis's themes
that he then popularized.
That he found in Chesterton.
Chesterton is just another author
who's having a tremendous revival now.
Everything Chesterton wrote is now being coming out in print.
And there's just been established.
There is the G.K. Chesterton Society.
I'm a member of it.
They published a journal now.
They've been doing it for the last three years.
And there's a great new interest in Chesterton.
So there is this amazing collection of writers
that all became Christians and wrote.
And their influence is still terribly influential.
I'm sure you realize it.
In any college, literary class, T.S. Eliot is still the most
powerful influence among collegiate literature courses.
And Eliot is a terribly persuasive Christian writer,
in my opinion, especially in his Murder in the Cathedral
and the Journey of the Magi his great poems.
Well, in fact, I think his non-Christian poems
are terribly powerful poems for Christians.
I mean, I think that Prufrock and the Hollow Men
raises all the questions that are answered by the Gospel,
just like in another sort of way, Lewis's.
Lewis was never the powerful poet.
That was not his gift.
I think Lewis's poetry tends to be quite ordinary.
Lewis was the master of prose and of narrative style,
like that walk.
I mean, that walk is just prose at its best.
And that's what Lewis was good at.
He could describe things.
He had a way of saying, it's like this.
Can I give you one last reading where, again,
it's so good, if I can find it, which I think is Lewis
as a correspondent and as a maker of parables.
This is a letter, it's undated,
but it was written by a person who was very angry at him
for his book, Mere Christianity.
Well, I'm not surprised at a man who agreed with me
and Screwtape might disagree with what I wrote about religion.
And now watch him handle this person.
We can hardly discuss the whole matter by post, can we?
I'll only make one shot.
By the way, Lewis always did that in his letters,
like if you read the Sheldon Vanauken in a book, Severe Mercy.
He writes this long letter to Lewis asking you about 35 questions
and Lewis decides to answer one of the questions
and then thoughtfully answers the one question.
So I'll make one shot.
When people object as you do, that if Jesus was God,
as well as man, then he had an unfair advantage
which deprives him for them of all value.
Notice again how Lewis recounts what the person writes.
That's why his correspondence is so fascinating.
You know what people write to him,
because he always repeats their argument.
Which is a good tactic, you know,
if you want to really make sure a person heard you.
So there's the man's argument.
When people object as you do, that if Jesus was God,
as well as man, then he had an unfair advantage
which deprives him for them of all value.
It seems to me that if a man struggling in the water
should refuse a rope thrown to him by another
who had one foot on the bank saying,
ah, but you have an unfair advantage.
There's Lewis, the storyteller.
I mean, he everything is a story.
And then he goes on to say,
it is because of that advantage that he can help.
And with that, Lewis stops his diatribe.
He stops the argument.
I would say the mastery of Lewis is he's the master of the light touch.
After he wrote Pilgrim's Regress from then on,
he has the light touch.
Light touch.
He never hits you with a sledgehammer.
So then notice what he says after that.
But all good wishes.
We must differ in charity, I hope.
You must not be angry with me for believing.
I am not angry with you.
This is another example of Lewis as a storyteller.
Hey, let's go.