C. S. Lewis and His Legacy: A Conversation Among Baylor Professors

Baylor Magazine

For C.S. Lewis fans out there, you'll find an interesting discussion among Baylor University scholars of Lewis's influence upon the concept of a Christian education, a perennial theme at Baylor, for I clearly recall Baylor President Abner V. McCall giving a talk on precisely that topic during Freshman orientation week way back in 1975! If I recall, he gave the illustration of water boiling in a saucepan on a stove, and that there were two possible answers to the query as to why the water was boiling, a scientific answer (because the heat imparted by an electrical coil under the pan was heating the water molecules and thereby causing them to jostle each other at ever greater rates) and a teleological answer (because I'm making coffee), and that the latter answer was a matter related to queries on the meaning of the universe. (No, the meaning's not coffee, though that does come pretty close!) Fresh from the Ozarks at the time, I wasn't accustomed to drawing such sharp distinctions in a word's meaning, but I found that concrete analogy so clarifying that I've retained it all these years . . .

Anyway, the discussion in this issue of Baylor Magazine is an excellent introduction to themes in Christian education as understood by several Baylor professors (nine, in fact), whose dialogue is found in the Winter 2014 issue. One of the professors, David L. Jeffrey (Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities), noted the current-day profound ignorance about Christianity even on the part of Christian students:

One of the challenges for Christian universities today might be the relatively low order of hold that many of our students have on their own culture. I would say in particular their own religious culture. They come in often better educated perhaps in some technical ways than they were 20 years ago, but I suspect more poorly educated as Christians than they were 20 years ago and most certainly than 30 years ago. By that I mean that biblical Christians tend not to know the Bible very well. Liturgical Christians tend not to have attended church enough to really understand what the liturgy is intended to do. And almost all of them lack a sense of their tradition in the largest sense, Christian history in the largest sense. So, among us, Christian identity that has intellectual substance is not maybe what it ought to be, and that is a challenge.

I've noticed some of these same things, and the superficial understanding of Christianity is evident in the lyrics of the so-called 'praise' songs. They're often fun to sing but say very little. Another Baylor professor, Alan Jacobs (Distinguished Professor of Humanities), notes the lack of rigorous education in many university students:

What I find myself thinking about as we have this conversation is a character in one of Lewis' novels. In That Hideous Strength, one of the two central characters is Mark Studdock. There's a passage about a third of the way into the book in which Lewis describes Mark's extreme vulnerability to manipulation -- he pauses in the action and says, "It must be remembered that Mark had at his fingertips scarcely a scrap of genuine learning. The severities of a traditional humanistic education and a rigorous scientific education alike had passed him by. He didn't have either one. And, therefore, he was utterly vulnerable to rhetorical manipulation, as he just didn't have the intellectual equipment." It's interesting that the two words that Lewis uses are "severities" and "rigor." Those are interesting words. What Lewis is saying very clearly, is that if Mark had had either one, if he had had either a first-rate scientific education or a first-rate humanistic education, he would have been equipped to offer at least some resistance. But he had nothing. He always did well in "essays and general papers" -- if he had the opportunity to bloviate he could sound good, you know? But that was really all there was to it. He was, Lewis says, a "hollow" man.

Not to be disparaging of our students, but we need to remember how little they know when they get here and how few "rigors" and "severities" that they have undergone, in order that we may educate them more rigorously, but also to be compassionate towards them and realize that they are not going to be able to catch up overnight. It's going to require a lot of patience from us to get them up to speed in these matters. But we do well to think of our students as being in many ways like Mark Studdock, beset on all sides by rhetoric from television, movies, the Internet, even the books they read; they are getting buffeted by this stuff and they don't necessarily have what it takes to stand up straight in a gale like that. That's how I think of our job in a lot of ways.

Interesting, this characterization of the character Mark Studdock, for I've worked in an allusion to Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength in my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, and the anonymous protagonist of my tale is partly reminiscent of Lewis's Studdock. I didn't exactly model my main character after Lewis's, but I did think of him as I described the profound ignorance of my protagonist. Here's the outright allusion made in my novella, a scene in which a lawyer named Dan Webster assists the main character by agreeing to take him on as a client and thus looks over a contract that the protagonist had signed with a certain "Mr. Em":

He leaned over the table and perused the document. "Hmm . . . spirit for spirit. Yes, it's typical of Old Scratch to play loose with words. That's his hideous strength, but also his grave weakness."

The direct reference is clearly to Lewis's novel, but behind that lies David Lyndsay's poem of 1555, Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour of the Miserabyll Estait of the World, which contains this couplet, "The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length," which refers to the Tower of Babel and hence all that this image entails about the power of instrumental knowledge and the intellectual poverty of linguistic confusion.

Anyway, I'd like to have been part of that Baylor conversation, but I'm not, of course, a Baylor scholar, other than in the sense that it's my undergrad alma mater, and that it prepared me well for Berkeley . . .

C. S. Lewis: Converted Later than Believed?

Christianity Today

Jerry Root, associate director of the Billy Graham Center Institute of Strategic Evangelism at Wheaton College and an expert on Lewis, asks, "Does C. S. Lewis Have Something to Hide?" in a review of Alister McGrath's C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet for Christianity Today (November 22, 2013). Root thinks not, but he does acknowledge this:

McGrath does uncover some information that's barely known even among Lewis scholars and aficionados. For example, Lewis's conversion to Christianity actually took place several months to a year later than the dates Lewis himself seems to suggest. The chronology of these events reveals how carefully McGrath pays attention to detail.

I noted this point on the Milton List -- Lewis was an expert on Milton's Paradise Lost -- and Professor Salwa Khoddam, another expert on Lewis, filled in the details:

What Alister McGrath in C. S. Lewis: Eccentric Genius. Reluctant Prophet--A Life writes is that Lewis came to believe in God in 1930 rather in 1929. But the famous conversation between him, Tolkien, and Dyson in Sept. 19, 1931 is still the pivoting event that drove the process of his conversion to Christianity, by his accepting the true "myth" of Christianiy. According to McGrath, this conversion process culminated not in what is traditionally taken to be the correct date of his belief in the divinity of Christ (28 Sept. 1931), during a trip to the Whipsnade Zoo in a motorbike driven by his brother Warnie, but in June 1932, while being driven to the Whipsnade Zoo in a car by Edward Foord-Kelcey. McGrath has interesting evidence to prove these new landmarks (135-59).

There it is, for all you Lewis fans: The Truth! Well, accuracy about dating, anyway . . .

'Lewising' the Metaphor

Blue Spectacles
Kantian Optics
Google Images

In his essay "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare" (pdf), which I noted yesterday, C.S. Lewis explores the putative loss of a hypothetical metaphor's etymological origin, treating what he calls the Master's Metaphor, i.e., a metaphor used by a teacher to illuminate the meaning of some difficult topic, in this instance, the meaning of the Kantian categories of understanding, such as the category of causality, which 'colors' our perception of reality somewhat like wearing a pair of blue spectacles would:

The question of the Master's Metaphor need not detain us long. I may attempt to explain the Kantian philosophy to a pupil by the following metaphor. 'Kant answered the question "How do I know that whatever comes round the corner will be blue?" by the supposition " I am wearing blue spectacles."' In time I may come to use 'the blue spectacles' as a kind of shorthand for the whole Kantian machinery of the categories and forms of perception. And let us suppose, for the sake of analogy with the real history of language, that I continue to use this expression long after I have forgotten the metaphor which originally gave rise to it. And perhaps by this time the form of the word will have changed. Instead of the 'blue spectacles' I may now talk of the bloospel or even the bluspell. If I live long enough to reach my dotage I may even enter on a philological period in which I attempt to find the derivation of this mysterious word. I may suppose that the second element is derived from the word spell and look back with interest on the supposed period when Kant appeared to me to be magical; or else, arguing that the whole word is clearly formed on the analogy of gospel, may indulge in unhistorical reminiscences of the days when the Critique seemed to me irrefragably true. But how far, if at all, will my thinking about Kant be affected by all this linguistic process? In practice, no doubt, there will be some subtle influence; the mere continued use of the word bluspel may have led me to attribute to it a unity and substantiality which I should have hesitated to attribute to 'the whole Kantian machinery of the categories and forms of perception'.

Lewis is exploring the way in which metaphors die, though he doesn't consider "bluspel" an example of such, apparently because he is describing a teacher who understands Kant well but has forgotten the coining of "bluspel." The metaphor has been entirely lost. Lewis's point is one I'll have to read and reflect upon, but I really like the metaphor --  blue spectacles do help to see what Kant meant.

Unless one takes the analogy too far, of course, and thinks that causality is a depressing concept (where's our free will?), and that's why it's like blue spectacles, which give us the blues about everything . . .

C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Truth

C. S. Lewis
Wikipedia

Here, in the final paragraph of Lewis's essay "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare" (complete on pdf), is something to ruminate on:

It will have escaped no one that in such a scale of writers the poets will take the highest place; and among the poets those who have at once the tenderest care for old words and the surest instinct for the creation of new metaphors. But it must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. I said at the outset that the truth we won by metaphor could not be greater than the truth of the metaphor itself; and we have seen since that all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor. And thence, I confess, it does follow that if our thinking is ever true, then the metaphors by which we think must have been good metaphors. It does follow that if those original equations, between good and light, or evil and dark, between breath and soul and all the others, were from the beginning arbitrary and fanciful -- if there is not, in fact, a kind of psycho-physical parallelism (or more) in the universe -- then all our thinking is nonsensical. And so, admittedly, the view I have taken has metaphysical implications. But so has every view.

I came across this quote by chance, and I've had time only to skim the essay, so I have nothing significant to say about this . . . but I wanted to save it for further reflection on the relation of truth to metaphor.

I can add that Lewis offers some good advice on writing a couple of pages earlier:

[H]e who would increase the meaning and decrease the meaningless verbiage in his own speech and writing, must do two things. He must become conscious of the fossilized metaphors in his words; and he must freely use new metaphors, which he creates for himself. The first depends upon knowledge, and therefore on leisure; the second depends on a certain degree of imaginative ability. The second is perhaps the more important of the two: we are never less the slaves of metaphor than when we are making metaphor, or hearing it new made.

Good advice, as I said, and connected -- as in everything Lewis wrote -- with his larger views on imagination, reason, and truth.

Curiosity as a Vice: Three Aspects

Gilbert Meilaender

Lutheran Theologian

(Image from Valparaiso University)

I'm still following the paper trail on the trials of theoretical curiosity that Hans Blumenberg first introduced me too many years ago when I read his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and I've recently come to see three distinct aspects to a critique of curiosity as a vice.

In "Mastering Our Gen(i)es: When Do We Say No?" (Christian Century, October 3, 1990, pp. 872-875), Gilbert Meilaender argues for limits to curiosity that derive from the unpredictability of those things that we would wish to control:

In That Hideous Strength, "a modern fairy tale for grownups," C. S. Lewis imagined a National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E) which is undertaking an ambitious attempt to control and shape nature. Filostrato, a slightly mad clergyman who is a member of N.I.C.E., says at one point that he awaits a more rational day when artificial metal trees will replace natural ones. Then, if we tire of a tree in one place, we simply move it elsewhere. "It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess." Applied to human beings, Filostrato's hope is equally sanitized. "What," he asks, "are the things that most offend the dignity of man?" Answer: "Birth and breeding and death." To take control of them is, we must admit, part of the Human Genome Initiative -- indeed, still more, part of the modern project whose "legitimacy" and "curiosity" have been defended by Hans Blumenberg in his provocative (if Teutonic) book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. What Blumenberg does not pay much attention to, however, is that the rise of the modern project was interwoven with renewed interest in magic and esoteric religion, with the thirst for control and mastery of the secrets of the universe. Still today that thirst is present: to get control of our genes and thereby, perhaps, of the elusive genies whose very unpredictability and unreliability threaten efforts at mastery.

I don't think that this "unpredictability and unreliability" of things that Meilaender thematizes in this article provide the material for his more fundamental objection, for our curiosity to understand might lead to information sufficient for us to know predictably well the consequences of our "efforts at mastery." Only if something is intrinsically unpredictable or unknowably complex would our curiosity for control need to be curtailed -- if the objection is merely that something unforeseen might go wrong.

This particular critique of curiosity as a vice if directed toward that which exceeds our grasp is thus merely a stopgap measure, not a profoundly serious critique, for an object of our curiosity might be illegitimate at one time but legitimate at another.

In "Curiosity as a Moral Virtue" (International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Fall 2001), Elias Baumgarten cites Meilaender to distinguish between two distinct albeit related critiques of curiosity as a vice:

Meilaender's religious perspective may help to spell out a concept of debasing curiosity, that which is beneath proper human inquiry. It also expands inappropriate curiosity to include a domain that is above and beyond proper human concern, and it suggests the possibility that both share a common flaw, a controlling and possessive spirit of curiosity that knows no limits, in contrast to a spirit of receptivity and humility.

Baumgarten then quotes Meilaender:

Many possibilities may pique my curiosity -- I may wonder how my neighbor's wife performs in bed; how human beings respond to experiments harmful to their bodies, or even to suffering; how the development of a fertilized egg could be stimulated to produce a monster rather than a normal human being; how to preserve a human being alive forever. I may wonder, but it would be wrong to seek to know . . . because I cannot possess such knowledge while willing what is good . . . . To love the good and to possess what we love are, in this life, not always compatible. (Gilbert C. Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 140)

Although Baumgarten suggests that Meilaender is speaking here of "human overreaching" and holds that Meilander therefore "puts this form of curiosity together with voyeurism as a vice rather than a virtue," I think that voyeurism applies only to curiosity employed in such things as wondering "how my neighbor's wife performs in bed," which would constitute something "beneath proper human inquiry," as Baumgarten has previously expressed it, for to know such a thing would be debasing to dignity and respect. This is not so much overreaching as 'underreaching'. I suspect that many of us would agree that curiosity of this sort would be debasing . . . though pornographers have made an enormously lucrative business out of it.

Overreaching, by contrast, would be to direct one's curiosity toward that which is "above and beyond proper human concern," and this is the "theoretical curiosity" that Blumenberg was centrally focused upon in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age. This would be curiosity employed not toward objects that immodestly debase us but toward those things that would improperly exalt us. I am, however, rather at a loss to know what things fall into this category. Presumably, such things would be those that lead us into hubristic pride, but would knowing "how to preserve a human being alive forever" be one of these things? Maybe. But in what sense? Is there some harm in knowing? Or only in acting on that knowledge? Or does the problem lie in a potentially prideful attitude?

I'm not much of a moral philosopher, but I've managed to identify three aspects to the so-called 'vice' of curiosity (exceeding, debasing, and exalting), so I'll just step back at this point and let others weigh in.

Narnia's War Drobe?

The Wardrobe in Question?

(Image from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

Photo/Courtesy of The Marion E. Wade Center)

I seem to be the one coming late to this point, for others have already commented on it, but as I was doing some light reading in children's literature yesterday, I came upon a passage in Edith Nesbit's 1908 story "The Aunt and Amabel" that made me wonder about C.S. Lewis's possible literary debt to Nesbit.

Rosemary Lake, who has written children's stories of her own and maintains a website devoted to fairy tales, mentions this possibility of Lewis's debt to Nesbit and provides the specific scene from Nesbit's story that I had also noted in my reading. The main character, Amabel, has just been banished to a spare bedroom for having done something that she ought not to have done:

She was to spend the whole day alone in the best bedroom, the one with the four-post bed and the red curtains and the large wardrobe with a looking-glass in it that you could see yourself in to the very ends of your strap-shoes.

The first thing Amabel did was to look at herself in the glass. She was still sniffing and sobbing, and her eyes were swimming in tears, another one rolled down her nose as she looked -- that was very interesting. Another rolled down, and that was the last, because as soon as you get interested in watching your tears they stop. [.....]

Then she looked round the room for something to read; there was nothing. The old-fashioned best bedrooms never did have anything. Only on the large dressing-table, on the left-hand side of the oval swing-glass, was one book covered in red velvet, and on it, very twistily embroidered in yellow silk and mixed up with misleading leaves and squiggles were the letters, A. B. C.

'Perhaps it's a picture alphabet,' said Mabel, and was quite pleased, though of course she was much too old to care for alphabets. Only when one is very unhappy and very dull, anything is better than nothing. She opened the book.

'Why, it's only a time-table!' she said. 'I suppose it's for people when they want to go away, and Auntie puts it here in case they suddenly make up their minds to go, and feel that they can't wait another minute. I feel like that, only it's no good, and I expect other people do too.'

She had learned how to use the dictionary, and this seemed to go the same way. She looked up the names of all the places she knew -- Brighton where she had once spent a month, Rugby where her brother was at school, and Home, which was Amberley -- and she saw the times when the trains left for these places, and wished she could go by those trains.

And once more she looked round the best bedroom which was her prison, and thought of the Bastille, and wished she had a toad to tame, like the poor Viscount, or a flower to watch growing, like Picciola, and she was very sorry for herself, and very angry with her aunt, and very grieved at the conduct of her parents -- she had expected better things from them -- and now they had left her in this dreadful place where no one loved her, and no one understood her.

There seemed to be no place for toads or flowers in the best room, it was carpeted all over even in its least noticeable corners. It had everything a best room ought to have -- and everything was of dark shining mahogany. The toilet-table had a set of red and gold glass things -- a tray, candlesticks, a ring-stand, many little pots with lids, and two bottles with stoppers. When the stoppers were taken out they smelt very strange, something like very old scent, and something like cold cream also very old, and something like going to the dentist's.

I do not know whether the scent of those bottles had anything to do with what happened. It certainly was a very extraordinary scent. Quite different from any perfume that I smell nowadays, but I remember that when I was a little girl I smelt it quite often. But then there are no best rooms now such as there used to be. The best rooms now are gay with chintz and mirrors, and there are always flowers and books, and little tables to put your teacup on, and sofas, and armchairs. And they smell of varnish and new furniture.

When Amabel had sniffed at both bottles and looked in all the pots, which were quite clean and empty except for a pearl button and two pins in one of them, she took up the A.B.C. again to look for Whitby, where her godmother lived. And it was then that she saw the extraordinary name 'Whereyouwantogoto.' This was odd -- but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone.

The name of the station was 'Bigwardrobeinspareroom'. And below this name, really quite unusual for a station, Amabel read in small letters:

'Single fares strictly forbidden. Return tickets No Class Nuppence. Trains leave Bigwardrobeinspareroom all the time.'

And under that in still smaller letters:

'You had better go now.'

What would you have done? Rubbed your eyes and thought you were dreaming? Well, if you had, nothing more would have happened. Nothing ever does when you behave like that. Amabel was wiser. She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

'I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats,' she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say 'I told you so,' but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.

Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon.

C.S. Lewis wouldn't have been borrowing extensively, but consider this famous scene of the Pevensie children deciding to explore the old house where they've been billeted during the war, a scene occurring early in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and conveniently supplied from a website titled The Chronicles of Narnia:

Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures, and there they found a suit of armour; and after that was a room all hung with green, with a harp in one corner; and then came three steps down and five steps up, and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led out on to a balcony, and then a whole series of rooms that led into each other and were lined with books -- most of them very old books and some bigger than a Bible in a church. And shortly after that they looked into a room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe; the sort that has a looking-glass in the door. There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead bluebottle on the window-sill.

"Nothing there!" said Peter, and they all trooped out again -- all except Lucy. She stayed behind because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked. To her surprise it opened quite easily, and two mothballs dropped out.

Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up -- mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in -- then two or three steps -- always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.

"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. "This is very queer," she said, and went on a step or two further.

Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. "Why, it is just like branches of trees!" exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.

In both stories -- the Nesbit short story and the Lewis novel -- we encounter a 'big wardrobe' in a 'spare room' that leads to a magical world.

Others who have noted this possible source include Paul F. Ford, who has several web pages devoted to Lewis and who writes of the connection to Nesbit in his article "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe at 50: A Celebration (and a Worry)" (pdf), pages 3-4:

What came across strongly to me on this re-reading was how the narrative tastes of the children's books of Edith Nesbit. We know that Lewis loved her Bastable books (and even refers to the Bastable family in the second paragraph of Chapter One of The Magician's Nephew) and how some motifs from her stories The Magic City (1911) and "The Aunt and Amabel" (in The Magic World, 1912) went down very deep in Lewis’s imagination, only to come up in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The omniscient author's perspective, with a touch of the avuncular (all the talk about not shutting the wardrobe door) is alive in Nesbit and in Lewis. Lewis was saying a great deal when he told Chad Walsh in the summer of 1948 that he was "'completing a children's book he has begun "in the tradition of E. Nesbit",' when he had finished Surprised by Joy. (C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949), p. 10.)"

In her Journey into Narnia (Pasadena, CA: Hope Publishing House, 1998), Kathryn Lindskoog notes the connection to Nesbit, as reported by Sarah J. Fodor in "Journey into Narnia" (Find Articles BNET), Anglican Theological Review, Spring 1999:

Providing a resource helpful to teachers, Lindskoog identifies a central theme for each book, summarizes key events, discusses a key symbol, and explains unusual vocabulary (such as the wooses in The Lion, from ouzel meaning blackbird, p. 106). She also includes a "Factual Quiz Just for Fun" and questions to encourage personal reflection. In her discussion of each book's background, Lindskoog notes the influence of Lewis's early reading of E. Nesbit's fantasies on his later writing. An appendix features a Nesbit story "The Aunt and Amabel" (1908), about a girl who embarks from the station Bigwardrobeinspareroom on a fantasy journey of reconciliation. Nesbit's story may have given Lewis the idea for the wardrobe in The Lion.

The Christian Broadcasting Network has posted an excerpt from "Chapter Seventeen: Into Narnia" of George Sayer's Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Good News Publishing):

The thought that he might write a children's story occurred to Jack in September 1939, but he did not complete his first one, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, until almost ten years later. The evacuated children staying at the Kilns provided his original inspiration. One of them showed an interest in an old wardrobe, asking if she could go inside and if there was anything behind it. Her request triggered his imagination. Perhaps he was reminded, too, of a story he had read as a child, The Aunt and Amabel, by E. Nesbit, in which a magic world is entered through a wardrobe in a spare room. He had read and loved the books of Edith Nesbit, but had given them up when he went away to prep school for fear of seeming childish. Now he thought of writing a story for and about the evacuated children, because he was concerned about how poorly developed their imaginations were and how little they read.

The same Christian Broadcasting Network offers an excerpt from Devin Brown's Inside Narnia:

Lucy finds a second row of coats behind the first and the wintry land of Narnia behind that. In making a wardrobe the entranceway to another world, Lewis unconsciously used a device from "The Aunt and Amabel," a story by Edith Nesbit published in 1908 that he would certainly have come across as a child. In the summer of 1948, Lewis is recorded as making a remark to Chad Walsh about completing a children's book which he had begun writing "in the tradition of E. Nesbit" (Walsh 1979, 129). Green and Hooper argue that it is likely that Lewis had come across "The Aunt and Amabel" when it appeared in Blackie's Christmas Annual for 1909 [cf. different image from 1904 issue, noted by Gypsy Scholar], when Lewis was ten, but they also point out that he "had forgotten the Nesbit story entirely until reminded of it" (1994, 250–1).

Amabel, like the Pevensie children, has been sent away from home. In Amabel's case, she has been sent to stay with a great aunt, not because of air raids but because of "measles or a new baby or the painter in the house" (Nesbit 1994, 192), and in her room she finds a "large wardrobe with a looking glass in it that you could see yourself in" (194).

On the dressing table in the spare room where she is staying, Amabel finds a strange timetable for trains, and in it she sees a station named "Bigwardrobeinspareroom" (Nesbit 1994, 196), a name which will perhaps be echoed in Mr. Tumnus's references to the land of "Spare Oom" and the city of "War Drobe" (TLWW, 13, 21). We are told that Amabel, thinking that she will find only hats inside, "went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle" (Nesbit 1994, 197). Nesbit then writes: "Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal-cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon."

Scholars even argue over the specific wardrobe that influenced Lewis, as noted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in "Which one opened door to Narnia?" (Dec. 8, 2005), written by Tom Heinen, who also mentions the Nesbit story:

Lewis may have been influenced by author E. Nesbit, whose works he loved. In "The Aunt and Amabel" short story, a girl enters another world through a wardrobe. Lewis did not recall reading it but told a friend it must have helped trigger him, Mead said.

Another article, this one by Steve Chawkins in his article "Colleges both claim famous wardrobe" (January 3, 2006), offered online in the Lincoln Journal Star, reports on the same wardrobe war:

David Colbert, author of a guide called "The Magical Worlds of Narnia," contends that Lewis' wardrobe "was one of his many borrowings from E. Nesbit, one of Britain's favorite authors."

"The description of the wardrobe and the room and the world just beyond are almost direct borrowings from Nesbit's 'The Aunt and Amabel,'" Colbert said, "though, of course, Lewis' story quickly heads in another direction."

The debt to Nesbit is mentioned in passing by Mark Stibbe in his article "The Magic of Narnia" (August 2006), written for the British magazine Christianity:

And then there's the wardrobe. For all Lewis's indebtedness to E. Nesbit's The Aunt and Amabel, this remains one of the most brilliant liminal images in children's fiction (one which lesser children's writers in our own time have sought but failed to emulate).

It seems that a lot of people have noticed the Nesbit wardrobe but can't entirely agree upon its degree of influence on Lewis. The influence looks rather strong to me, and I suppose that most of the writers above would agree to this general observation, but the details get complicated when dealing with writers as erudite as C.S. Lewis.

At any rate, Lewis's debt to Nesbit is interesting to consider, at least for me . . . and perhaps also for you if you've read this far.

Beyond the book: page 1379 of Deathly Hallows...

The Latest Harry Potter Volume

(Image from Wikipedia)

Though still a little-known fact, the latest Potter volume contains more than 759 pages.

No, I don't mean those those seven blank pages nor the "About the Author" page, another blank page, the "About the Illustrator" page, or that last visible page, on art direction and the choice of font.

Nope, not those.

I mean the part of the book that extends into another dimension, much like Doctor Who's TARDIS, which is bigger on the inside than on the outside. In those pages beyond our earthly dimensions, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows never seems to end.

It is, indeed, a hypertext, unbounded in all directions and linked to every other text in the universe, a veritable universe of discourse.

I've reached page 1379, where Voldemort fully melds with the Antichrist, something I've been anticipating for several volumes now as Voldemort has taken on ever-more-serpentine qualities and thereby grown ever-more Satanic. Turns out, then, that the entire anti-Potter faction among evangelicals has been utterly wrong the whole time about Rowling's supposed 'anti-Christian' magic. In these hypertextual pages, the Christian imagery grows ever more obvious. Those evangelicals who had opposed the Potter phenomenon for its 'pagan' worldview will just have to learn to read it in much the way that they've learned to read C.S. Lewis, seeing the deeper magic beneath the witchery and accepting the pagan details as vehicles for a Christian message, as Elisabeth Gruner has been arguing for some time.

Deathly Hallows is simply another expression for the valley of the shadow of death, so we should fear no evil...

"I'm 'a get medieval on your eyes"

Our Lady of Cardigan

Cardigan, Wales

"Go west, young man Gawain, go west..."

(Image from Mair O Aberteifi)

We left Gawain in trouble yesterday just as he had turned from devotion offered to the true heavenly queen to devotion offered to a more earthly aristocratic lady. Part of Gawain's trouble stems not from this pagan turn but from the nature of the courtly love that he accepts as part of his aristocratic culture.

I'm working on this topic (and hence boring my regular readers to tears) because the International Center for Korean Studies (ICKS) has asked me to present a paper at the ICKS International Conference on "Celibacy and Enlightenment/Salvation" (August 2-3, 2007), which will take place at Korea University. Since I've long wanted to write something about my favorite Medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I'm taking this opportunity to do so ... and thereby inflicting my interests on my wary but longsuffering readers.

The connection between the theme of this conference and my Gawain paper lies in the Christian conception of humankind's fallen nature and the need for a salvation external to one's own efforts. Early in the poem, Gawain is described -- though perhaps ironically -- as an almost perfect human being, one who perfectly embodies courtly and Christian virtues. He initially manages this by paying court to the Queen of Heaven, for he can thereby fulfull the demands of both systems. Gawain, however, must fail in his efforts at perfection if this poem is intended to convey a profoundly Christian soteriological point. The nature of Gawain's failure is what links my paper to the conference theme of celibacy and salvation, for when Gawain turns from the Virgin to Lady Bertilak, the love expressed turns from spiritual to carnal, for that's the nature of courtly love.

The following is part of what I've been working on to establish the problem posed by courtly love for Gawain's attempt to remain chaste. I'm not saying anything new, of course; I'm merely trying to fill some details for scholars outside of Medieval English studies.

In the Medieval context, courtly love would ordinarily entail some problematic elements. In the ideal case, a knight devoted himself to service not only to his liege lord but also to his lord's wife, whom he was bound to protect, honor, and love. But what sort of love? Although perhaps modeled on the paradigm of the Christian's devotion to the Virgin Mary, in which case the ideal courtly love would be a highly sublimated sort of love similar to Christian caritas (cf. Edmund Reiss, "Fin'amors: Its History and Meaning in Medieval Literature," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1979), 74-99), the reality is that courtly love was an unstable complex of sexual desire and spiritual aims. Francis Newman noted that courtly love was "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent" (Francis X. Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly Love (1968) vii). Similarly, C.S. Lewis described it as "love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love" (C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), page 2). From a rigorously Christian perspective, courtly love is inherently adulterous, for its practice entails that mature men express their love for an already married lady in language that powerfully emphasizes her physical beauty. From the explicit teaching of Christ as given in Matthew 5:27-28:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

The operative word here in this King James Bible, obviously, is "lust," but we should dig a bit deeper into the past and look at the Wycliffe English translation, for John Wycliffe was a contemporary of the Pearl Poet:

Ye han herd that it was seid to elde men, Thou schalt do no letcherie. But Y seie to you, that euery man that seeth a womman for to coueite hir, hath now do letcherie bi hir in his herte. (Matheu 5:27-28: Wycliffe Bible)

But we should also check the Latin Vulgate, which the Pearl Poet would surely have known:

Audistis quia dictum est antiques: non moechaberis. Ego autem dico vobis: quoniam omnis qui viderit mulierem ad concupiscendum eam iam moechatus est eam in corde suo. (Matthaeus 5:27-28: Vulgate)

The two words are thus coueite (covet) and concupiscendum (ardent desire), and they are related etymologically. The former derives from the Latin word cupere, meaning "to desire, covet," and in the 14th century, the time of both Wycliffe and the Pearl Poet, the word coueite meant "To desire with concupiscence or with fleshly appetite" (OED I, 1106, 2), hence demonstrating why Wycliffe (or one of the Wycliffe 'team') rendered the Latin Vulgate's concupiscendum by the Middle English coueite. As for the latter term, concupiscendum, it derives from the Latin concupere (the intensive prefix con- plus cupere, thus "to long for, desire"). The related Latin term concupiscentia was taken over into English as "concupiscence" as early as the 14th century, appearing in Chaucer, The Parson's Tale (c. 1386), with the meaning of "Libidinous desire, sexual appetite, lust" (OED I, 777, 2). Given the Pearl Poet's theological interests and scriptural knowledge, he would surely be aware of Christ's teaching on adultery as a matter of lusting in one's heart.

I still need to fill out this part of my paper more completely, for I need to put my own stamp on the material, maybe liven it up a bit so that it won't be quite so boring as this blog entry.

Perhaps if I were to quote from Lady Bertilak's attempts to seduce Gawain...

Now for some more godless ramblings...

C.S. Lewis

Another Godless Rambler?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Since Silly Sally and her acolytes object to my godless attention to Tiber-Swimmer Robert Koons, perhaps it's time to return to that article in which Koons was training for his swim.

But maybe you didn't know about my godlessness? Well, first from Silly Sally (aka Harvard Man):

I "sense" a thin coat of religious profession behind the surface of Gypsy Scholar's heart, hiding the inside from view; ... I sense ungodliness alive beneath.

Next, from Silly Sally's anonymous acolyte:

Maybe, there is a huge resevoir of ungodliness underneath that religious exterior.

I don't know quite when my 'religiosity' became an issue since I've neither focused on my private views nor ever suggested that I possess any special sanctity. I guess that I'm nevertheless a hypocrite because if I discuss religious issues, then I'm presenting myself as religious but must be pretending because I won't reveal my personal religious views in detail. But as I once told Silly Sally, I'm not interested in discussing my personal faith online with her, for I don't trust her -- nor do I know that I can trust all of the hundreds of people visiting my blog daily. Anonymous Acolyte is a fine example of why I shouldn't reveal too much of myself online, for The Acolyte -- being unsure of how to attack me spiritually -- attacks my 'priggishness' instead:

You are a prig using his own arbitrary standard as a hammer of malice against a unique personality. You can call your Procrustean bed simple blog propriety. But, to others it looks like mean spirited priggery. Discerning inspection reveals Sally to be quite proper.

Anonymous Acolyte was defending Silly Sally's right to self-expression of this sort:

Sonagi, You Buddha-bitch ex-Mormon niggard.

That was Silly Sally's 'humorous' (I suppose) response to Sonagi's criticisms. I reckon that I should be grateful to Silly Sally and The Acolyte for demonstrating to me the way, the truth, and the life through their own online behavior. But their pseudonymous and anonymous status leaves me wondering to whom I should be so grateful for such scriptural forthrightness and spiritual courage.

But let's turn again to Robert Koons, who avoids ad hominem and signs his own name to his words. Here, speaking still as a Lutheran -- in the pdf file of his "Lutheran's Case for Roman Catholicism" (July 13, 2006) -- he makes an intriguing analogy between Lutheran views and Gnostic ones concerning the nature of the body:

The Lutheran conception of glorification embodies a kind of Gnosticism, wrongly identifying our sinfulness with our physical bodies. Lutheran theologians assume that the death of our mortal bodies will, all by itself, free us forever from the propensity to sin, as though sin's reality in our lives is grounded entirely in our physical aspects. In fact, Paul uses the word 'flesh' (sarx) to refer to aspects of our lives that are entirely mental, intellectual and spiritual in nature (such as envy or pride). If our soul is still 'fleshly' at death, the mere separation of that soul from our bodies will not suffice to correct its disordered state: a process of purification after death will be required.

Why does Koons say this? Because in his studied opinion:

The core of the Lutheran position then, seems to be that this transformation [into a sanctified state] (i.e., our final glorification) must occur instantaneously and willy-nilly at the death of the believer -- that no active cooperation by us is involved. Lutherans in effect insist that sanctification has nothing to do with glorification -- we are all equally and immediately glorified at death, regardless of how far our sanctification has progressed, and this final step requires no cooperation or suffering on our part.

In other words, once free of the corrupt, physical body, the Christian soul is instantly sanctified. Hmmm.... Well, Lutheranism isn't my tradition, so I can only accept (provisionally, anyway) what Koons has stated, but I confess that I have noticed a tendency in Protestant rhetoric toward a sort of Gnostic denigration of the world.

Take an example from Silly Sally's comments:

The world is ever the same; one huge mass of sin and ungodliness . . . . It must be you who are changed; it must be you who die to it. Now, is it not true that it is the meeting of the two worlds in one embrace, which gives the [outside] world all its power to ensnare and entangle your feet? . . . . Let the worldly spirit be but crucified in your breast, then you shall be like the dying man who has no sympathy with the living world. You will be transformed: transcendent orientated. You will gladly seek pie in the sky.

Some of this I can agree with, but the concluding remark leaves me wondering. Pie in the sky? Lurks there here a quasi-Gnostic denigration of things physical, of an evil cosmos, of a hopelessly corrupt body?

I don't know, but rhetorically, Silly Sally's words indicate denigration of the world. My question partly turns on the ambiguity in the term "world." What is meant here? Is one not to enjoy things of the created world as gifts from God? Is life just one vale of tears, a painful pilgrimage through the shadow of death?

Or is one allowed to enjoy a fine wine -- maybe even, along with C.S. Lewis, an occasional pipeful of tobacco?

Don't hold back, Hugh, tell us what you really think of C. S. Lewis...

C. S. Lewis

Photograph by Arthur Strong, 1947

"...the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earthy-stopper"

(Image from Wikipedia)

For our prurient erudition, here's a quote from a letter that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote about C. S. Lewis to Bernard Berenson, describing Lewis with intellectual and aristocratic disdain as:

"a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earthy-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity: a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature and (of course) poetry: a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish -- beefsteak-and-kidney-pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and ... reactionary nihilism."

You can read this fine quote in Richard King's review (in "arts, books, other reviews") of Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, published in England by Weidenfeld and Nicolson).

King, who calls Trevor-Roper "an acquired taste," also cites one of his old teachers, who in commenting on seventeenth century historiography informed him "that it was sad and troubling that the Marxist historian and Master of Balliol Christopher Hill was such a nice man but wrong, whereas the Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was a very unpleasant man but right" about politics, economics, and history.

He wasn't right about the forged Hitler Diaries, of course.

For your further reading, the webpage "arts, books, other reviews" is published in the September 2006 issue of the online journal New Directions, which is part of a larger website, Trushare (aka The Cost of Conscience), "an Association of Anglican priests from all over the world ... committed to Safeguarding our Heritage: the Deposit of Faith, once delivered to the saints, which has been entrusted to us for the present time."

Amazing, the places that Gypsy Scholar leads the unwary reader, advancing "swiftly rowld / In tangles" through "wandering mazes lost"(cf. Paradise Lost 9.631-632, 2.561)...