Clive Lewis: Christian Reflections

COPYRIGHT CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Preface by Walter Hooper Christianity and Literature Christianity and Culture Religion: Reality or Substitute? On Ethics De Futilitate The Poison of Subjectivism The Funeral of a Great Myth On Church Music Historicism The Psalms The Language of Religion Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer Fern-seed and Elephants The Seeing Eye About the Author Other Books By About the Publisher

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

1

Copyright © 1967 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.

Copyright renewed 1973 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd

This ebook first published by William Collins in 2017

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN 9780008203856

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008228552

Version: 2016-12-15

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright COPYRIGHT CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Preface by Walter Hooper Christianity and Literature Christianity and Culture Religion: Reality or Substitute? On Ethics De Futilitate The Poison of Subjectivism The Funeral of a Great Myth On Church Music Historicism The Psalms The Language of Religion Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer Fern-seed and Elephants The Seeing Eye About the Author Other Books By About the Publisher William Collins An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com 1 Copyright © 1967 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. Copyright renewed 1973 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd This ebook first published by William Collins in 2017 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN 9780008203856 Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008228552 Version: 2016-12-15

Preface by Walter Hooper

Christianity and Literature

Christianity and Culture

Religion: Reality or Substitute?

On Ethics

De Futilitate

The Poison of Subjectivism

The Funeral of a Great Myth

On Church Music

Historicism

The Psalms

The Language of Religion

Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer

Fern-seed and Elephants

The Seeing Eye

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PREFACE

We were talking one day in 1963, C. S. Lewis and I, about the ‘resurrection’ of literary works. He mentioned Sir Walter Scott as one of his favourite authors whose books had gone out of fashion, but which appeared to be undergoing just such a resurrection. When I predicted that his own books would suffer no decline, he cautioned me against putting too high a value on them. Indeed, he tried to modulate my enthusiasm by pointing out that after an author’s death the general ‘rule’ is that the sales of his books fall drastically and eventually dry up altogether. ‘But sometimes – not by any means always –’, he said, ‘an author’s works undergo a kind of “resurrection”. But that is something no author, alive or dead, can count on.’

A literary historian, Lewis was naturally familiar with this phenomenon. He cherished no undue optimism as to what would happen to his books, and thus his frequent but gentle admonitions when I praised them more than he felt they deserved, and certainly more than made him comfortable. The truth is that Lewis was almost without opinions regarding the value of his writings. In so far as he was ‘worried’ about their future, it was simply that if the sales of his books stopped, and he died first, his elder brother Warren might find it difficult to survive.

A man of such remarkable astuteness, it must seem to many a wonder that C. S. Lewis could have been so unprophetic about the enduring success of his own books – such a glaring exception to the ‘rule’ he spoke of. But those familiar with his life will recall that Lewis was always more interested in writing and arguing for truth, whatever his subject, than in what he might become as a result of it. In this sense, he perfectly fulfilled what, in his essay on ‘Christianity and Literature’, he believed to be the proper attitude of a Christian author towards his own works: ‘Of every idea and of every method he will ask not “Is it mine?” but “Is it good?”’

While he seemed oblivious to the good he had himself given the world, he was by no means oblivious of the harm which has resulted from the widespread apostasy of the clergy, the cant and slush talked by the liberalizing ‘intelligentsia’ and the general lunacy of the world. Lewis certainly knew his place in all this, seeing himself as a Christian layman committed to explaining and defending what he called that ‘enormous common ground’ of belief which, by God’s mercy, exists at the centre of most Christian communions.

Talking about the spiritual bankruptcy we saw around us, Lewis said to me, ‘Our civilization was built upon Christian morals and nourished by the Faith of the Apostles. It was rather like a huge bank account to which many contributed and which everyone has drawn upon. Now, we know that you cannot go on writing cheques on an account unless you continue to add to its capital. The trouble is that, without adding to that capital, we continue to write cheques. One day that capital will run out.’ An apt analogy, it was nevertheless an unusual one coming from a man who was so extraordinarily free with his time and who regularly gave away more than two-thirds of his income to charity.

But be that as it may. Looking back, I realize that while I have always taken seriously Lewis’s fear of our spiritual ‘capital’ running out, nothing he said about the possibility of the demise of his books ever made much of an impression on me. Working in team with my fellow-trustee of the Estate, Owen Barfield, we have sought to make everything Lewis published or left unpublished available to as wide a public as possible. A public, incidentally, which has made itself known to us by the many thousands of letters of gratitude and encouragement we have received over the last sixteen years since Lewis died. What would have happened if Mr Barfield and I had not persevered we shall never know with any exactness.

What we are in no doubt about is that Lewis’s achievements, judging from the rapidly increasing sales of his books, have been spectacular. So spectacular that it has amounted to, if not a ‘resurrection’, at least a renaissance of Christian thought.