(#ulink_25232f2e-9fee-5597-a54b-ece3318fc145)
2 Genius (as translation of Gk. δαιμων) guardian spirit of a place or person > guardian angel > higher self > ‘genius’ of a poet. This is the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare’s Troil. IV. iv. 50 etc,
(#ulink_eff6fb19-3be1-53fb-ad1c-2f2c7d1a8e5a) and of the bower of bliss.
(#ulink_4016fc9c-da94-5e83-8046-2977cfcdc1e5)
On p. 65 at the top, might one add Deut. XXXIII 2,
(#ulink_6a306a76-6d04-569b-adfb-bb09fd1cbabc) as a common influence on both?
But it is time I stopped. I have no other points even of trivial disagreement, and if I continued I should only pile up praises in a way you might reasonably dislike. I will only say that you have left me longing to re-read the F.Q.—and all previous books on Spenser have produced just the opposite effect.
I suppose you got my second note agreeing to take one pair of gaseous but intelligent scholars?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
[The Kilns]
26th Dec. 1934
My dear Griffiths
There was nothing to apologise for. My friendship with you began in disagreement and matured in argument, and is beyond the reach of any dangers of that kind.
If I object at all to what you said, I object not as a friend or as a guest, but as a logician. If you are going to argue with me on the points at issue between our churches, it is obvious that you must argue to the truth of your position, not from it. The opposite procedure only wastes your time and leaves me to reply, moved solely by embarrassment, tu sei santo ma tu non sei filosofo!
(#ulink_57973cfe-f294-5ac4-9336-c722b76d287d) But I still think it more profitable to adhere to our former agreement and to keep off the question.
But I enjoyed my visit very much and so, I hope, did de Peyer-anima candida,
(#ulink_ae060882-fda1-5b5b-abe6-c6697da4d98c) a man whom I prize more every time I see him.
(#ulink_dc3ae0d1-19c4-5723-bafe-dded6df8717a)
Please thank the Prior for his hospitality and accept my best wishes (my prayers you may be sure you have) for every success both spiritual and natural.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Dec. 26th. 1934
My dear Arthur,
I have carried your letter about in a pocket all this term with the intention of answering it, and here goes at last! I wonder how much of its news is still up to date. For example, if I had replied when the letter came I should have said ‘I am so glad to hear that you have settled down in a comfortable routine’—but I can’t do so now because you may have got unsettled since!
I wish you had told me a little more about Voyage to Arcturus.
(#ulink_22ec7466-c17b-53dd-8ba2-8a95210c8358) Even if you can’t describe it, you could at least give me some idea what it is about: at least whether it is about a voyage to Arcturus or not. I haven’t come across the book yet, but will certainly read it if I do.
Which reminds me have you read ‘Gape Row’ by Agnes Romilly White?
(#ulink_986f6926-2e8a-5a74-b880-20aadccdfeed) Gape Row is the name of a village which turns out with absolute certainty to be Dundonald, if you work out all the geographical indications. It is not a very good novel—indeed I am not sure it isn’t a definitely bad novel (tho’ several reviewers seem to have thought otherwise), but fancy reading of characters in a book looking down on the Lough from above Holywood Barracks, or, again, nearer Dundonald, looking over to the Castlereagh Hills! The scenery is quite well described, and it is probably the only chance you and I will ever have of seeing that landscape described in fiction—except our own fiction, of course! The characters [are] all of the cottage class, and the dialect is well done—not that that kind of thing interests me after a few pages. If you want a New Year’s Gift for any one like Gundrede
(#ulink_715c34f0-e0a4-5f7b-bdcd-8e63e303148c) or Janie (I mean like them in love of dialect) this would do admirably. Now I come to think of it, is Janie the author? (Don’t let this raise false expectations in your mind. I don’t mean what you mean.)
We had this term a concert which I enjoyed more than any I have ever heard.
(#ulink_e2339124-89bd-5f3f-bc04-594e09c719aa) Beecham conducted and the bill of fare was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
(#ulink_a63c4c3e-f4cd-5a75-b058-3e92452730cf) a Debussy suite, Sibelius’ Tapiola (forest-god of the Finns)
(#ulink_86e56e81-6973-5e21-a2ef-42eb84de3961) and Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
(#ulink_672f267a-9b65-50d2-b35e-b2792e896dfa) For one thing, I have hardly ever before been at a concert where I liked all the items. The Elgar (do you know it?) I had never heard before and did not fully understand, but I understood enough to admire it greatly. For another thing, the playing was marvellous. I thought I knew the symphony from Warnie’s records, but Beecham brought things out of it that I’d never dreamed of.
Apart from this, very little has happened to me. I have addressed societies at Manchester and Birmingham and am doing one at Cambridge next term, which, I suppose, is a step in one’s career. I have had lunch and spent the afternoon at a monastery in the Cotswolds, where a former pupil of mine is a monk.
(#ulink_7e292c6c-1eac-5593-9a1b-b0f49b11e7af) Funny to have a silent lunch (except that a book is read aloud) amidst rows of white robed figures and then to file out behind them—chanting—down the long, dark corridor. One of them was a fine old man with a white beard, which just added the last touch. Don’t be alarmed: the effect on me was purely aesthetic, not religious, and during the afternoon my host talked nonsense enough to put me off the conventual life for ever and a day. Give my love to your mother and let me have a letter when you can.
Yours
Jack
1 (#ulink_18a7700d-3a11-500e-a55d-64818f29356d) The Morlocks are the subterranean workers in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895).
2 (#ulink_c61c1d52-4cce-5364-85aa-6bf3c9ba439c) ‘quick survey’.
3 (#ulink_51a5fe9b-8d0b-5721-87a6-709d591530be) Lewis was here mimicking evangelical clergymen such as his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton (1826–1905), Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela. 1874–1900. See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
4 (#ulink_51a5fe9b-8d0b-5721-87a6-709d591530be) The Rev. John Thomas Belton (1899–1966) took his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1917 and was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1920. He was Curate of Aghalee, Co. Down, 1919–20, Vicar of Shankill, 1921–5, and Rector of Kilkeel, 1925–57.
5 (#ulink_6b5bd69b-e554-5522-9a80-629406d47f3d) He is referring to their father’s way of ordering whisky. When he wrote to Warnie on 7 August 1921 about a family holiday in England, Jack said their father told the waitress: ‘I’ll have a bottle of soda water…and if you’d just put a little Scotch whiskey in it’ (CL I. p. 573).
6 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Idealism in this context is a metaphysical theory about the nature of reality, maintaining that matter does not exist in its own tight but is related to the contents of our minds. Thus, all objects, even the world, are mental creations. In SBJ, ch. 13, Lewis explained the place of Idealism in his conversion, describing how he reached the point where he accepted Idealism and admitted ‘that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos’.
7 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Scholasticism was originally a teaching device developed in the schools and universities of Western Europe from the end of the eleventh century and largely associated with the methods of three major philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. It proceeded by questioning ancient and authoritative texts. A favoured method was to draw up lists of contradictory statements in the texts, applying to them the rules of logic in order to reveal their underlying agreement. Its purpose was to get to the inner truth of things to which the texts bore witness. The method flourished until the sixteenth century when it came under attack from humanist scholars.
An attempt to restore scholasticism began in Rome about 1830. The most important of several theologians who wanted to extend this ‘neo-Scholasticism’ to the universal Church was Pope Leo XIII; in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), he recommended that scholasticism be the only philosophy and theology used in Catholic seminaries. The Pope enjoined the study of St Thomas Aquinas on all theology students as a clear, systematic philosophy capable of defending Christian tradition from contemporary attack.
