8 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher. Following his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1906 he turned to the study of St Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy he sought to relate to modern culture. He held professorial chairs at the Institut Catholique in Paris, 1914–33, the Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto, 1933–45, and Princeton University, 1948–52.
9 (#ulink_bfbf95a1-1d4f-53d3-940c-387acb8aa0df) The salvation of the virtuous infidel was to become an increasingly important issue to Lewis. He was familiar with the fact that in The Divine Comedy Dante put the Emperor Trajan in Paradise (see Purgatorio X, 74–93; Paradiso XX, 44–5) because of the legend that Pope Gregory the Great, through his prayers, brought Trajan back from Hell and baptized him to salvation. Of greater importance was Aquinas’s teaching on ‘baptism by desire’, e.g. Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 68: ‘when a man wishes to be baptized, but by some ill-chance he is forestalled by death before receiving Baptism…such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of faith that worketh by charity…’
Lewis came to believe that virtuous heretics or pagans could be saved through Christ. ‘I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God,’ he wrote to Mrs Ashton on 8 November 1952, ‘is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him’ (WHL, p, 428). He provided an illustration of this in The Last Battle (1956), ch. 15. On meeting Asian in the heavenly Narnia, Emeth the Calormene explains that he had been seeking Tash all his life. ‘Beloved,’ said Asian, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’
10 (#ulink_0e5521aa-8baf-5122-bf82-5774a8e3f037) i.e. J. R. R. Tolkien.
11 (#ulink_153b91ea-5fd8-5954-a7a1-a0dfbaa4d291) Lewis published this ‘anonymously’ with slight variations in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964). It is included under the title ‘Prayer’ in CP, pp. 136–7.
12 (#ulink_e0fb8315-b829-5b25-ab27-c8dd8fc3f533) ‘May you humbly love the rivers and woods’, adapting Virgil, Georgics 2. 486.
13 (#ulink_65146e2c-2b64-5805-981f-cc4fcd288685) i.e. stop to obtain food or drink.
14 (#ulink_982f55f0-44a3-524b-ae58-070a3d873d13) Sister M. Madeleva CSC (1887–1964), a member of the Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Cross, was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. While staying in Oxford during Trinity Term 1934 she attended Lewis’s lectures on medieval poetry, and had a particular interest in the lecture devoted to Boethius. Besides lending Sister Madeleva his notebooks giving details of the works mentioned in his lectures, Lewis invited her to visit him in Magdalen. On her return to Notre Dame in 1934, Sister Madeleva was made President of St Mary’s College, a post she held until her retirement in 1961. Her numerous books include Knights Errant and other Poems (1923), Chaucer’s Nun and Other Essays (1925), Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925), Penelope and Other Poems (1927), Selected Poems (1939), A Lost Language (1951), The Four Last Things (1959) and an autobiography, My First Seventy Years (1959). See Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: A Biography (1997).
15 (#ulink_33293399-3e22-54ed-acc3-0b9ce07bd73a) During the Trinity Term of 1934 (22 April-16 June) Lewis gave a series of lectures entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry’, later adapted into The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). For a detailed list of Lewis’s lectures see Walter Hooper, ‘The Lectures of C. S. Lewis in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, Christian Scholar’s Review, XXVII, no. 4 (Summer 1998). pp. 436–53.
16 (#ulink_6ea6d6dd-732b-55e2-8dd4-bb1d9e01379b) Walter William Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (1900). William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386) is the author of Piers Plowman, which Lewis discussed in The Allegory of lent, ch. 4, pp. 158–61.
17 (#ulink_6ea6d6dd-732b-55e2-8dd4-bb1d9e01379b) One ‘Prolegomena’ lecture had discussed the connection between Vincent of Beauvais (fl. 1250) and Chaucer’s ballad. Famine. In The Discarded Image Lewis wrote (p. 84); ‘Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned. Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Maturate, xix, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line “Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene” (Fortune, 35).’
18 (#ulink_b9f448e7-7fe5-5596-9d36-ef04e55598e4)The Romance of the Rose is a thirteenth-century French allegorical romance by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, It is discussed in chapter 3 of The Allegory of love
* (#ulink_b9f448e7-7fe5-5596-9d36-ef04e55598e4) I don’t claim to be such a person myself!
19 (#ulink_1578f066-b86a-5890-8216-d5d1e7edef71) Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), French authority on medieval philosophy, is the author of La Philosophie au Moyen Age (1922), Moral Values and the Moral Life: The System of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Leo Richard Ward (1931), and many other works.
20 (#ulink_867a29d5-ad7d-5483-a3e6-ae9c28ec44ce) Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), Hadrian the Seventh (1904).
21 (#ulink_e10fbacd-0a53-57b5-be69-4aa9ac517bd6) Numbers 13:33.
22 (#ulink_be9db6f8-8b12-53d2-8be5-80e604bb1086) Paul Elmer Mote (1864–1937), American critic and philosopher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, He taught Sanskrit at Harvard, 1894–5, and Bryn Mawr, 1895–7, and was a newspaper editor for twelve years. During 1919 he lectured on Plato at Princeton University. More was associated with Irving Babbitt, champion of humanism and founder of the modern humanistic movement. His major works are the Shelburne Essays (11 vols., 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols., 1921–31), and the New Shelburne Essays (3 vols., 1928–36). Princeton University Library has in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections the three letters from Lewis to More published in this volume, and also copies (in Lewis’s hand) of three letters from More to Lewis.
23 (#ulink_779440eb-5999-56e4-b0be-82d55be03cca) Paul Elmer More, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934).
24 (#ulink_d3b14037-1b95-5c68-8926-54cbe359f0b7) ‘by the force of the term’.
25 (#ulink_51f357e3-708f-5db2-8d78-d9ff6091c0ba) ‘necessity’. The reference here is to the old proverb: ‘Against necessity not even the gods may fight.’
26 (#ulink_51f357e3-708f-5db2-8d78-d9ff6091c0ba) ‘a pure act’, in the sense of the pure actuality of God. The phrase is standard in some later Latin literature (St Bonaventure uses it, as does Aquinas to describe ‘the Divine Being’).
27 (#ulink_a3a525e2-e3ae-52f6-8e17-b9d86b853b82) Dr Janet Spens (1876–1963) was born in Lanarkshire and educated at Glasgow University. She was joint founder and co-headmistress of Laurel Bank School, Glasgow, 1903–8, then returned to Glasgow University as Lecturer and Tutor, 1908–11. She was afterwards Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1911–36. Her books include Spenser’s Faerie Queene: An Interpretation (1934), Two Periods of Disillusion (19091, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition (1916) and Elizabethan Drama (1922).
28 (#ulink_427d8f83-bc90-528a-b156-697eb6231b7f) Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
29 (#ulink_427d8f83-bc90-528a-b156-697eb6231b7f) i.e. The Faerie Queene.
30 (#ulink_b06fecb6-4eb3-5f6b-8b0b-5b193260953d) ‘burden of proof’.
31 (#ulink_b06fecb6-4eb3-5f6b-8b0b-5b193260953d) Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, authorized trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1932–9).
32 (#ulink_bcbfb105-5281-52ac-8f5e-0f52c6eb6d79) Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, p. 55: ‘Spenser is essentially an Elizabethan, and the Elizabethans tended to utter their more intense emotions through the imagery of human figures; the men of the nineteenth century had been trained to accept the expression of theirs through the imagery of inanimate nature.’
33 (#ulink_5fc7e898-db04-5a4b-8e85-e33ffad59042) ibid., p. 68: ‘The description here [Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xii, 10, line 9] is almost Addisonian in its delineation of the mixture of superficiality and pose with naïve self-revelation and vacant wonder characteristic of an English crowd. It gives the dragon concrete reality as nothing else could do.’
34 (#ulink_5fc7e898-db04-5a4b-8e85-e33ffad59042) William Lindsay Renwick, Complaints: Edmund Spenser (1928).
35 (#ulink_7d2396a4-714b-5b55-a3b7-6ee9feb52438) In Spenser’s Faerie Queene Dr Spens staled of Busyrane (or Busirane); ‘There has been some discussion of the meaning of Amoret’s experience, but there can, I think, be little doubt. Her tortures at the hands of Busyrane in the House of Cupid represent the mental sufferings of the young wife in consequence of the too lustful element in Sir Scudamour’s passion for her’ (p. 105). Cf., however, The Allegory of Love, ch. 12: ‘To find the real foe of Chastity, the real portrait of false love, we must turn to Malecasta and Busirane. The moment we do so we find that Malecasta and Busirane are nothing else than the main subject of this study-Courtly Love; and that Courtly Love is in Spenser’s view the chief opponent of Chastity. But Chastity for him means Britomart, married love. The story he tells is therefore part of my story; the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery.’
36 (#ulink_69a36b92-6bfb-5f2f-9db3-906dd0895221)A Latin Dictionary founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev. and enlarged edn by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (1879).
37 (#litres_trial_promo) Alanus ab Insulis (c. 1128–1203) mentions ‘Genius’ in De Planctu Naturae, Prosa V, 40ff. See The Allegory of Love, p. 106.
38 (#litres_trial_promo) John Cower (1330–1408) wrote about ‘Genius’ in Confessio Amantis, Prologue, 881ff.
39 (#litres_trial_promo) The Garden of Adonis is described in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, vi, 34ff.
40 (#litres_trial_promo) William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1609), IV, iv, 50; ‘Some say the Genius so/Cries “Come” to him that instantly must die.’
41 (#litres_trial_promo) In Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, xii.
42 (#ulink_0efa02ca-f469-58a0-8de0-86c030057390) Deuteronomy 33;2: ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.’
43 (#ulink_7bc31837-4a74-5006-b2dd-9b3c05968a65) ‘You are a holy one, but you are no philosopher!’ It is not known why Lewis wrote this in Italian.
44 (#ulink_bc89b2c0-9a3f-5a46-923c-aa449e193fa3) ‘(speaking) in a sincere spirit’.
45 (#ulink_bc89b2c0-9a3f-5a46-923c-aa449e193fa3) This was probably Charles Hubert Sebastian de Peyer (1905–83), one of three brothers who went to Magdalen College. He was educated at Cheltenham School, after which he read PPE at Magdalen and took his BA in 1929. He was a civil servant with the Ministry of Power and a member of the UK Delegation to the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, with rank of minister in the Labour Party, 1953–7. He served as borough councillor for West Hertfordshire, 1964–75.
46 (#ulink_f1d9059c-55d0-53aa-99cd-c4d113a9daa0) David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Methuen, 1920). This book was to have an important influence on Lewis’s science fiction novels; see the letters to Charles A. Brady of 29 October 1944 and to Ruth Pitter of 4 January 1947.
47 (#ulink_79eeb97d-da5d-5176-934c-605d5cf5f95d) Agnes Romilly White, Gape Row [1934].
48 (#ulink_79eeb97d-da5d-5176-934c-605d5cf5f95d) i.e. Gundreda Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL 1.
49 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) The concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre on 15 November 1934.
50 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, first performed in 1808.
51 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Jean Sibelius, Tapiola, a symphonic poem first performed in 1926.
52 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Edward Elgar, Enigma Variations, first performed in 1899.
53 (#ulink_55dcdb80-c396-52b2-9cc2-b42e00fe549e) i.e. Dom Bede Griffiths.
1935 (#ulink_7164c826-e391-5d26-89b6-463dd64cbcb4)
TO JANET SPENS (BOD):
