The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’ Most Moving Addresses. C. S. Lewis

Oration” given at King’s College, University of London, on 14 December 1944. (7) “Membership” was read to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius, Oxford, on 10 February 1945 at the invitation of Miss Anne Spalding, an old friend of Charles Williams, as it was in Miss Spalding’s parents’ home that Williams lived when he moved to Oxford at the outbreak of World War II. The paper was originally published in Sobornost, no. 31 (June 1945).

      (8) “On Forgiveness” was written at the request of Father Patrick Kevin Irwin (1907–1965) and sent to him on 28 August 1947 for inclusion in Father Irwin’s parish magazine of the Church of St. Mary, Sawston, Cambridgeshire. However, Father Irwin was transferred to the Church of St. Augustine, Wisbech, before it could be published, and I first heard of the essay in 1975 when members of the priest’s family deposited the manuscript in the Bodleian Library. It was first pub lished in Lewis’s Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity (London: Fount/Collins, 1975).

      (9) “A Slip of the Tongue” was the last sermon Lewis preached. It was given at the invitation of the Chaplain of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Father C. A. Pierce, in the college chapel at Evensong on 29 January 1956. Unlike Magdalen College, Oxford, the Cambridge college is quite small, and its chapel, a perfect little gem by candlelight, is indeed tiny. Even so, the Chapel Register reveals that it was crowded with so many people—one hundred—that extra seats had to be brought in. The sermon was published in Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (London: Fount/Collins, 1965), which volume Lewis was helping his publisher plan just before he died.

      I am grateful to Collins Publishers for permission to reprint “Is Theology Poetry?” “On Forgiveness”, and “A Slip of the Tongue”, and to Mr. Sayer for providing me with a copy of “Why I Am Not a Pacifist”. My thanks also to Owen Barfield for permitting me to edit this book and for all the other things that cause me to regard him as one of those friends who, by any reckoning, is one of the most obvious boasts of our fallen race.

      Walter Hooper

      7 March 1980 Oxford

PREFACE

      This book contains a selection of the too numerous addresses which I was induced to give during the late war and the years that immediately followed it. All were composed in response to personal requests and for particular audiences, without thought of subsequent publication. As a result, in one or two places they seem to repeat, though they really anticipated, sentences of mine which have already appeared in print. When I was asked to make this collection I supposed that I could remove such overlappings, but I was mistaken. There comes a time (and it need not always be a long one) when a composition belongs so definitely to the past that the author himself cannot alter it much without the feeling that he is producing a kind of forgery. The period from which these pieces date was, for all of us, an exceptional one; and though I do not think I have altered any belief that they embody I could not now recapture the tone and temper in which they were written. Nor would those who wanted to have them in a permanent form be pleased with a patchwork. It has therefore seemed better to let them go with only a few verbal corrections.

      I have to thank the S.P.C.K., the S.C.M., and the proprietors of Sobornost for their kind permission to reprint Weight of Glory, Learning in War-Time, and Membership, respectively. The Inner Ring here appears in print for the first time. A different version of Transposition, written expressly for that purpose and then translated into Italian, has appeared in the Rivista of Milan.

      C.S.L.

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

      If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

      We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.

      The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognised as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.

      But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy, he will, quite probably, be revelling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in [Greek]. Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already