Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

Lord: A Study in the Creed (London: Mowbray, 1953; 2nd impression, 1954).

101 Lewis was reading the typescript of the book; the page numbers of the typescript differ from those in the published book which are the ones given below.

102 ibid., ch. 8, p. 48: ‘When a smith says of a sword, “It is finished,” he means that it is ready to be used. Only when it has served its purpose and has no longer any raison d’être, does the end of a thing mean its ceasing to exist. The two Ends that our Lord is seeing in St. Mark xiii exactly illustrate this difference. The End of the Temple was the destruction of the Temple, because the type was no longer needed when the thing typified, the New Humanity, had come. But when Man comes to his End, he will be finished in the sense of being ready, at last, for the purpose for which he was made.’

103 ibid., ch. 6, pp. 34-5: ‘Except for the saying of John the Baptist, “He that hath the bride is the bridegroom,” the bride is never mentioned in the Gospels. Why? Surely because she did not yet exist, because the New Eve had yet to be created, as the Fathers loved to say, out of the pierced side of the Second Adam on the Cross. Later in the New Testament St. Paul, in Ephesians v.22 ff., uses the husband and wife analogy for the relation between Christ and His Church, but does not expressly name her either wife or bride. In the Apocalypse, however, right to the end she is only the bride, the wife to be. For the Church is not yet wholly one with Christ, as man was one with God before the Fall; and the consummation of “the marriage of the Lamb” with the bride of His own redeeming and remaking is itself the consummation for which the whole creation waits.’

104 ibid., pp. 37-8: ‘There is so much that is obvious about Palm Sunday, our Lord’s deliberate and literal fulfilment of Zechariah’s prophecy about the peaceful king, the bitter contrast between that triumph and the Passion following, that other things no less significant often get overlooked…That impromptu procession of the Passover pilgrims on the first Palm Sunday combined the themes and types of both those two great Feasts. But over and above all that, the festal coming of Christ to Jerusalem was a symbol of His final, finished Coming to the Father as the Son of Man. That, at least, is how St. Bernard sees it. The liturgical palm procession, he says, which re-enacts that entry, represents the glory of our heavenly fatherland.’

105 ibid., ch. 9, pp. 58-9: ‘The Greek says, “He was metamorphosed before them,” He changed His form. Metamorphosis, change of form at different stages on the way to perfection, is common in the natural world, the most familiar instance being that of the creature which ends up as a butterfly, after being successively an egg, a caterpillar, and a chrysalis. The Transfiguration of Christ suggests that Man also is a metamorphic creature…After death [Christ] passed again to His perfection, this time finally. In that perfected body, that yet bore the marks of what its larval form had borne on Calvary, He was touched and handled, as well as seen and heard, by many of His friends during the Great Forty Days.’

106 ibid., ch. 2, p. 9.

107 ‘waiting for’.

108 Sister Penelope removed this word from the book.

109 The word ‘neo-Paganism’ was also removed from the book.

110 ‘respect’.

111 ‘fear of the gods’.

112 ‘world’ as in John 9:39: ‘For judgement I am come into this world.’

113 Corbin Scott Carnell (1929-) was born in Ormond, Florida, on 7 July 1929, the son of Stanley and Doris (Scott) Carnell. He received a BA from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 1952, and an MA from Columbia University in New York, 1953. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 1960 where his dissertation topic was ‘The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis’ Interpretation of “Sehnsucht” ‘. Carnell was, successively, Teaching Associate, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College, West Virginia, 1953-76. He served as Professor of English at the University of Florida, 1976-2000. His thesis was published as Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Reeling Intellect (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).

114 Carnell said of this letter: ‘I inquired about the lengthy footnote in Miracles which asserts that some Biblical miracles are to be understood rather literally, others not.’ The footnote he was inquiring about is a reference to the book of Jonah in Miracles, ch. 15, note 1: ‘A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this book and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view…would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History…The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology–the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical…I take it that the Memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end.’

115 On Lewis’s first confession see his letters to Sister Penelope of 24 October and 4 November 1942 (CL II, pp. 450-2, 453-4).

116 President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a speech of 16 April 1953, reported in The Times (17 April 1953), p. 8, under the title ‘President Eisenhower’s Appeal to Russia’: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’

117 See the biography of Margaret Deneke attached to letter of 3 October 1944 in supplement. Deneke was making plans to produce a volume of reminiscences about her kinsman, P. V. M. Benecke. The book was published as Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868-1944) (Oxford: A. T. Broome & Son, 1954), and Lewis’s contributions are found on pp. 3, 31-4.

118 Philemon 10: ‘I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds.’

119 Matthew 12:37.

120 Professor Masato Hori was a teacher at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan.