Quotations and Allusions
in C. S. Lewis, That Hideous
Strength
compiled by Arend
Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)
...I consider a happy ending appropriate to the
light, holiday kind of fiction I was attempting. The Professor has mistaken
the ‘poetic justice’ of romance for an ethical theorem.
–– C. S. Lewis on J. B. S. Haldane’s critique of That Hideous Strength
...it appears confused only so long as we are trying to get out of it
what it never intended to give. It becomes intelligible and delightful as soon
as we take it for what it is – a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of
intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all)
of invention, which starts many hares and kills none. ... There is a thread of
serious thought running through it, an abundance of daring suggestions, several
back-handed blows at European institutions ... But he does not keep our noses
to the grindstone. He says many things for the fun of them, surrendering
himself to the sheer pleasure of imagined geography, imagined language, and
imagined institutions. That is what readers whose interests are rigidly
political do not understand: but everyone who has ever made an imaginary map
responds at once.
–– C. S. Lewis on
Thomas More’s Utopia
C. S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous
Strength (1945) contains, like most of his books, a great number of
allusions to unspecified books and situations. Here is a listing by chapter
and sub-chapter of many such words and phrases with brief references to what I
have found to be their sources. I have also included a few other items where a
short explanation may be of use to some readers. The list is based on notes I
made for my Dutch translation of this book, which was published in 2008 as Thulcandra.
I am referring to the full text of That
Hideous Strength. An abridgement was made by the author and first published
in the United States in 1946 as The Tortured Planet. Later this
abridgement was also published in Britain, now under its original title That
Hideous Strength. The abridged editions now appear to be no longer
available except second-hand.
Double question marks in bold type ( ?? )
mark those places where I am still hoping to find relevant details. Additions,
corrections, and proposals for new entries are welcome.
Dedication
J. McNeill
Jane Agnes McNeill (1889–1959), a Belfast
friend of both C. S. Lewis and his brother W. H. (‘Warnie’) Lewis. Warnie
also dedicated one of his own books to her. Jane McNeill had a wide literary
interest and she was particularly fond of old Scottish poetry. One of her
friends was Helen Waddell, a renowned medievalist whom she knew from the days
they were classmates at school. Jane could not go to university as she had an
ageing mother to care for. She was a long-time editor of The Victorian,
the magazine of Victoria College, her school in Belfast. In chapter 10 of CSL’s
autobiography, Surprised by Joy, she makes a brief appearance as ‘Janie
M’. She did not like That Hideous Strength and was not pleased with the
dedication.
Motto
Sir David Lyndsay
Scottish poet (1486–1555). Ane Dialog
is a long didactic poem on the history of the world. Its full title is Ane
Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour (1555), more usually known as The
Monarche. The original story of the Tower of Babel is in Genesis XI.4–9.
David Lyndsay should not be confused with the modern science fiction author
David Lindsay, whose book Voyage to Arcturus (1920) was one important
inspiration for C. S. Lewis to write science fiction.
that hyddeous Strength
Lyndsay was certainly using the word Strength
here in its now archaic sense of ‘stronghold’ or ‘fortress’.
Preface
The Abolition of Man
A three-part course of lectures given by C.
S. Lewis in Newcastle-on-Tyne for the University of Durham in February 1943,
and published in that same year by Oxford University Press.
Durham
A small cathedral town in Northern England
just south of Newcastle, beautifully situated in a bend of the river Wear. See
previous note.
Olaf Stapledon
English writer and philosopher (1886–1950).
His science fiction novel Last and First Men (1930) was one of the
things that prodded Lewis into trying his hand at the genre. Lewis’s first
attempt resulted in Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the beginning of
the Ransom trilogy. Lewis was repelled by the kind of philosophy that seemed to
be closely connected with this kind of writing; he wanted to put science
fiction to new and better uses. Stapledon in his turn had been much inspired by
J. B. S. Haldane’s essay ‘The Last Judgment’, published in Possible
Worlds (1927).
Numinor and the True West, Tolkien
Lewis of course means the fantasy world of
his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973). Tolkien
started writing down his ‘private mythology’ during the First World War and
continued working on it until his death. The Lord of the Rings was
published in 1954–1955 after some twenty years’ writing and re-writing and much
encouragement from Lewis during weekly sessions in their private literary club,
the ‘Inklings’. Since That Hideous Strength was written in 1943,
allusions to Tolkien must be references not to the finished text of The Lord
of the Rings, but to some early prefigurations and side products which
Tolkien had read aloud to his fellow Inklings. The almost exclusively aural
acquaintance with Tolkien’s fantasy world explains why Lewis writes Numinor
for Tolkien’s Númenor. The history of Númenor and the True West is
contained in The Lost Road and in The Silmarillon, both
published posthumously in 1977 and 1987, but written before The Lord of the
Rings.
Chapter 1 Sale of College
Property
(1.1)
the liturgy
The chapter ‘Solemnization of Matrimony’ in
the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
John Donne
English poet (1572–1631). He pioneered a
grim type of love poetry – i.e. he gave poetic expression to a grim view of
erotic love – which according to C. S. Lewis was the reason why Donne was being
overrated by twentieth-century readers (cf. Lewis’s 1938 essay ‘Donne and Love
Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’ in Selected Literary Essays, ed.
Walter Hooper, 1969, pp. 106–125). Jane Studdock has chosen a fashionable
subject and has fashionable ideas on it.
Love’s Alchymie
A poem from Donne’s Songs and Sonnets
(1631).
(1.2)
Henry de Bracton
Medieval English lawyer (†1268), author of
an important work on common law. He argued that the highest authority in the country,
i.e. the King, is not above the law: ‘The King is under the Law for it
is the Law that maketh him a King’ (thus quoted and translated by C. S. Lewis
in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 1954, p. 48).
Bracton College, Fellows
British universities (like the fictitious
‘University of Edgestow’ in the present book) are traditionally loose
associations of individual ‘Colleges’, each College having its own name,
governing body, staff, buildings, property and traditions. The College buildings
were usually grouped around one or more courtyards called Quadrangles, or
Quads, as described in chapter I.3. ‘Fellow’ is the usual designation of a
staff member.
elected to a Fellowship
A new Fellow was usually appointed after
comparative examinations and a ballot by the sitting staff.
it was still sweet in the mouth
Cf. Job 20:21.
Watson
Friend and adviser to Sherlock Holmes in
the detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930).
...liked his papers better than yours
Curry is referring to the comparative exam
which Mark had to take when applying for his Bracton fellowship (see note on
‘elected to a Fellowship’, above).
Distributivism
Properly called Distributism, this
is an ideal or theory of small-scale economic organization which had some
currency in the early decades of the twentieth century, notably among Roman
Catholics. Its chief spokesmen were G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
(1.3)
Inigo Jones
English architect and theatre designer
(1573–1652).
Bunyan
John Bunyan (1628–88), English Puritan
preacher and writer; author of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Walton
Izaak Walton (1593–1683), a Royalist and an
Anglican, was not a regular writer or scholar, but nevertheless wrote two books
which became very well-known: the Lives (a collection of short
biographies, including one about John Donne) and a book on angling and the
English countryside, The Compleat Angler (1653).
Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), Puritan leader
of the parliamentary army during the English Civil War. After the execution of
King Charles I, Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth for the last
five years of his life. Shortly afterwards the monarchy was restored.
Merlin who was the Devil’s son
In the Historia Britonum, compiled
by the Welsh monk Nennius (c. 800 A.D.), there is a story about a boy
with prophetic powers who had not been begotten by a father. The boy’s name is
Ambrosius and the events take place around the year 430 A.D. In Welsh legend,
Merlinus (Myrddin) was originally the name of a bard and seer who lived in the
second half of the sixth century, i.e. much later than the aforementioned
Ambrosius. Still many more centuries later, about 1140, Geoffrey of Monmouth
wrote his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the British Kings)
which included the story about the unfathered young prophet (VI.17–19).
The boy is now called Merlin, however, and elsewhere in the book he figures as
a magician. Geoffrey, overlooking a time-gap of some 150 years between Ambrosius
and Merlin, explains that Merlinus ‘was called Ambrosius’. It was also Geoffrey
of Monmouth who, in Latinizing the Welsh name Myrddin, had changed d
into l to avoid associations with French merde, ‘shit’. With all
its (now) glaring historical inaccuracy, Geoffrey’s book started off the great
tradition of Medieval Arthurian literature, which flourished especially in
France (Chrétien de Troyes, †c. 1183). In France, this continually
expanding tradition was dubbed matière de Bretagne to distinguish it
from the matière de France (stories about Charlemagne) – hence the
English term matter of Britain. By the early thirteenth century,
Merlin’s fatherless provenance was often understood to mean that he was
fathered by the Devil.
(1.4)
‘red tape’ was the word its supporters used
One example of this use which was certainly
known to Lewis is in J. B. S. Haldane’s essay ‘Nationality and Research’, in Possible
Worlds (1927):
Probably a
standard educational system is an evil, as government officials always tend to
demand quantity rather than quality of work, and research flourishes best in an
atmosphere where leisure and even laziness are possible. On the other hand, a
government department like the Medical Resarch Council in England, which is not
dominated by red tape and is willing to subisdize work that may turn out to be
valueless (...) can be of enormous use to science.
Further mentions by Lewis of ‘red tape’ in
this books are in chapters
– 3.4, Fairy Hardcastle
speaking
– 5.1, ‘an immense programme
of vivisection, freed at last from Red Tape and from niggling economy...’
– 5.2, ‘...what [Mark] had
learned, in the Progressive Element, to describe as “settling
real business in private”, or “cutting
out the Red Tape” ...’
– 6.4, in Mark’s piece of
popular journalism.
(1.5)
Malory
Sir Thomas Malory (†1471), author of Le
Morte Darthur (published in 1485), a large collection of Arthurian stories.
King Arthur did not always figure prominently in them; the curious title was
originally meant to cover only the last part. Over the centuries the book went
through many editions and it is the source for most subsequent English-language
versions of King Arthur (except attempts at Celtic reconstructions). A
manuscript version of the book was not discovered until 1934 and the first revised
edition was published in 1947.
the Grail
A mysterious chalice or bowl, first
mentioned by Chrétien de Troyes in his last, unfinished work Perceval
(or Le Conte del Graal). Later authors and re-tellers developed this
object into the cup used by Christ during the Last Supper and afterwards used
by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood of Christ after He died on the
Cross. Generally spoken, the Grail in Arthurian stories is an object of great
significance and infinite value – often thought or found to possess healing or
life-protecting power – while the ‘Grail King’ or ‘Grail Keeper’ usually is an
exalted figure, and often a wounded man. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal,
the greatest medieval Arthurian work in German, the Grail is a stone without
any specified function or virtue.
Layamon
Author of a long poem in early Middle
English, Brut (c. 1190), which tells the history of Britain from
the Fall or Troy to the late 7th century. It is the first text in English
mentioning Arthur and several other early British heroes: all the earlier
authors, such as Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote in Latin. ‘Brut’ is
Brutus, great-grandson of the early Roman hero Aeneas. He is presented as
progenitor of the British kings and the name Brittannia is declared to
be derived from Brutus.
Chapter 2 Dinner with the Sub-Warden
(2.1)
Non-Olet
Latin for ‘It doesn’t stink’. The full
phrase, Pecunia non olet (‘Money doesn’t stink’) is ascribed to the
Roman Emperor Vespasianus referring to the tax proceeds from public toilets.
Clausewitz
Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), Prussian
general, author of Vom Kriege (On War) and other works on the art
of war.
Othello’s occupation would be gone
Cf. Shakespeare, Othello III.3, 357;
the aptness of this quotation in the given circumstances is of a wholly
superficial nature.
Sandown
Probably an oblique reference – though not
a very significant one – to Strandtown, the area of Belfast, Northern
Ireland, where C. S. Lewis had his parental home.
(2.4)
Belbury
According to Joseph Pearce in C. S.
Lewis and the Catholic Church (2003), p. 93, this might be a play on the
name of Blewbury, a village some fifteen miles south of Oxford. While Lewis
wrote the Ransom trilogy, controversies were going on over the foundation of an
atomic plant near Blewbury. In 1946, the Atomic Energy Research Establishment
(AERE, or ‘Harwell Laboratory’) was opened at the former RAF base of Harwell,
near Blewbury. This was the site of the first nuclear reactor in Europe.
Chapter 3 Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill
(3.2)
Hingest
This name – or more accurately ‘Hengist’ –
is arguably one of the two first specifically English names in recorded
history, as distinct from British (Celtic) names. Some very old sources mention
Hengist and Horsa as the two brothers who, by the middle of the 5th century
A.D., led the first group of Anglo-Saxon invaders or immigrants to Britain.
Horsa didn’t survive very long; Hengist was later declared to be progenitor of
the Kings of Kent. His death is recorded in Nennius’s Historia Britonum
(see note to chapter 1.3, above), in the same section (§56) that contains one
of the earliest mentions of Arthur.
de Broglie
Louis-Victor, Duc de Broglie (1892–1987),
French physicist, Nobel Prize winner in 1929. His name is pronounced so as to
rhyme with French feuille. In June 1921, de Broglie was present at an
academic ceremony in Oxford where C. S. Lewis, still an undergraduate, had to
make a brief public appearance as he had won the ‘Chancellor’s Prize’ in an
essay contest. Afterwards Lewis wrote about this in a letter to his brother:
‘From a great deal of snobbish reference, which sounded less vulgar in Latin, I
gather he [de Broglie] is of a great house’ (Collected Letters, Vol. I,
p. 557).
Almanac de Gotha
Reference work on European nobility and
royalty, first published in 1764 in de German town of Gotha.
Filostrato
In view especially of Mark’s talk with the
Italian professor in chapter 8.3, it seems just possible that Lewis named him
after the Greek writer Flavius Philostratus II (c. 165–250 A.D.). See CSL’s English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century III/2, p. 320:
...citing
the works of Pheidias, and ... adding those of Praxiteles, [Philostratus] says
that they were never produced by imitating nature. “Imagination made them, and
she is a better artist than imitation; for where the one carves only what she
has seen, the other carves what she nas not seen.” (De Vita Apollonii, vi. xix). In the third century Plotinus
completes the theory ... Art and Nature thus become rival copies of the same
supersensuous original, and there is no reason why Art should not sometimes be
the better of the two. Such a theory leaves the artist free to exceed the
limits of Nature.
Inglesaccia
Inglese is Italian for ‘English(man)’; -accio or -accia
is a pejorative suffix.
(3.3)
Peter Rabbit
I.e. The Tale of Peter Rabbit
(1902), a children’s book by Beatrix Potter.
Romance of the Rose
A 13th-century French narrative poem, Roman
de la Rose. It consists of two very different sections, written by
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung respectively. In the first part, a lover
in his dream sets out to find the perfect lady; she is symbolized by a rose
which he is going to pick in the Garden of Love. The Roman de la Rose is
the subject of chapter 3 in C. S. Lewis’s book The Allegory of Love
(1936).
Klingsor’s garden
A reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal
(1882), Act II, and to the medieval poem on which it is based, Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzifal. Klingsor is a wicked sorcerer who has stolen the
Holy Lance; Parsifal is the young hero who is going to retrieve it. He gets
into Klingsor’s garden where he has to resist the charms of flower-shaped
women.
the one book that lay on the table in the
middle of the room ... ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the
female as well as to the male’ etc.
This unspecified book and the passage found
by Jane are part of the fiction, as attested by Lewis in two letters (Collected
Letters III, pp. 699 and 1360):
– to Ruth Pitter, 31 Jan.
1956, ‘The passage is, so far as I know, my own invention, influenced, I think,
by Coventry Patmore. I am not now sure that it is very relevant in its
place.’
– to Rosamund
Cruikshank, 31 July 1962, ‘The bit Jane reads at St Anne’s is my own.’
divinely tall
Cf. Tennyson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’
(1832), Stanza 22. ‘At length I saw a lady within call, / Stiller than
chisell’d marble, standing there; / A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, /
And most divinely fair.’
my name is Camilla
Lewis very probably named her after the
warrior-maiden in Vergil’s Aeneid, VII, 803–817, and Book XI, 498–835.
(3.4)
suffragettes
Early 20th-century name for women who
actively advocated female suffrage, i.e. extension of the right to vote so as
to include women.
Chapter 4 The Liquidation
of Anachronisms
(4.1)
to behave like the Sword of Siegfried
In other words, to prevent lovers from
having sexual intercourse; a reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung
(Twilight of the Gods: Act 2, Scene 4). When Brünnhilde accuses
Siegfried of having ‘extorted lust and love’ from her, Siegfried denies the
charge, pointing out that he has placed his sword Notung between them when he
wooed her for his blood-brother Gunther.
I do not know of any story or passage
in Arthurian legend or Germanic mythology featuring Siegfried’s sword in this
function. There is, however, at least one relevant story in medieval legend
about another hero’s sword. Tristan lay his sword between himself and Isolde in
their bed when he had cause to fear they might be caught together by Isolde’s
husband. Interestingly, this husband’s name is Mark; cf. note to chapter 10.2.
The sword lying there was apparently thought to be sufficient proof that they
had no intercourse with each other (Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan,
XXVIII, 17.398–17.413).
Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen, (1828–1906), Norwegian poet
and playwright; Mrs Dimble is referring to the figure of Aline Solness in his
play The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness, 1892), Act 3. Aline
had been mother of twin boys who had died as babies shortly after a fire in
which their home had burnt to the gound. Recalling this, Aline tells her friend
Hilda that she doesn’t actually deplore the loss of her boys since ‘We ought to
feel nothing but joy in thinking of them; for they are so happy – so
happy now’; but that ‘it is the small losses in life that cut one to the
heart’. These losses include ‘nine lovely dolls’ which had been lost in the
fire: ‘The dolls and I had gone on living together. (...) I carried them under
my heart – like little unborn children.’
(4.3)
They will gnaw their tongues and not repent
Cf. Revelation of John, 16:10–11.
Cyrus
Cyrus the Great, King of Persia. In 539 bc, he conquered the New Babylonian
empire and shortly afterwards allowed the Jews to leave their place of exile
and go back to Palestine. The Jews had an understandably high opinion of Cyrus:
in Isaiah XLV.1, he is called the Lord’s ‘anointed’ (messiah)
There is no turning back once you have set
your hand to the plough
Luke 9:62. ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man,
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of
God.’
Know you not that we shall judge angels?
I Corinthians 6:3.
(4.4)
Raleigh’s fine phrase
Lewis is not quoting the English
Renaissance poet and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), but the first
Professor of English Literature at Oxford, of the same name, who died in 1922,
a few months before Lewis began studying English there. Raleigh’s letters were
published in 1926; the fine phrase is quoted from a letter of 25 January 1912
to the poet and literary critic Edmund Gosse. ‘I do find the obituary a
difficult instrument to play.’
(4.7)
Saeva sonare verbera, etc.
Vergilius, Aeneis VI, 557–558:
description of the noise coming up from Hell at the gate.
P.M.
Prime Minister.
Chapter 5 Elasticity
(5.1)
Quisling government
A puppet government collaborating with a
foreign power; named after Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), a Norwegian
collaborator with the Nazis. Miss Hardcastle is referring to the French ‘Vichy’
government led by Philippe Pétain in the years 1940–1944.
Basic English
A simplified form of English for
international use with a vocabulary of less than 1,000 words, designed by two
British linguists, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (Basic English and Its
Uses, 1943); the ‘free-thinking Cambridge don’ is Richards.
monarchist and legitimist
Legitimism is the idea that succession to
the throne is to be regulated by a fixed set of rules – usually primogeniture –
and ought not to be a matter of choice or deliberation or popular favour.
(5.2)
It was a Friday
This is not in accordance with Saturday
being the day of Mark’s first visit to Belbury (chapter 2.2). Counting from
there, the present section starts with Mark waking on what ought to be Wednesday.
As appears from the letter which he writes later this day, it is 21 October.
Counting back from here (Wednesday 21 October), the story begins on Friday 16
October. See also notes to chapters 7.1 and 11.2.
He [Laird] got a third
I.e. he got a third (lowest) degree
university diploma. Cf. Curry’s remark in chapter 4.7, ‘I’m not quite happy
about his bad degree’.
nasty, poor, brutish and short
From Thomas Hobbes’s description of
humanity in its primeval state: ‘...continual fear and danger of violent death;
and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – Leviathan
(1651), I.13.
(5.3)
the Sura
A sura is a chapter of the Koran.
Lewis here seems to use the word as a fictitious name for a semi-fictitious
figure. He may well have been thinking of Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889–1929), an
Indian mystic who was born into a Sikh family and became a Christian in 1904. Sadhu
is a Hindoo title for a wandering holy man. For most of his life after 1904
Sundar Singh travelled through India and Tibet as a Christian sadhu. He
visited Europe (London and Amsterdam, among other places) on two occasions
during the years 1920–22. In 1929, travelling on foot to Tibet, he disappeared
without a trace in the Himalaya.
Chapter 6 Fog
(6.2)
a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand
1 Kings 18:44. ‘Behold, there ariseth a
little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.’
(6.3)
bloods
Senior pupils of a ‘Public School’ who have
reached the top of the school’s social hierarchy. C. S. Lewis’s
associations with the word bloods are vividly illustrated in chapter 6
of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955).
Ovidius, ‘Ad metam properate simul’
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) II, 727 – ‘hurry on to the
finish [i.e. orgasm] together!’ Ovidius was a Roman poet living from 43 bc till 18 ad.
Dunne
John William Dunne (1875–1949), Irish
pioneer aviator. In addition to flying, he developed a theory of ‘serialism’
from experiences like Janes Studdock’s dreams in That Hideous Strength.
He supposed Time to be a thing with infinitely many dimensions, each dimension
having its own chain or series of events. He thought it an illusion to think of
time as one-dimensional; occasional escapes from this illusion were possible in
special circumstances, e.g. during dreams.
witches prophesying on a blasted heath
Cf. the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Rubicon
Small river on the eastern coast of Italy
north of Rimini. In 49 bc, Julius
Caesar deliberately started a civil war by crossing the Rubicon to the south.
(6.4)
the Stagyrite
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher
(born in Stagira, Macedonia).
‘peace-effort’
A less-than-ingenious pun reminding the
British public c. 1946 of their recent ‘war effort’.
Gestapo
Secret police of Nazi Germany, Geheime
Staats-Polizei.
Ogpu
Secret police of the Soviet Union in the
years 1923–1934.
Chapter 7 The Pendragon
(7.1)
‘We have your letter of the 10th’
The date is impossible: Mark’s letter in
chapter 5.2 is dated 21 October and Jane’s letter was written a few –
apparently three – days later. The mistake can be explained. From a comparison
between the first British and first American editions of That Hideous
Strength, it appears that Lewis originally wrote the story having in mind 1
October as Day One but later decided, presumably with a view to the
descriptions of the season, to shift the story half a month on. If this is what
happened, he further seems to have failed to make all the necessary changes
where days and dates were concerned. See also notes to chapter 5.2 and 11.2.
Fisher-King
The Fisher King is a personage in (high)
medieval Arthurian legend, introduced by Chrétien de Troyes in Le Conte del
Graal. Perceval first meets the Fisher King as an old fisherman who shows
him the way. Later he meets the same man as a king lying in bed with an
incurable wound. A procession carrying the Grail enters the room and passes by
the bed where the wounded king lies. Perceval, from a knightly sense of
propriety, does not ask questions about the meaning of this, only to discovers
later on that he would have procured the fisher king’s recovery by inquiring.
(7.2)
I live like the King in Curdie
A reference to The Princess and Curdie (1883),
a novel by George Macdonald (1824–1905). The miner’s boy Curdie discovers that
the king has long been given drugged wine; together with the princess he
succeeds in providing the king with regular meals of safe, undrugged bread and
wine.
Brobdingnag
The land of giants in Gulliver’s Travels
(1726), by Jonathan Swift.
(7.4)
Black and Tans
British volunteer army fighting Sinn Féin
in Ireland in the years around 1920; black and tan were the colours of their
uniform.
Chapter 8 Moonlight at
Belbury
(8.2)
‘Be glad thou sleeper and thy sorrow
offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure’
After Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls,
131–132. The author, after reading Cicero’s Dream of Scipio until
nightfall, has his own dream of meeting Scipio the Elder, who leads him to a
medieval-style Garden of Love. Over the gate of this garden two very different
messages are written, one inviting, the other alarming. Each is a regular
seven-line stanza, and lines 5–6 of the inviting one are
This is the wey to al good aventure.
Be
glad, thow redere [reader],
and thy sorwe of-caste.
the Curdie books
George Macdonald, The Princess and the
Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883). The latter book
was mentioned by the Director in chapter 7.2 (see note there).
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen’s fourth novel (1814), written
between Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
Mr. Bultitude
The name is borrowed from Vice Versa: A
Lesson to Fathers (1882), a famous school story by by F. Anstey, where Mr.
Bultitude is magically transformed into his son and vice versa.
(8.3)
A king cometh, who shall rule the
universe...
Isaiah 32:1.
Chapter 9 The Saracen’s
Head
The Saracen’s Head
In the Middle Ages, especially during the
Crusades, ‘Saracens’ was the usual word for Muslims or Arabs. The turbaned head
of an Arab was sometimes used as a ‘charge’, or decorative element, in heraldry.
Such a head also appeared as a decoration over the entrance of inns and taverns
and so lend the establishment its name, ‘The Saracen’s Head’. Lewis is of
course referring to Alcasan.
(9.2)
he ‘discovered in his mind an inflammation
swollen and deformed, his memory’
?? (cf. Jane’s waking in chapter 8.2)
(9.3)
General Assembly over the water
MacPhee, the ‘Ulsterman’, is presumably
descended from a protestant Scottish family that came to Northern Ireland in
the late seventeenth century. He appears to stick to an old habit of talking
about Scotland as a country ‘over the water’ even though he is now living in
England – where a phrase like ‘North of the Border’ would have been more
appropriate.
Covenanters
Radical Protestants (Scottish
Presbyterians) during the English civil war in the mid-seventeenth century.
‘Fool, all lies in a passion of patience’,
etc. / Taliessin through Logres
The line is quoted from the poem ‘Mount
Badon’, in Taliessin through Logres (1938), a cycle of Arthurian
poems by Charles Williams (1886–1945). Taliessin was followed in 1944 by
another cycle, The Region of the Summer Stars. Williams was one of C. S.
Lewis’s two chief fellow ‘Inklings’, the other being J. R. R. Tolkien
(see note to Preface, above). Among the various Williamsian motifs in That
Hideous Strength, perhaps the most important one is the idea of an ancient
ideal (viz. Logres, the fallen kingdom of Arthur) kept alive by a small
community (here the company of St Anne’s).
Robert Burns
Scottish poet (1759–1796).
the spear-head of madness
Lewis here joins together various things
associated with the goddess Diana or Artemis – a ‘moon goddess’ who also was
goddess of hunting and of wild animals. The madness meant here could be
‘lunacy’: a ‘moon-stricken’ condition inflicted by the nymphs who follow
Artemis on her roamings through woods and fields. As the leader of such a
company, Artemis might be viewed as its ‘spear-head’.
See also Lewis’s ruminations in his
essay ‘The Seeing Eye’ (1963), about the prospect of humans traveling to the
moon. Stating three reasons to hate this prospect, he mentions as his first,
‘merely sentimental, or perhaps aesthetic’ reason that ‘the immemorial Moon –
the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers – will have been taken from us for
ever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of our emotional wealth, will have gone.
Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in that fashion to all humanity: he
who first reaches it steals something from us all.’
the Pendragon of Logres
Pendragon is a Welsh title for a chief or leader.
The word originally means something like ‘head dragon’ or ‘chief dragon’.
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin gave this title to King Arthur’s
father, Uther, who was henceforth called Uther Pendragon. In medieval Arthurian
literature he remained the only one to carry the title, which therefore does
not appear to have been inheritable. Logres
is derived from Lloegyr, the ancient Welsh name for what came to be
called England (Angle-land) from the ninth or tenth century onwards – or
at least for that part which was associated with King Arthur. In Charles
Williams’s Arthurian poems, a tradition of Companies of Logres is just about to
start rather than being an age-old phenomenon. A twentieth-century Pendragon of
Logres is probably an original idea of Lewis (see note above). There is a
possible source, though, in Evelyn Underhill’s novel The Column of Dust
(1909). In 1943 Charles Williams published an edition of Underhill’s letters
and in his preface discussed that novel. 1943 was the year in which That
Hideous Strength was written.
(9.4)
Baron Corvo
Pseudonym or pen name of the English
novelist Fredrick Rolfe (1860–1913) – whose style Lewis once described as ‘one
of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I doubt if I ever saw so much
pedantry combined with so much ignorance’ (letter to Arthur Greeves of 1 October
1934, Collected Letters II, p. 143). Corvus is the Latin word for
‘raven’, a bird closely related to the jackdaw.
Oyéresu
Plural form of oyarsa, the incoporeal being
governing a particular planet and sharing its name. In Out of the Silent Planet
and Perelandra, Ransom meets the oyéresu of Mars and Venus repsectively. An
oyarsa is a kind of ‘eldil’ (see MacPhee’s explanation to Jane about the
organization of life at the Manor, in chapter 9.3).
(9.5)
Faustus
Semi-legendary German magician and
astrologer from the early 16th century; principal character of some famous
plays (Marlowe, Goethe) and musical compositions (Wagner, Berlioz, Gounod).
Prospero
A magician in Shakespeare’s play The
Tempest.
Archimago
A magician in The Faerie Queene, an
unfinished long poem by Edmund Spenser (1552–1599).
after the fall of Numinor
In Tolkienian mythology, the end of the
Second Era as described in The Silmarillion and in The Lost Road.
The episode shows similarities to the story about the Tower of Babel and also
to That Hideous Strength.
Paracelsus
Swiss alchemist and physician (1493–1541).
Agrippa
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim
(1486–1535), German alchemist, physician and philosopher, author of De
occulta philosophia.
Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English
statesman, philosopher and essayist, whose works include The Advancement of
Learning (1605) and the The New Atlantis (unfinished, 1626).
‘attained not to greatness and certainty of
works’
This may not be a literal quotation, though
the wording is certainly very Bacon-like. Bacon would not necessarily have
applied it to magicians or magic only, but rather to all forms of knowledge
which he did not consider useful. He often stressed the need and the
possibility for mankind to accumulate ‘useful’, scientific knowledge. C. S.
Lewis when talking about Bacon often stressed the similarity of this ideal of
knowledge with sheer lust for power – a lust which he suspects Bacon shared
with the magicians of his (Bacon’s) day. See Lewis’s The Abolition of Man,
chapter III, paragraph 16 (‘Nothing I can say will prevent...’).
Atlantis
Tolkien regarded the story of Númenor as
his own adaptation of the Atlantis myth. Plato in his dialogues Kriton
and Timaeus described Atlantis as a big island or a continent in the
Western ocean which had sunk away and submerged about 9000 years before the
days of Solon, who heard this story in Egypt.
To those high creatures whose activity
builds what we call Nature...
Lewis/Ransom is here toying with the idea
that terrestrial, ‘sub-lunary’ Nature was created not directly by God but
indirectly, through the agency of ‘created virtue’, as Dante called it (Paradiso
VII, 135: creata virtù); cf. Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964),
end of chapter 5. The idea reappears also in Tolkien’s ‘creation myth’ as
presented in The Silmarillon and in his poshumously published History
of Middle Earth, vol. 5 (1987).
élan vital
‘Life force’ – a concept of the French
philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941).
panpsychism
The doctrine that not only humans and
animals but also plants and inanimate objects have consciousness.
Anima Mundi
Latin for ‘world soul’.
Chapter 10 The Conquered
City
(10.1)
ultra vires
Unauthorized, beyond one’s proper sphere of
action; a Latin legal term.
Scotland Yard
The London Metropolitan Police, or more
particularly its criminal investigation branch; named after the street near
Westminster Bridge where its headquarters were located until 1967. Scotland
Yard was under direct control of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
(10.2)
To bluster a little as an injured husband
in search of his wife
In the Arthurian tradition, King Mark (or
March) is the ‘injured husband’ of Isolde, Tristan’s mistress (cf. note to
chapter 4.1 on the Sword of Siegfried).
(10.4)
Brother Lawrence
Nicolas Herman (1614–1691), born in
Lorraine, entered the Carmelite Order in Paris as a lay brother in 1640 and
took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. When Brother Lawrence had died, his
abbot compiled two little books from his notes and letters and from
reminiscences of conversations with him. The two books together came to be
known under the title La pratique de la présence de Dieu (The
Practice of the Presence of God; a new critical edition was published in
1991 and a new English translation in 1994). Dr Dimble is quoting from the second Entretien
(Conversation): ‘Je ne ferai jamais autre chose, si vous me laissez faire’. This confession characterizes one milestone
in Brother Lawrence’s spiritual development: the stage where he resigned
himself to the fact that an awareness of being near to God must be invariably
spoiled by a feeling of utter unworthiness.
Chapter 11 Battle Begun
(11.1)
They had tried to do that to Merlin
Ambrosius or Merlin – in the old story
referred to above (see note to chapter 1.3 on Merlin) – was sent for by King
Vortigern after the latter’s three consecutive failures to build a fortress,
which collapsed each time. The King’s magicians had advised to find a
fatherless child (i.e. a child not begotten by a man), kill it, and sprinkle
its blood over the building: this would prevent further collapsings. The boy is
found, but he puts the magicians to shame by pointing out the real reason why
the building would not stand, and by giving more proofs of ‘prophetic’ powers.
(11.2)
‘We are acting on an order dated the 1st of
October’
In the first British edition, the date here
is 14 October. The latter (and later) date is probably in accordance with
Lewis’s final view of the matter: see note to chapter 7.1. Counted back from
the dates in chapter 5.2, Day One of the story is Friday 16 October. This same
date would have been a suitable one for the order, too, perhaps more so than 14
October.
occultation
Eclipse, temporary disappearance from
sight.
(11.3)
John Buchan
Scottish writer and politician (1875–1940),
author of a 24-volume history of the First World War and some biographies, but
chiefly known for his many adventure stories, including Prester John
(1910) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915; later filmed by Alfred
Hitchcock).
Chapter 12 Wet and Windy
Night
(12.3)
Old Solar
The ‘Great Tongue’, mentioned in chapter
10.4. Old Solar is the interplanetary language which Ransom learned on Mars
(Malacandra) and which was also in use on Venus (Perelandra) – see the two
previous volumes in the Ransom trilogy.
(12.5)
Barfield’s ‘ancient unities’
Owen Barfield (1898–1997) and C. S. Lewis
were exact contemporaries and as Oxford students they became each other’s best
friends for some time. Barfield became a lawyer but also wrote some
philosophical works. Lewis gratefully adopted some of his ideas, including the
theory of ‘old single meanings’ or ‘ancient unities’ as expounded in Barfield’s
Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1926, new edition 1952). Barfield
shows how primitive man employed many concepts, and had in fact many
experiences, which in the course of time have broken up into very different,
often irreconcilable parts. For example, ‘spirit’ originally meant (1) breath
or wind, and (2) principle of life with humans and animals; but it never meant
either: it always meant both. No one would make the distinction, since there
was no awareness of a literal as against a figurative sense or even of an
object’s different aspects. This theory of primitive speech and thought is
further developed into ideas about language and poetry (‘language is fossil poetry’)
and about the ‘evolution of consciousness’.
Lewis gives a summery of this view of
the “ancient unities” in Miracles, chapter 10, par. 18 (“We are often told that
primitive man...”)
(12.6)
the Atlantean Circle / the Great Atlantean
This ‘background’ of Merlin does not go
back to any Arthurian stories but was invented by Lewis for the present
occasion (cf. note to chapter 13.5 about the ‘seven bears’).
the Great Disaster
The end of Atlantis or the fall of Númenor;
in Tolkienian mythology, the end of the Second Era (see two notes to chapter
9.5, above).
Chapter 13 They Have
Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
(13.1)
Numinor, the True West
Lewis makes a bad mistake here. In
Tolkien’s scheme of things (see notes to Preface and to chapter 9.5, above),
the True West is not Númenor, but Valinor. This is the land of the Valar
– a species of gods or angels. Númenor is the land created by the Valar to the
west of the other, older countries, but still east of Valinor.
Abhalljin, beyond the seas of Lur in
Perelandra
‘Abhalljin’ is an old form (invented by
Lewis) of Avalon – the island where King Arthur was brought after being wounded
in battle, not in order to die there but to recover and then to return. Lur is
a place where the King of Perelandra stayed for some time and received
instruction; see the last chapter of Lewis’s Perelandra.
(13.3)
the stroke that Balinus struck
Balin was a hot-tempered knight (or
prospective knight) at King Arthur’s court. In a fit of anger he hurts Pellam
with the Holy Lance, the spear that was used to pierce Christ on the Cross.
Through this ‘Dolorous Stroke’, a sacrilege, the surrounding country turns into
barren land for many years. The story came up in the thirteenth century and was
included in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Book II.
Apuleius
Roman author of the 2nd century ad.
Martianus Capella
Latin author from Carthago, in North
Africa, 5th century ad.
Hisperica Famina
Early medieval text, probably originating
from 6th-century Ireland or Wales; notorious for its idiosyncratic form of
Latin, some other examples of which have been ascribed to Gildas and to St
Columba.
Merlinus Ambrosius
This ‘full name’ of Merlin is Lewis’s
further development of what very probably began as a piece of sloppiness by
Geoffrey of Monmouth; see note to chapter 1.3, above.
(13.4)
It was so silly not to have realized that
he wouldn’t know about forks.
The use of forks for eating was not
introduced until the late seventeenth century and after that took a century, or
perhaps much longer, to spread from high society down to the lowest social
strata – as pointed out by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process
(1939), Part 1, ch. IV/10. Indeed, Lewis in chapter 12.6 pictures the tramp,
too, as someone who ‘was apparently unacquainted with forks’.
the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into
merry Middle Earth
??
the bit in the Bible about the winnowing
fan
Isiah 30:24.
Browning, ‘Life’s business’ etc.
Robert Browning (1812–1889), The Ring
and the Book X, 1235–1237: ‘White shall not neutralise the black, nor good
/ Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: / Life’s business being just the
terrible choice’.
fate, longaevi
Fate is the plural form of fata, which is Italian
for ‘fairy’ (fata Morgana = Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s hostess in
Avalon). Longaevi is a Latin word used by Martianus Capella (see note to
chapter 13.3, above) for ‘long-lived beings’. C. S. Lewis gave a survey of
early medieval ideas about these beings in The Discarded Image (1964),
chapters III.d and VI.
magia, goeteia
Two Greek words for ‘magic’. During the
Renaissance the two words were sometimes used distinctively – magia for
white and goeteia for black magic. Magia is also a Latin word
for magic, derived from a Persian word for ‘priest’.
(13.5)
the last of the seven bears of Logres
In a letter of October 1952 C. S.
Lewis wrote, ‘The seven bears and the Atlantean Circle are pure inventions of
my own, filling the same purpose in the narrative that “noises off” would in a
stage play.’ The Atlantean Circle is mentioned in chapter 12.6.
the days when Nimrod buit a tower to reach
heaven
In Genesis 10:10, just before the story of
the Tower of Babel, it is said of Nimrod that Babel and a few other towns in
the land of Shinar were ‘the beginning of his kingdom’. This in itself would
not seem sufficient ground to suppose that Nimrod built the Tower, yet the idea
has a long tradition which includes Augustin’s De civitate Dei and
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Blaise
This figure first appeared as Merlin’s
secretary in French Arthurian stories around 1300. ‘Blaise’ is a gallicized
form of Bleheris, which is the name of a 12th-century Welsh bard. In the 19th
century, Blaise appeared as Merlin’s master, Bleys, in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls
of the King: ‘The Coming of Arthur’ II, 358–396.
I am not the son of one of the Airish Men.
That was a lying story
See note to chapter 1.3 on Merlin. In
addition to the Devil, there were other spiritual beings who were sometimes
supposed to be Merlin’s father – not all of them necessarily evil spirits (cf.
the passage on fate and longaevi in chapter 13.4).
the time when Logres was only myself and
one man and two boys
He may be thinking of the episode in
Malory’s Morte Darthur I.5 about Merlin, Sir Ector, young Arthur and Kay
(with Kay as the ‘churl’).
Cathay
This name for China did not yet exist in
Arthurian times. (But of course neither did the whole Arthurian tradition exist
in Arthurian times.)
Chapter 14 ‘Real Life is
Meeting’
‘Real Life is Meeting’
Martin Buber (1878–1965), Ich und Du,
part one, section 14 (or 13 in English), last sentence. The book was first
published in 1923, translated into English by Ronald Gregor Smith as I and
Thou in 1937, and re-published with an added epilogue in 1958. While Lewis
began writing That Hideous Strength, in 1942, he was feeling a recent
impact from reading I and Thou, as appears from two letters he wrote in
the summer of 1942: one to Sister Penelope on 29 July, and one to Owen Barfield
a few days later (Collected Letters Vol. II, pp. 526 and 528).
Remarkably, Lewis did not so much tell these correspondents his own opinion of
the book, but asked for theirs. In February 1943, Lewis alluded to I and
Thou toward the end of The Abolition of Man. Twenty years later he did
so once more, in chapter 4 of his last book, Letters to Malcolm, where
he appears to be at last quite unreserved in his praise for Buber.
The Buber quotation here clearly
serves to reflect chapter 14’s last episode, on Jane Studdock’s great personal
turning point. That episode, in turn, reflects what Lewis later described as an
‘ambiguous moment’ in his own life: ‘Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ
at their maximum?’ – Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 15, par. 8.
The whole section in Buber is as follows
(German & English) –
Das Du begegnet mir
von Gnaden – durch Suchen wird es nicht gefunden. Aber daß ich zu ihm das
Grundwort spreche, ist Tat meines Wesens, meine Wesenstat.
Das Du begegnet mir. Aber ich trete in die
unmittelbare Beziehung zu ihm. So ist die Beziehung Erwähltwerden und
Erwählen, Passion und Aktion in einem. Wie denn eine Aktion des ganzen
Wesens, als die Aufhebung aller Teilhandlungen und somit aller – nur in deren
Grenzhaftigkeit gegründeter – Handlungsempfindungen, der Passion ähnlich
werden muß.
Das Grundwort Ich-Du kann nur mit dem ganzen Wesen
gesprochen werden. Die Einsammlung und Verschmelzung zum ganzen Wesen kann
nie durch mich, kann nie ohne mich geschehen. Ich werde am Du; Ich werdend
spreche ich Du.
Alles wirkliche Leben ist
Begenung.
|
The Thou
meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the
primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my
being.
The Thou meets me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the
relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just
as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial
actions and consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their
particular limitation, is bound to resemble suffering.
The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being.
Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my
agency nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation
to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.
All real living is meeting.
|
Lewis’s phrasing – ‘Real Life’ not ‘Real
Living’ – suggests that Buber’s work may have come to his attention through a
little book published in England in 1942, Real Life is Meeting by J. H. Oldham. The title of
Oldham’s book is also the title of its second chapter, which deals with Buber’s
I and Thou.
(14.1)
Waddington ... Existence is its own
justification. The tendency to developmental change...
C. H. Waddington (1905–1975), English
embryologist and geneticist; here quoted and paraphrased from Science and
Ethics (1942). This slim volume contains a brief essay by Waddington, ‘The
Relations between Science and Ethics’, followed by comments from a great
variety of other authors and several replies from Waddington. C. S. Lewis
attacked Waddington in The Abolition of Man (chapter 2, note 3),
summarizing Waddington’s position by quoting the phrase ‘existence is its own
justification’ from Science and Ethics, page 14, where Waddington
writes:
...there
are many propositions for which it is clear that no ulterior criterion for
value is necessary. The statement that it is as well not to put your hand in
the fire is not based on anything else except the fact that if you do it will
cease to be a hand: and existence is its own justification; hands are the kind
of things which do not go in fires.
Professor Frost goes on to paraphrase a
sentence from Waddington which is also the next thing quoted by Lewis in his
note to The Abolition of Man:
An
existence which is essentially evolutionary is itself the justification for an
evolution towards a more comprehensive existence. (Science and Ethics
p. 17)
Huxley himself ... Romanes lecture
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895),
English biologist and popular writer on science, leading champion of Darwinism
in his day. The Romanes lectures, given in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford,
were founded in 1891 by Huxley’s friend George Romanes (1848–1894), who was
also a biologist.
Professor Frost means that if a man
of Huxley’s stature could find no better support for moral judgements than mere
emotion, then surely no better support is available. Frost implies that
emotions are absolutely futile. He also implies, in using the phrase ‘Huxley
himself’, that Huxley’s views were broadly in line with his own; but this is
demonstrably untrue. Huxley’s Romanes lecture, ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893),
was an eloquent call to follow the banner of ethics against evolution
since it was clearly impossible to derive ethics from evolution. The
words quoted by Frost can be found in a passage toward the end:
...the
practice of that which is ethically best – what we call goodness or virtue –
involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which
leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion
it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but
shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival
of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It
repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.
The lecture was published, along with
‘Prolegomena’ of about equal length and extensive notes, in Evolution and
Ethics and other essays (1894); the passage quoted is on pp. 81–82.
Huxley’s position is summed up one page further as:
Let us
understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on
imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in
combating it.
In spite of this, the further progress of
evolutionary biology inspired some of its later practitioners to make fresh
attempts to base ethics on evolution. Notable among these in Great Britain,
apart from C. H. Waddington (see previous and next note), was T. H.
Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Half a century after his
grandfather’s Romanes lecture, he was invited to give one on the same subject,
which he did under the subtly changed title ‘Evolutionary Ethics’ (1943). The
two lectures, along with the older Huxley’s Prolegomena, were reprinted
together in 1947 with an introduction and two further essays by the younger
Huxley as Evolution and Ethics 1893–1943.
The view expressed by Frost has
perhaps never been expressed so starkly by any real 20th-century scientist, let
alone any moral philosopher. However, Lewis’s contemporaries Waddington and
Julian Huxley were certainly closer to it than the older Huxley had been. On
the question whether Frost is too much of a caricature, see Lewis’s letter of 8
December 1959 (‘The devil about writing satire now-a-days is that reality
constantly outstrips you’) and Walter Hooper’s note in Collected Letters,
Vol. 3, pp. 1104–1105, with rare but highly relevant references to
Julian Huxley.
An fine overview of more than a
century of failed attempts to base ethics on evolution is offered in The
Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley
etc. 1994) by Paul Lawrence Farber. Commenting on J. Huxley and Waddington,
Farber notes that ʻphilosophers
could have dusted off nineteenth-century critiques on evolutionary ethics in
response, but most did not think the musings of scientists important enough to
make the effort’ (171). One philosopher of the period who did make a brief
effort was D. Daiches Raphael
in his essay ‘Darwinism and Ethics’, in A Century of Darwin, ed. S. A.
Barnett (Heinemann, London etc. 1958), pp. 334–359, where both Waddington’s and
J. Huxley’s positions are thoroughly demolished.
as an acturalial theorem
That is, as a matter of pure statistics.
The word ‘actuarial’ appears in the same passage where Waddington
mentions the ‘definite integral’. The Huxley quotations were also used here by
Waddington (Science and Ethics, p. 16–17):
To Huxley,
the cosmic process was summed up in its method; and its method was ‘the
gladiatorial theory of existence’ in which ‘the strongest, the most
self-assertive tend to tread down the weaker’, it demanded ‘ruthless
self-assertion’, the ‘thrusting aside, or treading down of all competitors’. To
us that method is one which, among animals, turns on the actuarial expectation
of female offspring from different female individuals, a concept as unemotional
as a definite integral ...
‘things of that extreme evil which seem
innocent to the uninitiate’
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925),
chapter VI, ninth paragraph. After a chapter on pre-Christian ‘day-dreams’,
Chesterton deals with the ‘nightmare’, i.e. after the human forms of paganism
he describes the perverse and inhuman forms which paganism is always in danger
of taking. –
This inverted imagination produces things of which it
is better not to speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being
known; for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent.
They are too inhuman even to be indecent.’ (quoted from p. 141 in the Hodder
& Stoughton edition of 1947)
Healthy
paganism is embodied in ancient Rome, supremely in the poet Vergil, while ‘the
other kind of paganism’ was embodied in Rome’s great enemy Carthage, heir of
the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, with its ‘religion of fear, sending up
everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice’. Chesterton describes the Punic wars,
i.e. the long struggle between Rome and Carthage, as a major contest of light
and darkness and the destruction of Carthage as a major victory of real over
perverse civilisation.
The evil role played in Chesterton’s
account by Hannibal’s elephants in this struggle (‘...it was Moloch upon the
mountains ... it was Baal who trampled the vineyards’ – ch. VII, par. 15) is
curiously inverted by the elephant in Lewis’s chapter 16.1 as it destroys a
modern Carthage by its own ancient weapon.
(14.2)
Cnossus
Chief city of Crete in the Minoan
(pre-Greek) period, second millennium bc.
(14.3)
Mr. Bultitude’s mind was as furry....
This exercise in animal psychology may well
have been at least partly inspired by J. B. S. Haldane’s essay ‘Possible
Worlds’, in the book of the same name (1927). In a passage about dogs he
writes, among other things, ‘I doubt if a dog would ever arrive at our idea of
a thing, at least for objects with interesting smells.’
(14.5)
Titian
Tiziano Vecellio (1490?–1577), Italian
painter in the Venetian school; his works include many mythological scenes. In Surprised
by Joy (ch. XIII), Lewis includes Titian among a few examples of what he
calls ‘the resonant, dogmatic, flaming, unanswerable people’ (italics
mine).
You had better agree with your adversary
quickly
Cf. Matthew 5:25.
Upon them He a spirit of frenzy sent To
call in haste for their destoyer
Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671),
1675, about the Philistines gathering in the building where Samson was brought
to “bring them sport” (Judges 16:21–31).
Among them he a spirit of frenzy sent,
Who hurt their minds,
and urged them on with mad desire
To call in haste for their destroyer.
(14.6)
This demand ... was the origin of all right
demands and contained in them.
Cf. George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
III (1889), tenth sermon (‘Righteousness’):
...it is
the duty of, or at least the honest trying to do many another duty, that will
at length lead a man to see that his duty to God is the first and deepest and
highest of all, including and requiring the performance of all other duties
whatever.
This passage is included in Lewis’s George
Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as part of Nr. 226.
whether it was in the moulding hands or in
the kneaded lump
Cf. a further passage from Macdonald’s same
sermon, Nr. 235 in Lewis’Anthology:
Statue under the chisel of the sculptor, stand steady to
the blows of his mallet. Clay on the wheel, let the fingers of the divine
potter model you at their will.
those who have not joy
?? Probably a quotation or otherwise fixed phrase;
source not found.
Chapter 15 The Descent of the
Gods
(15.1)
See thou do it not! ...fellow servants
Cf. Revelation 19:10 and 22:9.
the slayer of Argus
In Greek mythology, Argus was a monster
with a hundred eyes, whose obvious job therefore seemed to be watch-keeping
(hence the expression ‘Argus-eyed’). Hera, wife to Zeus, asked him to watch Io
the priestess and keep her from seducing Zeus. Hermes (=Mercury) was then asked
by Zeus to kill Argus. Hermes complied by putting Argus to sleep with a magic
wand and then killing him.
Mercury and Thoth
Hermes, the Greek god of commerce and of
learning, was identified by the Romans with their own god Mercury, while the
Greeks identified him with Thoth, the Egyptian moon god and guardian of writing
and arithmatic, among other things.
‘Inconsolable wound’ is a phrase possibly borrowed from
Ovidius, Metamorphoses V, 426. Borrowed or not, the slightly
curious use of the word ‘inconsolable’ is also found in Lewis’s essay ‘The
Weight of Glory’ (1941), fifth paragraph. There he talks of ‘the inconsolable
secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that...’ etc.; he is
clearly referring to the experience described in Surprised by Joy as
‘Joy’ and an ‘inconsolable longing’ (SbJ chapter 5, second paragraph). The
idea of our being ‘born with’ or ‘born for’ something that hurts is
expressed by Lewis also (1) in The Pilgrim’s Regress, VII/9, where Mr
Wisdom mentions ‘the sorrow that is born with us’; and (2) in the last
paragraph of Reflections on the Psalms, where Lewis talks of the
‘tyranny of time’ and our hope finally to escape from it ‘and so to cure that
always aching wound (“the wound man was born for”) which mere succession and mutability inflict on us, almost equally
when we are happy and when we are unhappy.’ The latter instance may well be an
unchecked Hopkins quotation (see the last of my Notes on Reflections on the Psalms). The combined idea – of a wound that is
both ‘native’ and inconsolable – only appears in the present passage in That
Hideous Strength.
King William said, Be not dismayed, etc.
From an anonymous song, ‘The Boyne Water’,
celebrating the battle of the Boyne (1690). A Protestant army led by King
William of Orange defeated a much larger Jacobite army led by the Catholic
James II. It was a decisive moment for the advance of Protestantism in Ireland.
Duke Schomberg, a commander in the Orangist army, was shot while crossing the
Boyne river, after which ‘Brave boys’, he [William] cried, ‘be not dismayed / For the loss of one commander, /
For God will be our king this day / And I’ll be general under.’ The song was included in Robert Young’s
The Ulster Melodist (1832) and also in Pádraic Colum’s Anthology of
Irish Verse (1922).
Mars, Mavors, Tyr
Mavors is an old form of ‘Mars’. Tyr or
Tiwaz is a Germanic deity that was identified with the Roman god Mars. The
third day of the week, called Martis dies in Latin and martedí in
Italian, was ‘Tiwaz-day’ with the ancient Germans, hence modern English Tuesday,
German Dienstag, Dutch dinsdag, etc.
fields of Arbol
Arbol is the sun. In Perelandra,
‘the field of Arbol’ is the usual term for ‘the Solar system’ but on one
occasion is used in the plural form, apparently denoting the orbits of planets
around the sun. This latter meaning seems to apply here.
(15.5)
Haeckel, McCabe, Reade
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist and
philosopher, leading champion of radicalized Darwinism in Germany, author of The
Natural History of Creation (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1868).
In his ‘monistic’ worldview humans are a part of nature and no distinction is
made between god and world; his thought became increasingly animistic or pantheistic
in character. Joseph McCabe
(1867–1955) left both the Franciscan Order and the Roman Catholic church in
1896 to become a militant rationalist and freethinker and a prolific writer. Winwood Reade (1838–1875), author of
many books on Africa, also wrote The Martyrdom of Man (1872), a
popular bird’s-eye view of world history containing much of his criticism of
established religion.
For an excellent account of the kind
of ideas referred to by these names, see Owen Chadwick, The Secularization
of the European Mind in the 19th Century (1975), especially chapter 7,
‘Science and Religon’.
The Golden Bough
A thirteen-volume ‘Study in Comparative
Religion’ by James Frazer (1854–1941), published in 1880–1915; abridged edition
1922.
Chapter 16 Banquet at Belbury
(16.2)
Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, etc..
?? (It may or may not be a quotation.)
Artemis
Greek goddess of hunting; her Roman
counterpart was Diana (cf. note to chapter 9.3 on ‘the spear-head of madness’).
‘made him al the cheer that a beast can
make a man’
Malory, Morte Darthur XIV.6, said of
a lion that had been fighting a serpent and received help from Sir Percival.
Percival thought the lion ‘the more natural beast of the two’. – ‘And the lion
went alway about him fawning as a spaniel.’
(16.4)
So full of sleep are they
Dante, Inferno I, 11–12. Tant’era
pien di sonno in su quel punto, / Che la verace via abbandonai – ‘So full
of sleep I was at the moment I left the true path.’
(16.5)
Sturk
A fictitious place-name recalling the
opening scene of the trilogy in Out of the Silent Planet where Dr Elwin
Ransom, on a walking tour near Sturk, meets Professor Weston and Richard
Devine, the later Lord Feverstone.
Chapter 17 Venus at St
Anne’s
(17.2)
like starlight, in the spoils of provinces
From Ben Jonson’s play Volpone,
or The Foxe (1606), III.7, ‘Why droops my Celia?’, where Volpone
invites his beloved to enjoy all the riches he has to offer her:
...See,
behold,
What thou art Queene of; not in expectation,
As I feede others: but possess’d, and crown’d.
See, here, a rope of pearle; and each, more orient
Then that the brave Aegiptian Queene carrous’d:
Dissolve, and drinke them. See, a Carbuncle,
May put out both the eyes of our St Marke;
A Diamant, would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in, like star-light, hid with jewells,
That were
the spoyles of Provinces.
(17.4)
Barbarossa
Frederick I Barbarossa (c.
1123–1190), King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. Like King Arthur, he was
considered to have been cast into an enchanted sleep from which he would return
at some future date – originally at the end of the world.
Enoch or Elijah
Two Old Testament figures whose life on
earth is described as having ended without death; see Genesis 5:24 and II Kings
2:11 respectively. Enoch has been thought in legend to have spent 300 years
learning cosmological and other secrets from the angels; Elijah acquired a role
in later Old Testament and in New Testament times as a figure who was to return
some day.
the Third Heaven
In medieval cosmology, the Heavens were a
system of seven revolving spheres, i.e. hollow globes of different sizes, each
sphere being contained by the bigger and containing the smaller ones. At the
centre was the Earth. The spheres were wholly transparent but one planet was
fixed in each of them and so made their revolving movement visible. From small
to large and thus increasingly distant from the Earth these spheres and their
planets were called the Moon (‘first Heaven’), Mercury, Venus (‘third Heaven’),
Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The further planets of our solar system have never
been taken up in this model as they were not discovered until modern times
(Uranus in 1781, Neptune in 1846, Pluto in 1930).
Aphallin
Another fictitious ancient form of the name
Avalon (see note to chapter 13.1, above).
there was a moment in the Sixth Century...
The high point in (King) Arthur’s career
was the battle of Mount Badon, or Badon Hill (cf. Merlin’s ruminations during
the Mars episode in chapter 15.1; see also note to chapter 9.3 on Taliessin).
This battle seems to have taken place in the first half of the 6th century or
around the year 500 ad.
Mordred
A nephew or natural son (in some accounts
both) of King Arthur; he tried to dethrone Arthur but was killed in the attempt
while Arthur was badly wounded and went to Avalon (see note to chapter 13.1,
above). The name ‘Mordred’ was originally spelled ‘Modred’.
Milton, Cromwell
Cromwell: see note to chapter 1.3. John
Milton (1608–74), a great poet and great scholar, was on Cromwell’s side during
the English civil war an held a high office in the Commonwealth government.
However, he was a much more honourable figure than Cromwell and a keen defender
of the liberty of press and of conscience. Milton’s principal work is the long
poem Paradise Lost (1667).
Sidney
The poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86),
author of the (prose) romance Arcadia, was an able and respected English
diplomat. He died in the Netherlands, near Zutphen, from wounds inflicted by a
Spanish fusil bullet. In line with commonly accepted evaluations of Sidney both
as a poet and as a man, C. S. Lewis has called him ‘dazzling’: ‘he is that rare
thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’ (English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, III/1, p. 324).
Cecil Rhodes
English businessman (1853–1902), chief
representative of British imperialism in southern Africa. Present-day Zimbabwe
was called Rhodesia, after him, in the years 1964–1978.
Uther, Cassibelaun
Uther was King Arthur’s father and the
first to be given the name or title of Pendragon (see note to chapter 9.3,
above). Cassivelaunus was one of Julius Caesar’s fiercest opponents during the
latter’s second expedition to Britain in 54
bc. Geoffrey of Monmouth called him Cassibelaun and a forefather of
Uther.
As one of the modern authors has told us,
the fire from Heaven must descend...
Charles Williams in He Came Down from
Heaven (1938), chapter 2. See also Lewis’s letter to Charles Williams of 7
June 1938 and Walter Hooper’s note 21 in Collected Letters, Vol. II
(2004), p. 227–228.
If we’ve got an ass’s head...
A reference to Bottom in the third Act of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Trahison des clercs
‘The Treason of Clerks’; title of the
principal work (1927) of the French writer Julien Benda (1867–1956). The
‘clerks’ in question are the educated members of Benda’s own generation,
especially in France and Italy; their ‘treason’ was their failure to stand firm
for Enlightenment ideals (‘knowledge values’) against the rising tide of
nationalism and irrationalism (‘action values’). In a more general way it is
the kind of treason commited wherever dangerous fads are not being exposed and
denounced by the educated class.
(17.6)
Sine Cerere et Baccho
Fragment of a Latin saying taken from the
comedy Eunuchus by the Roman author Terentius (2nd century bc). Sine Cerere et Libero friget
Venus: ‘Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus will freeze’, i.e. ‘Whithout food
and drink, love will cool down.’
She comes more near the earth
Shakespeare, Othello V.2,
113–114; not a literal quotation. Othello is not talking about Venus but about
the Moon.
So geht es im Schnützelputzhäusel...
Anonymous 18th-century German song, published
in 1807 in the Sammlung deutscher Volkslieder (Collection of German
folk-songs) compiled by J. G. Büsching and F. H. von der Hagen.
(17.7)
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet I.5,
47.
How had he dared? ... her sacrosanctity ...
He was discovering the hedge after he had plucked the rose
Cf. what Lewis wrote towards the end of The
Allegory of Love about the allegorical passage in Spenser’s Faerie
Queene (IV.x.53) where the old medieval ideal of Courtly Love is finally
transformed into the new ideal of virtuously romantic marriage. Scudamour
‘plucks Amoret from her place among the modest virtues. The struggle in his own
mind before he does so, his sense of “Beauty too rich for use, for earth
too dear”, is a beautiful gift made by the humilities of medieval love poetry
to Spenser at the very moment of his victory over the medieval tradition: (...)
“For sacrilege me seem’d the Church to rob / And folly seem’d to leave the
thing undonne.”’ (Allegory of Love
p. 343–344).
last updates
16 November 2007 (added reference to Owen
Chadwick in note to chapter 15.5).
14 April 2008 (added note to chapters 3.2
on Filostrato; more about Sidney in note to 17.4)
9 May 2008 (added notes on ‘red tape’ in
1.4 and on Mr. Bultitude in 14.3)
4 August 2008 (added note on ‘things of
that extreme evil’ in 14.1)
7 August 2008 (improved note on Walter
Raleigh in 4.4)
28 August 2008 (on ‘Be glad thou sleeper’,
in 8.2; note on ‘things of that extreme evil’ in 14.1 improved)
22 September 2008 (large addition to note
on Huxley in 14.1)
23 December 2008 (corrected note on Ibsen
in 4.1)
17 November 2010 (added note on
‘This demand...’ in 14.6)
20 April 2011 (revised note on
‘Barfield’s “ancient unities”’ in 12.5)
2 June 2011 (added note on
‘whether it was in the moulding hands...’ in 14.6)
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