Bede Griffiths
I entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as an undergraduate in October 1925 just after C. S. Lewis entered as a fellow and tutor in English literature. For the first two years I had no contact with him, as I was reading classics, but in my third year I decided to read English literature, and found that I was to have Lewis as my tutor. From that time I had to present an essay on some subject in English literature every week, which he would then criticize, and we would remain talking for some time after. These talks were gradually extended, as acquaintanceship ripened into friendship. I remember how on one occasion we continued talking almost till midnight, and had to run to be out of college before the clock finished striking twelve, as no one was allowed in or out of college after midnight.
After I left Oxford we continued to correspond, and I visited him from time to time, and in 1932 I went on a walking tour with him and his friend Owen Barfield. By this time our interests had gone beyond English literature, and we were both engaged on the venture of faith that was to lead to our becoming convinced Christians. During this period, from 1929 when left Oxford till 1932, when we were both undergoing a conversion to Christian faith, I was probably nearer to Lewis than anyone else. He has described in Surprised by Joy how he “kept up a copious correspondence” with me at this time, and for these three years we were both following the same path. When in December 1932 I became a Catholic, our ways parted and, though we remained friends, we never again shared the thrill of that adventure, when we were both discovering the truth together and almost every day brought some new insight into the goal we were seeking.
It may be imagined that, as a result of this close association at the time of our conversion, I would have something of value to add to what Lewis has written of the stages of his own conversion. But, in fact, I am afraid that I can add very little. Lewis himself once said that friends, unlike lovers, are looking not at each other, but at something they hold in common. It was so in our friendship. was not looking at Lewis as a person different from myself but as one who shared my own interests and enthusiasms. I was scarcely conscious of any difference between us, though, of course, I was aware of his vastly greater knowledge. But Oxford is not a place which encourages humility, and an undergraduate normally has very little respect for a don. I was thus quite unaware that there was anything exceptional in this friendship, and it was only years afterward that I began to discover other aspects of his mind and character, which were then completely hidden from me. In fact, it was only after his death that I came across the Narnia stories and recognized in them a power of imaginative invention and insight of which I had no conception before. It must be remembered that Lewis always affected (I think that it was deliberate) to be a plain, honest man, with no nonsense about him, usually wearing when out on walk an old tweed hat and coat, and accompanied with pipe, a stick, and a dog. It was, no doubt, the expression of a determination to avoid all pretentiousness, which later developed into a real and profound humility, but it prevented anyone from taking him for a “great man” and often concealed his real greatness.
It was characteristic that when quite early on he gave me to read his poem Dymer, which he had written under the name of Clive Hamilton, he did not reveal that he was the author, and I would never have credited him with the capacity to write a poem of such unashamed romanticism. In fact, Lewis was just then growing out of his earlier romanticism, as I myself was beginning to do, and adopted a saner and more rational philosophy. I remember at our first meeting, when I explained to him my reasons for reading English literature, he protested strongly against my view. After reading for Honors Mods (the first part in a classical degree), I had come to the conclusion that mere intellectual knowledge was of little value, and that it was through poetry and imagination, not through reason and intellect, that one could find fulfillment.
Lewis himself was just then reacting against this view and saw its one-sidedness, but he realized also, I think, that I was prepared to study English literature seriously. He lent me, perhaps as a kind of answer to my need, a little work he had just written called Summa Metaphysica contra Anthroposophos. This was the first writing of his that I ever saw. I don’t know what became of it; probably it was destroyed. It was his reaction to his friend Owen Barfield, who together with other friends had become a disciple of Rudolf Steiner. I don’t remember this little essay in any detail, but I do remember that he outlined in it his conception of the Spirit the Universal Spirit behind all phenomena. This was exactly what I needed, and from that time I became a confirmed idealist.
I think that Lewis later reacted rather too strongly against this “universal Spirit” in favour of personal God on the ground that one could not enter into personal relations with it. But the impersonal, or rather transpersonal, aspect of the Godhead is surely as important as its personal aspect. Lewis saw the danger of substituting abstract terms for concrete and personal terms, when speaking about God, but he seems to have reacted too much against this danger. In his Letters to Malcolm he wrote: “What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really had a beard?” It may be that no soul ever perished for this reason, but the impoverishment of religious faith due to this, and the scandal caused to unbelievers by such childish religious beliefs, are surely just as harmful as any liberal theology that takes refuge in abstractions.
Another book that Lewis lent me at an early stage was Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, which had permanent effect on my life. Barfield was a philologist, which did not naturally endear him to me, but he had discovered by the study of words what felt, and still feel, to be one of the most profound secrets not only of the growth of language, but also of the evolution of man and the universe. He showed how a word such as spiritus in Latin or pneuma in Greek could mean several different things, namely, wind or air or breath or life or soul or spirit. The common understanding of this phenomenon is that man began by using words to signify material things such as wind and air and breath and then went on by gradual stages to discover more abstract concepts such as life and soul and spirit.
But Barfield showed, on the contrary, that the original words contained all these meanings together. This is why early languages are immensely rich and suggestive. Then in the course of time the different meanings are distinguished and separate words assigned to them. Thus language progresses from symbols that are deep and rich and manifold in meaning to words that are precise and clear and prosaic but lacking the poetic quality of early speech. This threw a flood of light for me on human evolution. We do not progress from a simple materialistic view of life to a mere spiritual understanding, but from a rich, complex, global experience of life to a more rational, analytical understanding, in other words from poetry to prose.
Thus my view of life was shaped by some basic insights that Lewis gave me, and his influence must have been felt in innumerable ways that I cannot now recall. But there was one point on which we disagreed, and I cannot help feeling that in this he was wrong. This was on the question of what he called the “personal heresy.’ I had written an essay on Sir Philip Sidney, in which I said that his poetry was so much better than much Elizabethan love poetry because he wrote from his own personal experience. Lewis immediately attacked this view, maintaining that poetry had nothing to do with the poet’s personal feelings, a theory he afterward developed in his book The Personal Heresy from a debate with Dr Tillyard. I was unable to answer Lewis at the time, but it appears to me now that Dr Tillyard had much the better of the argument, and that this was really a blind spot with Lewis. Lewis seems to have concentrated his attention on the aspect of poetry as an art or skill and to have underestimated the unconscious. But, as Dr Tillyard pointed out, that is on the conscious aspect of poetry. But the imagination, as Coleridge and Wordsworth understood it, is the meeting place of conscious and unconscious, and it is through the unconscious that the poet is linked not only with his own personal feelings but also with the experience of the race, the collective unconscious of mankind. This is why the poet has been called a seer, or rishi in Hindu tradition, and is said to have been inspired by the Muses.
Another problem is that Lewis defined personality as “that which distinguishes one man from another,” but this is to take a very limited view of the human person. It would be better to keep the word individuality for that which distinguishes one man from another, and to say that the person is that by which a man exists in himself and is related to other persons. Person implies relation, as is seen in the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is in his person that a man is open to humanity and to the universe. This may seem to be labouring a small point, but I believe that it marks a difference in Lewis’s outlook, which affected his whole understanding of the relation between the life of the intellect and the life of the imagination. This was a perennial source of debate between us, and for Lewis himself it was one of the principal problems of his life, how to reconcile his extraordinarily powerful intellect, which made him one of the greatest critics of English literature, with his no less powerful imagination, which was to flower in the planetary novels and the Narnia stories. It is a measure of the gap between them that in all my acquaintance with him he never revealed his imaginative side. I knew him only as a master mind, not as an imaginative genius. This was the image he projected.
I remember once when I spoke disparagingly of Dr Johnson how vehement was his reaction. Dr Johnson was a hero to him, and he himself has often been compared to Johnson (though he would have repudiated the suggestion), and this is surely revealing. Dr Johnson also had a powerful intellect with a kind of gap between it and his imagination. Was there the same kind of gap in Lewis’s mind that made him, on the one hand, a great critic and great moralist and later a great writer of children’s stories but never, as he had once hoped, a great poet.
This had its effect also on Lewis’s understanding of religion. Both he and I came to religion by way of literature. Even before I left Oxford in the summer of 1929, we were beginning to discover together the religious values in literature, and it will be remembered that it was in the autumn of 1929 that he underwent his first conversion to theism. When I left Oxford I undertook a course of reading in philosophy at Lewis’s recommendation, and soon afterward I entered on that experiment in common living with two Oxford friends in a small cottage in the country, which was to lead to my own conversion. During all this time Lewis and I kept up copious correspondence, and our reading followed much the same lines. In particular, I began to read the Bible seriously for the first time. But in doing so, I was reading it as literature. I approached it just as I had approached Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Keats. I was looking for a way of life. That which I was leading in a small village in the country, where the daily life of the farm and the cottage reflected the background of many of the Bible stories and the poetry of Wordsworth, gave all this experience a setting in real life. And so my whole life came together in a coherent whole, and I found it after a time as natural to pray as to read poetry or to walk among the hills. I am not sure how far Lewis’s experience differed from mine in this respect. I unfortunately never thought of keeping the many letters he wrote to me at this time, though I kept most of his later ones. There was no thought of fame on his side at this time. We were simply two friends finding our way to what was believed to be the truth, and I don’t think that either of us thought that anyone else would be interested in what we had to say to each other. The only letter of mine I can remember was one I wrote commenting on the text, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” I think that I had then grasped clearly the fact of the solidarity of mankind, that all men together make one man and that Adam, whom St. Paul describes as the “type (or figure) of him who was to come” was representative of all mankind and was kind of “myth” or symbolic figure of whom Christ was the fulfillment.
It will be remembered that the turning point in Lewis’s conversion to theism had been when his friends Dyson and Tolkien had convinced him that in Christ the myth had become history. I think that this understanding of the relation between myth and history was the key to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity and in a sense to his whole life. He has described how his first awakening took place when he discovered Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and the world of Norse mythology took possession of his imagination. Later he has described how the joy, which he experienced in all this romantic literature, began to fade, and he came to think that all he had loved in this world of myth was imaginary, while all that he believed to be real was “grim and meaningless”. This was the period when he became an atheist. His mind and his imagination were completely divided. But then the change took place. He read Phantastes by George MacDonald ( a book I have never been able to read, but in these cases it is not so much the book in itself that is important as the point in one’s own development, when a book suddenly sets fire to the imagination), and the world of imagination began to become real for him again.
When I first came into contact with him, Lewis had passed beyond his atheism and reached the stage of belief in Universal Spirit, such as he described in the Summa Metaphysica contra Anthroposophos, though he still would not call this Spirit God, nor was there any thought of prayer to this or any other Spirit. We were both therefore very close to each other at this stage. As we read English literature together, we both began to discover more and more of the religious background of what we were reading. He has described in Surprised by Joy how “The Dream of the Rood” and the poetry of Langland, whose Piers Plowman is figure of Christ, had moved him.
Gradually this Christian mythology, as we both would have called it, began to impress us more and more, and the idea that it might after all be true began to dawn on us. For me the turning point came when I was reading the Bible in my retreat in the Cotswolds with my two friends and I began for the first time since my childhood to pray. For Lewis it had come a little before in the Trinity term of 1929 when he “gave in and admitted that God was God.” But for both of us the passage from theism to Christianity had to be made, and it was here that Lewis’s sense of the meaning and value of myth helped him so much. He was able to reconcile his imagination and his reason in Christian faith. It will be remembered that he gave as a subtitle to his Pilgrim’s Regress, an Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, and this expresses exactly how we both came to accept the Christian faith.
It is needless to say that in all this, though the place of imagination was crucial, reason was hard at work all the time. The most obvious fact about Lewis in my first encounter with him was his sheer intellectual power. He could be as witty and amusing as anyone in Oxford and was ready to discuss anything, but he never abated his rigorous criticism of any argument, as he had learned to do in the school of his master Kirkpatrick. It was this union of rigorous critical intellect with rich poetic imagination that, it seems to me, gave Lewis’s Christian apologetics such an extraordinary force. But there was another element in it, which I would not have expected. In my first acquaintance with him, Lewis never gave the impression of being a moralist or of having any great psychological insight. No doubt, his intellect was just as active in the moral sphere, and he was learning at this time to relate his life to the demands of morality, but I would never have imagined that he would have developed such astonishing psychological insight, as he showed in The Screwtape Letters and in his Broadcast Talks. This capacity to speak to the common man and see into the hidden motives in the heart of everyman was something that perhaps came to him together with his Christian faith. In other words, not only his extraordinary imaginative gifts but also his psychological insight were aspects of his personality that escaped me.
During all this time until December 1932, when I became a Benedictine monk, Lewis and I had been moving in the same direction. When became a Catholic I went on writing, as had done before, but from then on I came across an impenetrable barrier. Lewis had no desire to follow me in that direction. This was a great disappointment to me. I had felt that I was simply following the path we had both been following to its logical conclusion, and I expected the debate to continue on the same lines.
But obviously the change in my life involved more than I realized. Lewis felt that I was trying to convert him. “You in your charity,” he wrote in a letter to me, “are anxious to convert me; but I am not in the least anxious to convert you.” I doubt whether I was really anxious to convert him to Catholicism any more than I had wanted to convert him to Christianity. I wanted simply to continue the debate between us, and was not aware of any change in my attitude. But he complained in another letter: “If you are going to argue with me, you must argue to the truth of your position, not from it. The opposite procedure only wastes your time and leaves me to reply moved solely by embarrassment, tu sei santo ma tu non sei filosofo.” No doubt, I was carried away with enthusiasm for my new faith, and did not realize how far it was from his. But the problem for me was that this new understanding of the Christian faith was all-important for me, whereas for him it had very little significance.
As he wrote in another letter: “One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You think my specifically Protestant beliefs a tissue of damnable errors; I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human traditions that may be fatal to certain souls, but which I think suitable for you.” I doubt whether I ever felt that Protestant beliefs were a ’tissue of damnable errors”. When I passed from Anglicanism to Catholicism, it was not so much with the sense of rejecting anything as it was with a sense of total fulfillment, and it was this that I wanted to share with him. Lewis went on to say: “I therefore feel no duty to attack you; and certainly feel no inclination to add to my other works an epistolary correspondence with one of the toughest dialecticians of my acquaintance, to which he can devote as much time and reading as he likes, and I can devote very little.” As my stand with Lewis from the beginning of our acquaintance had been that of an “anti-intellectual” and was to continue so in many ways to the end, I was surprised and rather pleased to be described as a “tough dialectician”, but Lewis went on to say: “As well, who wants to debate with a man who begins by saying that no argument can possibly move him?” I think that what I had meant was that my faith would not be influenced by anything he said, but I was only too anxious to share my understanding of the faith, and in this I would have hoped to learn from him as had done in the past.
The result was that we agreed not to discuss our differences any more, and this was perfectly satisfactory to Lewis; for me it was a great embarrassment. It meant that I could never really touch on much that meant more to me than anything else, and there was always a certain reserve therefore afterward in our relationship. I think that Lewis himself felt this, and he remarked once on this difference between us, which was one not only of faith but also of character and temperament. But in all this it is remarkable how Lewis never gave the faintest sign that he recognized any difference in knowledge or intelligence between us. He always treated me as an equal in every respect, as I believe that he treated all his other friends. In through his correspondence with me, which covered more than going thirty years, I have been touched to see how unvarying was his friendship, how totally he accepted me, appreciating what said, disagreeing when necessary, but always with complete sincerity, giving his time and attention to answering my letters, as though he had nothing else to do. Only once did he complain when I wrote at Christmas, saying that he had so many letters to answer at Christmas that it had become more of a penitential season for him and begging me to write at other times. I think that it was through him that I really discovered the meaning of friendship.
But apart from personal differences between us, I think that there was one thing that prevented Lewis from ever taking the question of Catholicism versus Protestantism very seriously. This was his almost total lack of concern about the Church as an institution. “To me,” he wrote in Surprised by Joy, “religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone, and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters.” This is surely a very revealing remark. It would be difficult to imagine a more Protestant, a more totally unecclesiastical conception of Christianity than this. And this was what Lewis’s character and temperament inclined him to. “The idea of churchmanship,” as he wrote in Surprised by Joy, “was to me wholly unattractive.” It was the externals of church worship that he found so unattractive, a kind of wearisome, get-together affair.” Hymns and organ music were also especially unattractive. “Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked ( and like) the organ least.” To a large extent this feeling remained with him to the end of his life. When I wrote to him a year before he died about Syriac and the liturgy of the Syrian Church in Kerala, he wrote back complimenting me on learning yet another language (though, in fact, I have not been at all successful with Indian languages) but added, “I hardly share one of the purposes for which you use it. I cannot take an interest in liturgiology. 1 see very well that someone ought to feel it. If religion includes cult and cult requires order, it is somebody’s business to be concerned with it. But not, I feel, mine. Indeed, for the laity I sometimes wonder if an interest in liturgiology is not rather a snare. Some people talk as if it were itself the Christian faith.”
It can easily be understood why, having this feeling for the Church and her liturgical worship, Lewis felt very little attraction toward Catholicism, even if there were not other factors, such as his Northern-Irish background, which naturally prejudiced him against it. For myself I had probably as little interest in liturgy, originally, as he had, but the concept of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ (which I had discovered first in Hooker, for whom we both shared a great admiration) had been the leading motive in my becoming a Catholic. From this I went on to see the liturgy of the Church as the worship of the Mystical Body of Christ or Christ himself, as St. Augustine said, praying in his members. Lewis was later to acquire a deep reverence for and understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist, but his aspect of the Church as a worshipping community and of cult as something “sacred,” a reflection on earth of a heavenly reality, remained hidden from him.
It is perhaps strange that he, with his passionate interest in pagan mythology, should have missed this aspect of religion, but as far as I recall, though he was interested in myth, he never showed any interest in ritual as the dramatization of the myth. This, again, may have been partly due to the fact that he was personally extremely clumsy with his hands and found any kind of ceremony awkward. He wrote rather amusingly of his admission ceremony at Magdalen: “English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial. They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment, as if everyone felt that he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot anyone who said so”.
It is remarkable also that Lewis showed very little interest in the Fathers of the Church. With his wide classical culture one would have expected him to be naturally attracted to the Greek and Latin Fathers, but apart from mention of St. Augustine’s Confessions, I don’t remember his ever referring to one of the Fathers. This again would suggest that he had very little sense of the Church as a living organism, growing by stages through the centuries, as Newman portrayed it in his Development of Christian Doctrine. In fact, I remember his saying to me once that he thought that Charles Kingsley had the better of the argument with Newman, which produced the Apologia. This is surely a surprising judgment and shows how fundamentally unsympathetic he was to the Catholic outlook.
Finally, it must be said that he was most unsympathetic to the revival of Thomism, which was taking place during the thirties and forties. I don’t think that he found St. Thomas himself very attractive (though, of course, he appreciated the Thomist elements in the poetry of Dante), and neo-Thomism he objected to most strongly. He wrote to me once: “A man who was an atheist two terms ago and admitted into your Church last term and who had never read a word of philosophy came to me urging me to reread the Summa and offering to lend me copy”. One can understand his irritation at this sort of thing, and though it was not due to a rejection of Scholasticism as such, he showed little sympathy with it by continuing: “By the way, I hope that the great revival of religion now going on will not get mixed up with Scholasticism, for I am sure that the renewal of the latter, however salutary, must be as temporary as any other movement in philosophy.” This sums up very well his attitude toward Scholasticism. He was not attracted to it himself, and with considerable prescience he regarded it as a movement in philosophy that was destined to pass along with others.
In this connection, it may be worth remarking that Lewis’s own defence of the Christian faith at the Socratic Club in Oxford, of which he was president for many years, suffered a similar fate. His arguments for the existence of God were challenged by Elizabeth Anscombe, a Catholic, who was a logical positivist. I remember Lewis saying to me that she had completely demolished his argument and remarking that he thought that, as she was a Catholic, she might at least have provided an alternative argument. Later, he was to write to me: “At the Socratic the enemy often wipe the floor with us.” Lewis was certainly disturbed by this but, of course, it did not affect his faith. He had no illusions about the relation of philosophy to faith. As he wrote in the letter, which I have quoted on Scholasticism: “We have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes except the Word.” This is a very profound statement and could be of crucial importance, but I am not sure in what exact sense Lewis intended it. That theology, like philosophy, was also “passing” I think he would have agreed, at least in some sense. The object of Christian faith is the Word of God himself, as Lewis himself had said, and that Word is a “mystery” that can never be fathomed.
Yet, of course, there are some statements like those of the New Testament and some of the Creeds, which are nearer to the truth and therefore more adequate than others. Yet one wonders how far when in Miracles, for instance, Lewis says the “Original Thing must be not a principle or a generality, much less an ‘ideal’ or a ‘value,’ but an utterly concrete fact,” and again that “no thinking person would in so many words deny that God is concrete and individual”. How far did he take such statements to be necessarily true, and how far he would have allowed that they are analogical statements, which always stand in need of correction. Lewis felt very strongly the danger of abstract and impersonal terms in reference to the Godhead, but perhaps he did not realize sufficiently the equal danger of concrete and personal terms.
This raises the question of his attitude toward mysticism. In the Letters to Malcolm Lewis has spoken very clearly on the subject of mysticism. He describes himself as belonging to the “foothills” of prayer. “I do not attempt the precipices of mysticism,” he said. Yet when one thinks of the experience of joy, which he described in Surprised by Joy, it would be difficult to deny that this was a mystical experience. He speaks of it as an experience of “unsatisfied desire,” which was itself “more desirable than any other satisfaction,” and he has no hesitation in calling it the “central” experience of his life. Now the specific character of mystical experience is its ineffability. He himself remarked in Letters to Malcolm that “one thing common to all mysticism is the temporary shattering of our ordinary spatial and temporal consciousness and our discursive intellect.” But as he shrewdly observes, this negative aspect of mystical experience is not everything. “The value of this negative experience, as he says, “must depend on the nature of the positive experience for which it makes room.” This is something that is often forgotten when speaking of mystical experience. For Lewis it was the search for the origin of this joy, which he had experienced, which was the “central story of [his] life.’
It was to lead him, of course, to the discovery first of God in the traditional sense and then of Christianity. The question is whether in becoming a Christian Lewis reached the fulfillment of mystical experience. I think that he would have replied in the negative. There is no doubt that he had profound kind of mystical intuition, which gave him such an extraordinary insight into the mysteries of Christian faith, and there are times, especially in the Letters to Malcolm, when he comes near to a genuine mystical insight. But on the whole, he was so much on his guard against any kind of pantheism and so much inclined, as he confessed, to go as near to dualism as possible that he generally stops short of mysticism. Perhaps his very emphasis on the Person of God and the Incarnation made it difficult for him to go “beyond personality” and experience the presence of God beyond all images and concepts, which is characteristic of mystical experience. I had some correspondence with him on this subject, and I remember that he did not seem to understand the point was making. I think that he regarded mystical experience as a rare event to which the ordinary Christian (with whom he would have classed himself) need not aspire.
I think that Lewis’s understanding of the place of mystical experience in religious life and the whole problem of the relation of the Personal God to the absolute Godhead would have grown if he had been able to make a deeper study of Hinduism. In Surprised by Joy he had written that there were really only two possible answers to the question, Where was the fullness of religion to be found? namely, either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Long before, he had written to me: “You will remember that long ago you and I had agreed, being still unbelievers, that Hinduism and Christianity were the only two things worth serious consideration. I still think that it was a sound decision.” But Lewis was never able to study Hinduism in depth, and the objections he raised to it in Surprised by Joy were not altogether relevant. But he did touch on what I would consider the essential difference the question of myth and history. Yet I think that he was inclined to think that myth was an expression of the childhood of humanity, which modern man had outgrown.
The meeting of myth and history in the Incarnation was the turning point in the history of religion, as he had realized. But it was not simply that myth had been fulfilled in history and was now outgrown, but rather that myth was revealed as a dimension of history and history as a dimension of myth. History is not simply a record of events abstracted from the context of the total reality, but the record of events realized in the total context of reality, human and divine, as is seen in the biblical revelation. And myth is not simply an ideal, symbolic expression of ultimate reality, but an expression of the ultimate meaning of life in the context of actual history. To speak of the “myth of the God incarnate” can therefore be a perfectly accurate expression, provided that it is properly understood. This raises the question of how far, if he had lived, Lewis would have been influenced by the new currents in theology and biblical criticism that have developed since the Second Vatican Council. It is impossible to answer the question, but it would have been of great interest to have been able to follow his thoughts in this direction.
This whole question of myth is relevant because Lewis himself had the myth-making faculty so highly developed. It is remarkable how, in his later years, he was driven to express himself more and more in terms of myth, in the planetary novels and above all in the Narnia stories, which I am sometimes inclined to regard as his greatest work. It is perhaps significant that the book to which he attached the greatest value, Till We Have Faces, is at once the most profoundly mythical of all his writings and one of the least popular. Perhaps there was something in him that was striving for expression and could not find a completely adequate form. My suggestion is that the mythmaker and the poet in him were never quite reconciled with the philosopher and the moralist, or rather that they did not reach the supreme fulfillment in the poetry of prophecy, as one might have hoped. But this is a very delicate question, which cannot really be answered. In making these criticisms would be understood as putting forward an argument, just as I would have done if Lewis were alive, and there is nothing I would wish more than that he were alive to answer such questions. When I look over the years of our friendship, realize how much I owed to the constant stimulus of his critical mind and to the inspiration of his kindness. When we last met, a month before his death, he reminded me that we had been friends for nearly forty years. There are not many things in my life more precious to me than that friendship.
This article was first published C S Lewis at the Breakfast Table, James T Como (ed), pp. 11-26. Collins (1980),