how he reached the point where he accepted Idealism and admitted ‘that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos’.
7 Scholasticism was originally a teaching device developed in the schools and universities of Western Europe from the end of the eleventh century and largely associated with the methods of three major philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. It proceeded by questioning ancient and authoritative texts. A favoured method was to draw up lists of contradictory statements in the texts, applying to them the rules of logic in order to reveal their underlying agreement. Its purpose was to get to the inner truth of things to which the texts bore witness. The method flourished until the sixteenth century when it came under attack from humanist scholars.
An attempt to restore scholasticism began in Rome about 1830. The most important of several theologians who wanted to extend this ‘neo-Scholasticism’ to the universal Church was Pope Leo XIII; in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), he recommended that scholasticism be the only philosophy and theology used in Catholic seminaries. The Pope enjoined the study of St Thomas Aquinas on all theology students as a clear, systematic philosophy capable of defending Christian tradition from contemporary attack.
8 Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher. Following his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1906 he turned to the study of St Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy he sought to relate to modern culture. He held professorial chairs at the Institut Catholique in Paris, 1914–33, the Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto, 1933–45, and Princeton University, 1948–52.
9 The salvation of the virtuous infidel was to become an increasingly important issue to Lewis. He was familiar with the fact that in The Divine Comedy Dante put the Emperor Trajan in Paradise (see Purgatorio X, 74–93; Paradiso XX, 44–5) because of the legend that Pope Gregory the Great, through his prayers, brought Trajan back from Hell and baptized him to salvation. Of greater importance was Aquinas’s teaching on ‘baptism by desire’, e.g. Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 68: ‘when a man wishes to be baptized, but by some ill-chance he is forestalled by death before receiving Baptism…such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of faith that worketh by charity…’
Lewis came to believe that virtuous heretics or pagans could be saved through Christ. ‘I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God,’ he wrote to Mrs Ashton on 8 November 1952, ‘is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him’ (WHL, p, 428). He provided an illustration of this in The Last Battle (1956), ch. 15. On meeting Asian in the heavenly Narnia, Emeth the Calormene explains that he had been seeking Tash all his life. ‘Beloved,’ said Asian, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’
10 i.e. J. R. R. Tolkien.
11 Lewis published this ‘anonymously’ with slight variations in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964). It is included under the title ‘Prayer’ in CP, pp. 136–7.
12 ‘May you humbly love the rivers and woods’, adapting Virgil, Georgics 2. 486.
13 i.e. stop to obtain food or drink.
14 Sister M. Madeleva CSC (1887–1964), a member of the Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Cross, was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. While staying in Oxford during Trinity Term 1934 she attended Lewis’s lectures on medieval poetry, and had a particular interest in the lecture devoted to Boethius. Besides lending Sister Madeleva his notebooks giving details of the works mentioned in his lectures, Lewis invited her to visit him in Magdalen. On her return to Notre Dame in 1934, Sister Madeleva was made President of St Mary’s College, a post she held until her retirement in 1961. Her numerous books include Knights Errant and other Poems (1923), Chaucer’s Nun and Other Essays (1925), Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925), Penelope and Other Poems (1927), Selected Poems (1939), A Lost Language (1951), The Four Last Things (1959) and an autobiography, My First Seventy Years (1959). See Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: A Biography (1997).
15 During the Trinity Term of 1934 (22 April-16 June) Lewis gave a series of lectures entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry’, later adapted into The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). For a detailed list of Lewis’s lectures see Walter Hooper, ‘The Lectures of C. S. Lewis in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, Christian Scholar’s Review, XXVII, no. 4 (Summer 1998). pp. 436–53.
16 Walter William Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (1900). William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386) is the author of Piers Plowman, which Lewis discussed in The Allegory of lent, ch. 4, pp. 158–61.
17 One ‘Prolegomena’ lecture had discussed the connection between Vincent of Beauvais (fl. 1250) and Chaucer’s ballad. Famine. In The Discarded Image Lewis wrote (p. 84); ‘Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned. Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Maturate, xix, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line “Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene” (Fortune, 35).’
18 The Romance of the Rose is a thirteenth-century French allegorical romance by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, It is discussed in chapter 3 of The Allegory of love
* I don’t claim to be such a person myself!
19 Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), French authority on medieval philosophy, is the author of La Philosophie au Moyen Age (1922), Moral Values and the Moral Life: The System of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Leo Richard Ward (1931), and many other works.
20 Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), Hadrian the Seventh (1904).
21 Numbers 13:33.
22 Paul Elmer Mote (1864–1937), American critic and philosopher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, He taught Sanskrit at Harvard, 1894–5, and Bryn Mawr, 1895–7, and was a newspaper editor for twelve years. During 1919 he lectured on Plato at Princeton University. More was associated with Irving Babbitt, champion of humanism and founder of the modern humanistic movement. His major works are the Shelburne Essays (11 vols., 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols., 1921–31), and the New Shelburne Essays (3 vols., 1928–36). Princeton University Library has in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections the three letters from Lewis to More published in this volume, and also