(7) The Funeral of a Great Myth, published for the first time in this book, may appear an intruder on theological premises. I have included it here because the myth discussed in this essay seems quite obviously to be an out-growth and development of one of the myths compared to the Christian Faith in Lewiss Is Theology Poetry? (The Socratic Digest, No. 3 (1945), pp. 2535). Its close connection with the Digest essay caused me to feel it deserved a place here; it is, also, relevant to the idea of Theism. (8) On Church Music is reprinted from English Church Music, Vol. xix (April 1949). Lewis did not himself like hymns and the existence of this paper is entirely owing to the special invitation of his friend Leonard Blake, who was editor of English Church Music at the time. (9) Historicism originally appeared in The Month, Vol. iv (October 1950).
(10) The two-part essay on The Psalms was published here for the first time. Judging from the handwriting (Lewis wrote all his works with a nib pen) it would appear to have been composed shortly before his book Reflections on the Psalms (1958). By the by, their mutual friend Charles Williams brought Lewis and T. S. Eliot together for the first time in 1945, at what proved to be a disastrous tea party, Mr Eliots opening gambit having been Mr Lewis, you are a much older man than you appear in photographs. But their distrust of one another disappeared completely and they became fast friends when they met again in 1959 to serve for several years as literary
advisers to the committee whose aim was the revision of the Prayer Book Psalter. The new text, entitled The Revised Psalter, was published by SPCK in 1963.
(11) Although two pages of the manuscript of The Language of Religion are lost, the omission, fortunately, does not seriously affect the main argument of the paper. I have only recently discovered that Lewis intended reading it at the Twelfth Symposium of the Colston Research Society held at the University of Bristol in March 1960, but illness prevented him from attending the Symposium and the paper was published here for the first time. (12) Petitionary Prayer: A Problem without an Answer was read to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953 and it, too, was published for the first time in this book. (13) The numerous admirers of Fernseed and Elephants may recall that it was originally published in this volume as Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism, and I have to admit to altering my original title as I didnt think it did justice to this superb essay, which Lewis read at Westcott House, Cambridge, on 11 May 1959. (14) The Seeing Eye was originally published in the American periodical, Show, Vol. iii (February 1963) under the title Onward, Christian Spacemen. Lewis so heartily disliked the title which the editors of Show gave this piece that I felt justified in re-naming it.
While most of these essays were never prepared for publication, even those which originally appeared in periodicals were sent to the publishers in Lewiss own hand. The result was that a good many errors slipped in, and remained, as Lewis was generally rather cavalier about proof-reading. It has fallen to me as his editor to correct such errors as I found, and, because it seemed called for, I have ventured to add footnotes where they were needed. In order to distinguish who wrote which notes, it is, I think, sufficient to point out that all the footnotes are mine except those Lewis appended to the essay on Christianity and Culture and two others that are designated by the initials C.S.L.
Walter Hooper
Oxford, 24 June 1979
CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
When I was asked to address this society, I was at first tempted to refuse because the subject proposed to me, that of Christianity and Literature, did not seem to admit of any discussion. I knew, of course, that Christian story and sentiment were among the things on which literature could be written, and conversely, that literature was one of the ways in which Christian sentiment could be expressed and Christian story told; but there seemed nothing more to be said of Christianity in this connection than of any of the hundred and one other things that men made books about. We are familiar, no doubt, with the expression Christian Art, by which people usually mean Art that represents Biblical or hagiological scenes, and there is, in this sense, a fair amount of Christian Literature. But I question whether it has any literary qualities peculiar to itself. The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature. And if we enlarge the idea of Christian Literature to include not only literature on sacred themes but all that is written by Christians for Christians to read, then, I think, Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist. It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan. In the same way, literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand. But whatever it chose to do would have to be done by the means common to all literature; it could succeed or fail only by the same excellences and the same faults as all literature; and its literary success or failure would never be the same thing as its obedience or disobedience to Christian principles.