Letters to Malcolm and the trouble with Narnia: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis.

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It is sad that 'Narnia' and all that part of C.S.L.'s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his. Also, I personally found Letters to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable. (Tolkien, Letters 352)

My only function as a Christian writer is to preach 'mere Christianity' not ad clerum but ad populum. Any success that has been given me has, I believe, been due to my strict observance of those limits. By attempting to do otherwise I should only add one more recruit (and a very ill-qualified recruit) to the ranks of controversialists. After that I should be no more use to anyone (396)

Apparently I have been myself guilty of introducing another red herring by mentioning devotions to saints. I didn't in the least want to go off into a discussion on that subject. There is clearly a theological defence for it; if you can ask the prayers of the living, why should you not ask for the prayers of the dead. There is clearly also a great danger. In some popular practice we see it leading off into an infinitely silly picture of Heaven as an earthly court where applicants will be wise to pull the right wires, discover the best "channels," and attach themselves to the most influential pressure groups. But I have nothing to do with all of this. I am not thinking of adopting the practice myself; and who am I to judge to practices of others? I only hope there'll be no scheme for canonisations in the Church of England. (Malcolm 15)

We were coming down the steps of Magdalen Hall [...] long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: "I can't imagine any two persons more dissimilar." We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an "Evangelical clergyman of good family" taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. (Carpenter, Inklings 51-52)

Newman makes my blood run cold when he says in one of the Parochial and Plain Sermons that heaven is like a church because, in both, "one single sovereign subject--religion--is brought before us. [...] He has substituted religion for God [...]. [E]ven in this present life there is danger in the very concept of religion. (30)

Compunction, compassion, gratitude--all the fruitful emotions--are strangled. Sheer physical horror leaves no room for them. Nightmare. Even so, the image ought to be periodically faced. But no one could live with it. (85)

The substance of the bread or wine, after the consecration, remains neither under the sacramental species, nor elsewhere; yet it does not follow that it is annihilated; for it is changed into the body of Christ [...]. [emphasis added]. (Q75, Art 3, Reply Obj. 1) It is evident to sense that the accidents of the bread and wine remain after the consecration. [...] There is no deception in the sacrament; for the accidents which are discerned by the senses are truly present. But the intellect, whose proper object is substance [...] is preserved by faith from deception [emphasis added]. (Q75, Art 5) (Aquinas 2443, 2444)

I find "substance" (in Aristotle's sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My efforts to do so produces mere nursery-thinking [...]. (Malcolm 102)

About the resurrection of the body. I agree with you that the old picture of the soul re-assuming the corpse--perhaps blown to bits or long since usefully dissipated through nature -is absurd. [...] We are not, in this doctrine, concerned with matter as such at all; with waves and atoms and all that. What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations. [...] At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow "inside" the body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it--the sensuous life raised from death--will be inside the soul. [...] "But this," you protest, "is no resurrection of the body. You give the dead a sort of dream world and dream bodies. They are not real." Surely neither less nor more real than those you have always known? You know better than I that the "real world" of our present experience (coloured, resonant, soft or hard, cool or warm, all corseted by perspective) has no place in the world described by physics or even by physiology. Matter enters our experience only by becoming sensation (when we perceive it) or conception (when we understand it). That is, by becoming soul. That element in the soul which it becomes will, in my view, be raised and glorified; the hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as a substitute to the genuine article, but as a flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal. It will be eternally true that they originated with matter; let us therefore bless matter. But in entering our soul as alone it can enter--that is, by being perceived and known--matter has turned into soul (like Undines who acquired a soul by marriage with a mortal). (Malcolm 121-123)

Resurrection is the rising again from the dead, the resumption of life. The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that all men, whether elect or reprobate, "will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear about with them." [Emphasis added] [...] [T]he heretical contention of Hymeneus and Philitus that the Scriptures denote by resurrection not the return to life of the body, but the rising of the soul from the death of sin to the life of grace, must be excluded. [...] Among the opponents of the Resurrection we naturally find first those who denied the immortality of the soul; secondly, all those who, like Plato, regarded the body as the prison of the soul and death as an escape from the bondage of matter; thirdly the sects of the Gnostics and Manichaeans who looked upon all matter as evil; fourthly, the followers of these latter sects the Priscillianists, the Cathari, and the Albigenses; fifthly, the Rationalists, Materialists, and Pantheists of later times. (Maas) (12)

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [from Bunyan] represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?" This is not allegory at all. (Letters of C.S. Lewis 475)

He'll be coming and going [...]. One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild you know. Not like a tame lion. (Lewis LW & W 180)

I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning--and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again [...]. Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of the Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger. (Tolkien, Letters 340)

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God [...] and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection [emphasis added]. (Catechism 93)