“‘We know not—we remember that we knew.’

And then he paused, and ruefully he smiled

Fondling his knee with thoughtful hand; and, ‘Child,’

He said, ‘How can it profit us to talk

Much of that region where you say you walk.

We are not native there: we shall not die

Nor live in elfin country, you and I.

Greatly I fear lest, wilfully refusing

Beauty at hand, you walk dark roads to find it,

Impatient of dear earth because behind it

You dream of phantom worlds, forever losing

What is more wonderful—too strange indeed

For you—too dry a flavour for the greed

Of uncorrected palates; this sweet form

Of day and night, the stillness and the storm,

Children, the changing year, the growing god

That springs, by labour, out of the turn’d sod.’

‘I have no child,’ she said, ‘What mockery is this,

What jailor’s pittance offered in the prison of earth,

To that unbounded appetite for larger bliss

Not born with me, but older than my mortal birth? . . .

When shall I be at home? When shall I find my rest?

My lord, you have lived happy and with cause have blessed

This world’s habitual highway, where you walk at ease;

I walk not, but go naked upon bleeding knees.’”1

This is an exchange of stunning honesty. Neither the voice of the Archbishop nor the Queen becomes a caricature; instead, both express sincere responses to the question that has pulsated through every generation: What do we do with our longing? The Archbishop fears that the Queen has become so captivated by the world within her dreams that she can no longer see the gifts hidden within this one. See how he names the most ordinary things: day turning to night, the changing seasons, the stillness and the storms, children, and honest labor. None of them are glamorous, yet all of them are holy. He urges that, in her “dream of phantom worlds,” she is “forever losing / What is more wonderful.” His warning is not against the pursuit of beauty and transcendence, but against overlooking the “beauty at hand” while endlessly and restlessly searching for something beyond it.

The Queen’s reply is equally compelling. “What jailor’s pittance . . .” she asks. Earth, as wonderful as it is, simply cannot satisfy the depth and breadth of the desire she carries.

Here Lewis gives her one of the poem’s most arresting lines: Her longing for “larger bliss” is “older than my mortal birth.” My goodness. She is not describing some fleeting ambition or dissatisfaction, but naming a deep intuition that we were made for more than this world can offer.

The genius of Lewis’s writing lies in refusing to let either voice silence the other. We need the wisdom of the Archbishop in his provocation to pay attention, to “listen to our lives and see them for the fathomless mystery that they are,”2 as Frederick Buechner put it, while embracing the Queen’s refusal to settle—to pursue a land that, far from being phantom, is in many ways more real than the one we inhabit. We are called to live within the tension of this conversation, as those not destined to escape the world, while remaining unconvinced that it will ever be enough.

I’ve lived with this passage for some time now, and I find myself wondering how I might respond to the Queen’s piercing question: “When shall I find my rest?” Perhaps when longing itself becomes a mercy—a holy prodding that prevents us from sleepwalking through our lives. Perhaps when it awakens in us the desire to inhabit the here and now more fully, recognizing that its beauty and goodness are but the foretaste of that far country where we so long to be.

Enjoy the following excerpt from This is the Main Event, Joshua’s latest book that offers a roadmap on how every moment can become meaningful when we recognize the God who meets us in it.

This is the Main Event Sneak Peak

Sometimes I feel lost. Not so much waking up on the wrong side of the bed but on the wrong side of eternity. I feel, to borrow from the Oklahoman John Moreland, “homesick for a home I’ve never had.”1 The Welsh have a word for that. Of course they do—they’re the only people who can make a shopping list sound like a hymn, lifting the most mundane mix of words into melodies that attract angels; I think the muses were born from the springs of Welsh valleys.

The word is hiraeth. It means homesickness, but it’s more than that. It speaks to an ache for something both familiar and estranged—something, someone, or someplace that perhaps never even existed. Yeah, sometimes I feel like that.

It’s Lewis, more than anyone, who has touched the pulse of this experience in his writing. Before naming it the “inconsolable secret”2 or the “old ache”3 he imagined a queen who was haunted by this longing, this sense of forgetting something once intimately known. In his wonderful poem “The Queen of Drum,” the kingdom has drifted into a dull slumber; the people wake each morning and engage in their ordinary lives, yet beneath the rhythm of their days lies a mysterious exhaustion: It’s as if they have stumbled into a spiritual sleep, an unending yawn and weariness of heart. It’s only the Queen who refuses to settle, roused by a dream in which she has seen a country beyond the boundaries of her land and every morning, upon waking, feels the longing for that place. She alone remembers, if only dimly, that this world is not all there is. The rest of the poem is in many ways the story of what the Queen does with that memory and Lewis, in his poetic brilliance, extends the question to us all: What do we do with our longing?

I find myself resonating with the Queen’s unrest. Hers is a journey, like many of ours, of learning to distinguish between the gift of enchantment and the greater gift of Presence. We were made to be enchanted, to awaken, bleary-eyed from cynicism and indifference, and we ache for those moments that interrupt the ordinary, that pull us from the monotonous and the mundane, reminding us we are more than matter, more than the sum of our parts, and in that sense, enchantment is a grace, like the Queen’s dream, stirring us to believe that the world is charged with mystery. And yet, as the story of the Queen will gradually reveal, enchantment is not our home, it is not the chief end of our desire, and our longing for it can gradually become a hurried appetite for euphoria and experience, a futile pursuit for the next event that will lift us beyond ourselves and suspend the weight of our lives, leaving us floating, believing, if only for a moment, we are free. We begin to pursue interruptions to ordinary life, rather than allowing our ordinary lives to become interrupted and transformed by God’s presence; we call it enchantment but in practice it’s just escape.

Presence asks something different of us: to pursue fulfillment in abiding, in the practice of an ordinary devotion that stays within the confines of our actual life, until, by grace, those same mundane days begin to glimmer with eternity. This is the slow, miraculous work of Presence; stones becoming altars, water becoming wine, desolate, dusty road becoming the meeting place of mankind and the divine, and ultimately the mystery of the incarnation, where God steps into our story, eternity wrapped in time, enchanting the world not through creating the means to escape it but in extending the invitation to enter in more fully. So we must pay close attention to the ache, for it is the longing that keeps us awake, not only to anticipate what is to come but to engage more fully in what is. I’ve sometimes wondered, and perhaps you can relate, why the sweetest moments in our lives are so often tinged with sadness. I’ll usually find myself in an experience of great joy—playing with my children or sitting around a dining table with friends, passing plates laden with good food and raising our glasses in raucous toasts—only to feel what I can best describe as a passing wave of grief. It rises above and overwhelms me, and although it soon passes and I’m quickly distracted, I can’t deny it’s there or that it happened. It’s as if I am momentarily heartbroken by the temporal nature of my existence. To experience these moments is to experience the best of what life offers and, simultaneously, the most tragic. We all know that, in one way or another, this is all going to end; we will have to say goodbye, and sadly, in some cases, we won’t even be able to do that. Endings are baked into our being here, and they feel bloody unfair most of the time, which is why I have found it immensely comforting in Lewis’s writing that he engages with this experience not as a defect or mindset to be cured but as an apologetic of sorts, recognizing that our longing for these simple and seemingly ordinary moments to last forever is the evidence of true hiraeth.

“. . . the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”4

This is the quest of the Queen: how to steward her longing, how to live in the tension of knowing there is more without escaping what actually is. We are homesick people, and it is the ache, like a worn and weathered signpost hanging on a country lane, that directs our attention to a land beyond these plains, it is a pulsing reminder that the transcendent is revealed in the temporal and that the life we long for is hidden in the life we have.

For a modern poet’s take on longing’s place in our spiritual journey, enjoy Joshua Luke Smith’s poem—Save Me From the Shallows.

Save Me From the Shallows

For more from Andrew Roycroft, you can find his debut poetry collection, 33—a series of reflections on the Gospel of John—here. Or check out his Substack, New Grub Street.

The essay was published in 1940, nearly ten years after Lewis wrote Launcelot. You can read an excerpt of it below, and once you have, we want to hear how you think Lewis’s fictional re-imagining of Launcelot and his non-fictional analysis of the character engage with one another!

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things—from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals—if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture—we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. ‘Thou wert the meekest man’, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. ‘Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’1

The important thing about this ideal is, of course, is the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, ‘he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten’.2

What, you may ask, is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world? It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be practicable—the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it—but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die.

…

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot’s character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

…

In the world today there is a ‘liberal’ or ‘enlightened’ tradition which regards the combative side of man’s nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the ‘false glamour’ of war. And there is also a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment

as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a ‘modern invocation’. Already in our own Kipling the heroic qualities of his favourite subalterns are dangerously removed from meekness and urbanity. One cannot quite imagine the adult Stalkey in the same room with the best of Nelson’s captains, still less with Sidney! These two tendencies between them weave the world’s shroud.

Happily we live better than we write, better than we deserve. Launcelot is not yet irrecoverable. To some of us this war brought a glorious surprise in the discovery that after twenty years of cynicism and cocktails the heroic virtues were still unimpaired in the younger generation and ready for exercise the moment they were called upon. Yet with this ‘sternness’ there is much ‘meekness’; from all I hear, the young pilots in the R.A.F. (to whom we owe our life from hour to hour) are not less, but more, urbane and modest than the 1915 model.

In short, there is still life in the tradition which the Middle Ages inaugurated. But the maintenance of that life depends, in part, on knowing that the knightly character is art, not nature—something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen. And this knowledge is specially necessary as we grow more democratic. In previous centuries the vestiges of chivalry were kept alive by a specialised class, from whom they spread to other classes partly by imitation and partly by coercion. Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness. This is, indeed, part of the general problem of a classless society, which is too seldom mentioned. Will its ethos be a synthesis of what was best in all the classes, or a mere ‘pool’ with the sediment of all and the virtues of none? But that is too large a subject for the fag-end of an article. My theme is chivalry. I have tried to show that this old tradition is practical and vital. The ideal embodied in Launcelot is ‘escapism’ in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural process; but this seems to have been an exaggeration.3

This excerpt comes from Present Concerns, a collection of essays on moral, practical, and spiritual concerns.

After setting up the tension of the long wait for the return of the heroes of the Grail Quest, over the first forty nines lines of the poem with many images of foreboding that all is not well, we come in line 50, with what we might expect to be a turn in the poem, with the arrival of spring and the long expected return of many of the knights. But all indeed is not well:

Then with the spring began

The home-coming of heroes from the quest, by two’s

And three’s

But they bring no news or are reluctant to tell it. They have about them ‘the dim disquiet of defeated men’ and they are all somehow ‘changed’:

‘Strange to their wives, unwelcome to the stripling boys.

Ladies of Britain mourned the losing of their joys.

There seems nothing in what has happened to them in the mediaeval narrative to account for this, but if you had read these lines in the twenties or thirties to any of the men of Lewis’s generation (and we do not know to which of his contemporaries he may have shown these lines) they would have known exactly what these lines were about, because they had lived them. This is a harrowingly accurate account of what it was like for ‘the home-coming of the heroes’, for the returning survivors, wrung with survivor’s guilt, the men who returned alive from the Western Front. All changed, all in different ways traumatised. Their experience was so dreadfully and so radically different from the experience of those they’d left behind that they had no language for it. Indeed, Lewis goes on to say exactly that:

‘…Now they do not understand

Our speech. They talk to one another in a tongue

We do not know. Strange sorrows and new jests, among

Themselves they have.’

Writing much later in Surprised by Joy, Lewis attempts, unsuccessfully to make light of his war experience in the chapter ‘Guns and Good Company,’ but even there, after nearly forty years, the original horrors creep in: “the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpse, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass…”1

It is well known amongst the writers who survived these horrors that it is sometimes more than a decade before these experiences can find expression, and sometimes they are displaced and come out in some other form of writing, as they did in Tolkien’s account of the dead marshes and the plain of Gorgoroth. So later in Launcelot the hero’s description of the Wasteland could be reportage from the Western Front:

…and villages on every side

Ruined he sees, the jaws of houses gaping wide…

All day he journeys in a land of ruins and bones

And rags…2

So too in our extract Guinevere anticipates it all and hears, even before Launcelot speaks: “..loud winds from the cruel countries of despair.”

What we have, in Launcelot, I believe is a reading of the ‘Matter of Britain3’ not as historical reconstruction but as a locus for otherwise inexpressible experiences of the Great War. This poem deserves to stand not simply as a skillful contribution to Arthuriana, but alongside the writings of Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, and others, as a profound poetic response to one of the great traumas of the twentieth century.

Lewis had a lifelong love of the legends of King Arthur and was familiar with its main source for English writers, Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century compilation of translations from earlier sources, Le Morte d’Arthur. Indeed, along with his fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, he had an academic as well as personal and artistic engagement with the whole ‘Matter of Britain’1, as the mediaeval poets called the cycle of Arthurian legends, including the legends of the Grail. As Sørina Higgins writes in The Inklings and King Arthur, the authoritative book on this subject:

“As highly educated men of letters, several of whom taught literature at Oxford or Cambridge, these authors provide an essential dual insight into the Arthurian texts. Their professional knowledge of Mediaeval and Renaissance literature gave them the ability to read the earlier Arthurian materials with a level of accuracy, detail, and interpretive depth not available to the average reader—or writer. Yet they were focussed not on a revival of the past, but on the present’s need for redemption: as soldiers, office workers, and creative professionals, the Inklings wrote Arthurian works that contained incisive critiques of their own times and visions of utopian or dystopian futures evolving out of contemporary decisions.”2

We can see this very clearly with Lewis in his introduction of Merlin as a character in That Hideous Strength, his prophetic and dystopian novel, and it is also this latter emphasis, the use of Arthurian material to embody or express our own contemporary dilemmas or future fears, that concerns us most in reading ‘Launcelot’.

Before turning to the text of ‘Launcelot’ itself, we should also notice that there is an arc of development in Lewis’s response to the Arthurian legends, and especially to the Grail. There is a significant change brought about firstly by his conversion to Christianity and secondly by his friendship with Charles Williams. After these major life events, his understanding of the Grail changes significantly. At first, Lewis follows Tennyson’s lead in regarding the Grail as peripheral to the main subject of the Round Table and the court of Camelot—it draws the knights away, weakens and undermines the fellowship, and is ultimately part of what leads to the breaking of the fellowship. Williams changes all that, successfully arguing that the Grail is central, that Camelot exists for the Grail and not the other way around, and that this is a working through of Christ’s dictum that we should first seek the Kingdom of God, and then these other things; the nation and the civil polity will find their proper place. By the time Lewis publishes Arthurian Torso3 in 1948, which contains the unfinished manuscript of The Figure of Arthur, Williams’s treatise on the whole Arthurian cycle together with Lewis’s own commentary on Williams’s Arthurian poetry, he is convinced by Williams that the Grail is at the centre of the Arthurian legends, not the periphery.

But to return to the poem at hand, the 296-line fragment ‘Launcelot’, skillfully written in hexameter couplets, we are looking at an earlier stage in Lewis’s appreciation of ‘the Matter of Britain’. Walter Hooper dates this to the early 1930s.4 I would suggest that it is before Lewis’s fuller Christian conversion in 1931, precisely because it veers away from the Grail, rather than towards it. The Grail Cycle, in its fullest mediaeval development, is about the sacrament and mystery of Presence, whereas ‘Launcelot’ is essentially a poetic lament circling around various kinds of emptiness and aching absence. It is set not on the Grail Quest but amongst the empty chairs and expectant emptiness of Camelot after the departure of so many knights on the quest. That sense of aching absence is especially focussed on harrowing insights into the heart of Guinevere. The poem opens with this atmosphere of vacancy: ‘Desolation was in Arthur’s hall / and stillness in the City of Legions’. Far from promising fulfilment and achievement, those who remain say ‘the Sangrail has betrayed us all’. All this is focussed on the feelings and intuitions of Guinevere:

And the Queen understood it all. And the drab pain,

Now for two years familiar in her wearied side,

Stirred like a babe within her.

This is the dark poetry of paradox, for there is no ‘babe’, no fruition of love, and if there were, the whole tone makes it plain that it would be a stillbirth. Indeed, Guinevere, so long tortured by Launcelot’s absence, knows already that their affair is dead: ‘No tidings now could do her good’.

Then she has the shock of knowing that Launcelot has in fact returned but has not immediately come to see her. They are both putting off the inevitable.

The most striking thing in this interval is the weary, dispirited, almost mute mood of the knights who do return. It is as though they have come back from some unspeakable war rather than from the joyous quest on which they set out. We will examine this response in more detail next week, in the passage I have chosen for close reading.

When Launcelot finally does speak to Guinevere, he holds her hand not passionately but piteously, as one ‘to whom they bring bad news she will not understand’.

What follows is Launcelot’s account to her of his part in the Grail Quest. Those who know the narrative in Malory will know that, because of the dolorous stroke, struck by Balin, wounding the Fisher King, any knight approaching the Grail Castle will have to pass through the Wasteland, all the lands made desolate in the instant the King was wounded. The real purpose of the Grail Quest, certainly in Williams’s understanding, was to heal the Fisher King with the same spear with which he was wounded and so restore the Wasteland. And certainly, Launcelot describes his passage through the Wasteland. Lewis knows that we should then expect him to reach the Grail Castle, but he and we are disappointed; he turns aside to other adventures.

The Wasteland is brilliantly described in poetry as evocative as Eliot’s, the poet whom Lewis affected to despise:

He passes by

Forsaken wells and sees buckets red with rust

Upon chains. Dry watercourses filled with dust

What is going on here, in this exploration of desolation? We will take a closer look at one passage and see what we can discover next week.

Enjoy an excerpt from Malcom’s Galahad and the Grail which invites us as reader’s to “take up the tale” of Arthurian legends where “Who knows what wonders might be met...”5

Read the Excerpt!

—The Personal Heresy, C.S. Lewis

How many of us, when we think of C.S. Lewis, think of poetry? Yet how many of us who have read and reread C.S. Lewis have felt his words evoke something palpable, almost tactile? While prose can often do this, it is poetry whose express purpose is to elicit a “specific emotional response through language.”1 Before he ever penned a Christian or philosophical treatise, Lewis, not yet ten years old, was writing poetry in “the little end room” at his home in Belfast. Over the course of his life, Lewis was deeply inspired by poetry of all forms from authors like Longfellow, Thomas Browne, Milton, Edmund Spenser, and many more. While he is most known for his Christian and fiction writing, Lewis remained passionate about poetry, penning books like The Personal Heresy and Preface to Paradise Lost that showcased his love for the form.

Walter Hooper, Lewis’s private secretary in his later years and his biographer after his passing, writes that through C.S. Lewis’s poetry, we get a sense of his “spiritual odyssey.”2 Don King, a modern scholar who has studied Lewis’s poetry extensively, writes: “Lewis’ poetry matters because it illustrates the degree to which writing poetry (and being a poet) is fundamental to all his writing.” He agrees with Hooper that through Lewis’s poetry, we can chart his spiritual journey, watching him move from an atheist in despair while writing Spirits in Bondage, to someone seeking a deeper understanding of faith in The Pilgrim’s Regress, to being able to express that intangible joy attached to faith in Surprised by Joy.

If this is the case—if Lewis’s poetry, or even his mind as a poet, might enhance or illuminate the ways in which we experience his theological, philosophical, and fiction work—why aren’t more of us reading it?

Although I have read Spirits in Bondage and Poems cover to cover, I must admit that Narrative Poems—a collection of epic poems by Lewis—has always intimidated me. Regardless of the author, I can feel a bit like an imposter when I first sit down with a new book of poems. As I try to find the deeper meaning a poet has hidden within the text, I can’t help but wonder what I might be missing. Yet it is the treasure hunt within the words that excites me about reading poetry, the feeling that there is something concealed waiting to break free if only my mind can unlock it. It is also the very thing that sometimes acts as a barrier to my reaching for a new book of poetry.

Lewis, as it turns out, offered a simple roadmap for how to approach poetry:

The truth is that the value of literature, as of other utterances, has always been pretty well understood by the great mass of readers. Of any utterance, whether conversational or poetical, our first demand is that it should be interesting. I am afraid we cannot make it more definite than that. It may be interesting for all sorts of reasons; because it is so funny, because it is so true, because it is so unexpected, or because it does just what we were expecting so well, because it carries us away from daily life into such fine regions of fantasy, or because it brings us back to our immediate surroundings with such a home-felt sense of reality. I know that different things interest different people. It cannot be helped.

And in the second place, we demand that an utterance, besides entertaining, charming, or exciting us for the moment should have a desirable permanent effect on us if possible—should make us either happier, or wiser, or better. There is nothing ‘moral’ in the narrower sense about this, though morals come into it. It is all of a piece with what we want in other departments of life: a man wants his food to be nourishing as well as palatable, his games to be healthy as well as enjoyable.… The only two questions to ask about a poem, in the long run, are, firstly, whether it is interesting, enjoyable, attractive, and secondly, whether this enjoyment wears well and helps or hinders you towards all the other things you would like to enjoy, or do, or be.3

Whether poetry intimidates or excites you, I want to extend an offer to join us this summer in reading through three epic poems found in C.S. Lewis’s Narrative Poems. As we journey through each poem, one per month, we will be led by an expert guide who will share their understanding of what makes each poem unique and what we as modern readers can learn from them. While I do believe that reading Lewis’s poetry can help illuminate some of his other works, I would be remiss not to provide the warning he gives readers in The Personal Heresy:

The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says “look at that” and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him….

To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles: in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him.4

As we read through “Launcelot,” “The Nameless Isle,” and “The Queen of Drum” this summer, we may glean something of Lewis from them. But as he says above—that is not the point. We are to “enjoy him” as a tour guide illuminating elements of our humanity with words that inspire us or challenge us.

If you’d like to join the book club this summer, grab a copy of Narrative Poems. Our reading schedule will be as follows:

• June: “Launcelot”

• July: “The Nameless Isle”

• August: “The Queen of Drum”

Below is a timeline of when Lewis began working on some of the poems in Narrative Poems, taken from Walter Hooper’s preface to the book. They shed some light on what parts of Lewis’s life the writing of these texts coincided with. For me, the most fascinating takeaway is that many of these poems were a work in progress over the course of years, as they all required what Lewis describes as an essential element of writing poetry: “The real poet is a man who has already escaped from that emotion sufficiently to see it objectively.”5

In the eighty years since Lewis wrote these words, we’ve only become more starved for silence. Research shows that the “normal” noise threshold has steadily risen—each generation tolerating as “normal” what the previous one called “too loud.” But regardless of how we perceive it, sustained exposure above fifty-five decibels (roughly the noise level of a busy office) produces subtle but steady physiological stress.2

Beyond literal noise, there’s also the existential noise from our digital devices. Our world’s cleverest minds work night and day to perfectly engineer devices to safeguard us from quiet boredom. At our convenience, our screens can chip away every millisecond of dead air we might accidentally stumble into.

Even churches—historically places of calm respite—aren’t immune.3 Many now produce and curate gatherings that unintentionally crowd out stillness. With noble intentions, we layer gatherings with tips and tricks that mirror social media engagement strategies (like and subscribe for eternal life!).

While this may come across like old-man-complaining-about-“kids-these-days” syndrome, it isn’t new. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote almost two centuries ago, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence!”4 Similarly, A. W. Tozer thought that making church gatherings noisy was a “monstrous heresy.”5 And of course, there’s Pascal’s infamous theory that most problems arise from our inability to sit in a quiet room alone.6

The theory remains piercingly accurate. We don’t avoid silence purely because we love noise; we avoid quiet because it’s uncomfortable. But, as Pascal warned, avoiding this discomfort merely prolongs our problems; avoidance can’t remedy our deepest aches.

The mind unfettered by stimulation is mysteriously restorative. In one way or another, many of history’s greatest minds have stumbled into this wisdom. Silence stings. It’s like pouring peroxide on a wound. So we typically resist, but if we pull away, we forfeit the chance to heal.

Lewis doesn’t just diagnose this problem—he also champions the way through it. He began his final sermon by admitting that he often approached his quiet time with a sense of timidity. Not because he feared he wouldn’t meet God, but because he knew he would.7 If he wasn’t careful, God might maneuver past Lewis’s rote prayers. Then, in the silence, God might tell him to do something he’d rather not do, such as skip his extra morning cigarette, or, worse, tear up the sharply worded letter he was about to send to someone who’d been rude to him.

Beneath the humor is a serious insight: Capturing the thoughts that enter the mind amid prayer is a panacea for our human ailments. We move past filling in every gap with empty words and meet God.

Avoiding silence might feel pleasant, but it delays growth. By rejecting quiet, we reject opportunities to mature beyond those emotional insecurities that tell us we must win every fight to be content.

The boredom of raw silence is the ideal venue for weaning our overstimulated minds from noise fatigue. As Lewis wrote in a poem about trying to wind down in the evening, “O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.”8 The peace we long for lies on the other side of what we avoid in the quiet.

However, the tricky part is adjusting our overstimulated brains to quiet. Lewis understood this intimately, but cleverly transposed distraction into an opportunity. When Screwtape coaches his apprentice on how to sabotage a man’s prayer life, he advises stirring up a guilt complex about prayer-time distractions:

“When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavours, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm.”9

Our enemy loses ground when we stop rejecting the silent wandering mind and embrace it as the very substance of raw prayer. The distractions we interpret as an excuse to call ourselves undisciplined are often exactly what God wants to surface. This is one way Lewis is practically mystic; the anxious thoughts, the unresolved conflicts, the quiet guilts we keep scrolling past—taking these captive is often the doorway to God and true peace.10

Silence is a natural means toward intimacy. When we first begin to pray, we tend to fill every void with rambling, petitioning—explaining ourselves as if God requires a briefing. Over time, persistence guarantees that we start to say less. We trust He already knows our hearts because He is greater than them.

In a letter to a friend, Lewis offered this reassurance: “Our minds are in ruins before we bring them to Him and the rebuilding is gradual.”11 For beginners on the path of rebuilding, he suggested starting with practicing concentration:

“It may help to practice concentration on other objects twice a week quite apart from one’s prayer: i.e. sit down looking at some physical object (say, a flower) and try for a few minutes to attend exclusively to it, quietly (never impatiently) rejecting the train of thought and imagination which keep starting up.”12

Beyond structured concentration, there’s a simpler practice: sitting quietly, often in nature, with no agenda at all.13 It’s essentially just the practice of detoxing from urban noise long enough to soak in the world around us. We may achieve nothing other than staring at the foliage, but it calms and declutters the mind so God can fill it.

Even this kind of quiet “soaking” becomes a form of worship—and worship itself is a unique form of joy. Lewis believed that God’s desire for us to praise Him was never coercive or selfish; rather, we’re to praise Him because it’s life-giving. In the same way that praising artwork can elevate our minds to a new standard of beauty, so admiring something as glorious as God leads us into truer, heightened joy. And while expressing praise through words and song could do the trick, Lewis mentioned that silent reverence is just as powerful. Silent awe is a “necessary reaction: the divine light sent back to its Source from the creature which has become its mirror. The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it: but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.”14

For Lewis, silence was always instrumental, never ultimate. The goal wasn’t pursuing mystical stillness for its own sake. I doubt any would disagree that Lewis’s chief aim was one and the same with the New Testament’s: love. Silence is a means to love—quieting our compulsions so we can receive and give it more freely.

It may begin simply: five minutes without your phone, a quiet walk, or a prayer without words. The silence that some experience as agony may become, gradually, eventually, progressively the place we most want to be.

-Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Gooch’s writing has appeared on Christianity Today, Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition and this October he will be a speaker at the C.S. Lewis Festival in Petoskey, MI. He writes most frequently on Substack.

To Edith Gates

May 23, 1944

Certainly, I cannot love my neighbor properly till I love God. As George MacDonald says in his Unspoken Sermons: “And beginning to try to love his neighbor he finds that this is no more to be reached in itself than the Law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the Law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this principle—the driving of things upward toward the center.”

On the other hand we have no power to make ourselves love God. The only way is absolute obedience to Him, total surrender. He will give us the “feeling” if He pleases. But both when He does and when He does not, we shall gradually learn that feeling is not the important thing. There is something in us deeper than feeling, deeper even than conscious will. It is rather being. When we are quite empty of self we shall be filled with Him, for nature abhors a vacuum. Of course it is good, as you say, to “realize” that the source of all our good feelings is God. (That is the right way to deal with pride: not to depreciate the good thing we are tempted to be proud of but to remember where it comes from). But “realization” depends on faculties that fail us when we are tired or when we try to use them too often, so we can’t depend on it. It is the self you really are and not its reflection in consciousness that matters most.

May I take what is really the closest parallel? No child is begotten without pleasure. But the pleasure is not the cause of life—it is a symptom, something that happens when life is in fact being transmitted. In the same way “feeling love” is only the echo in consciousness of the real thing which lies deeper.1

We want to hear how The Magician’s Nephew has spoken to you too. Share your story in the comments in celebration of this timeless origin story!

In interviews and in your own writing you often cite C.S. Lewis while analyzing modern economic, social and tech trends. How did you originally discover C.S. Lewis?

He’s always been a fixture in my life. The Chronicles of Narnia was one of my favorite book box sets growing up. As a shy kid, I loved any book I could escape into. And escaping into the life of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy was a real treat. I used to write books when I was much younger - about penguins and Ice Princesses - and Lewis’s work influenced my world building technique enormously when I was 8 years old. Now, 20 years later, I find so much comfort in Lewis’s other writing.

Was there a particular moment or book that made you realize Lewis’s ideas were relevant to understanding modern challenges?

The Screwtape Letters knocked me to the ground when I picked it up to reread again in late 2024. It felt like it captured so much of what I couldn’t find the words to say. Wormwood’s attempts at corruption were mirrors to what we have to deal with in (1) politics with our current state of democracy and debate and (2) technology with the dual forces of AI and social media. James Baldwin said “you read something which you thought only happened to you and you discover it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.” And that’s how I feel about Lewis. To allow someone to feel seen in a piece of writing is the absolute greatest gift you can give them. So Lewis is more relevant than ever because he sees what it means to be human during a time of immense uncertainty and can carry people through it through story.

You wrote a brilliant piece on economic lessons from The Screwtape Letters on your Substack. In it you talk about how the pursuit of convenience is actually leading to “a perpetual state of anxiety, constantly questioning [our] worth, experiencing rejection not as an occasional setback but as the default condition of existence.” Basically, a strategy right out of Screwtape’s playbook! From your own reading of The Screwtape Letters and your personal experience, what are some of your favorite ways to resist this constant “pursuit of the rainbow’s end?”

I don’t know if I am good at resisting some days! I think that what Screwtape Letters captures so well is the amount of will we have to put forward to attempt to stop everything that comes at us. That chapter where Lewis talks about the rainbow is also where he references ‘The War’. Screwtape encourages Wormwood to coax humans into living in the past or the future, not the present. He writes “we want a man hag-ridden by the Future–haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon Earth [...] never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”1 I feel like I often heap the altar, so to say. My favorite ways to get out of that is to ride my bike for a very long time or to hike for a very long time. When you’re in nature and surrounded by wildflowers and animals and staring into the vast expanse our world, you’re forced to exist in that moment.

On The Ezra Klein Show, he asks every guest the same question: What 3 books can you recommend. During your interview one of the books you selected was A Grief Observed. How do you think Lewis’s approach to grief compares to how modern culture addresses grief and loss?

It’s such an incredibly raw book - the opening alone “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”2 is just something that knocks you to your knees. Lewis pours himself onto the page for the reader to sit with, to take from. It’s vulnerability at the highest power, exemplary of grief through love. The reason I brought it up on Ezra’s show is because my dog Moo had died the month before. Dogs mean different things to different people, but Moo was my best friend for most of my early adulthood. She was by my side during the white knuckle early years of starting my own business and the countless apartment to apartment moves that followed. And finally, when the business stabilized, she got cancer and she died. I was left to deal with life without her. I was so angry. It felt unfair. Lewis captures some of that - the going back and forth between grief and living, the confusion with the grief bleeds into life, the day you know in your bones that they are never coming back. There are a few ways to respond to that - avoiding it entirely, which I think modern culture tends to do, or sitting in the pain, which Lewis does. He analyzes where the aches radiate from, dares to question God, and takes us on the roundtrip from the most hollow part of the pain to the final resolution. Modern culture sweeps it under the rug, which is where a lot of our pain comes from. We are taught to be “efficient” through it, and because of that, it’s dehumanizing. The COVID pandemic is a great example. People died. It was awful. And it’s just papered over and forgotten about. But pain doesn’t disappear. It always ends up somewhere.

What philosophy or insight from that book had the most impact on your own experiences with grief?

The anger resonated with me. Lewis is very brave in that book. It takes a lot of courage to question God, in my opinion. And he does it through grace, of course, but I think that knowing I was allowed to be angry in grief, that I was allowed to not have total control over these feelings that ripped into every piece of me, was freeing in a way. Bearing witness to his pain alleviated mine. There was a specific part that really stuck to me - when he writes “I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices do.”3 That one I rolled around with for weeks and weeks, making sense of my own guilt and how that leaks into my daily actions. I think we often cloak loss in shame because we don’t quite have the language to speak to what it really means to lose something. In a consumeristic culture, the assumption is that you will always placate yourself with something else, a quick salve whether through vice or virtue, but never really address the root. Anger is pain and pain is grief and grief is fear. It’s all connected.

On X you wrote that reading Lewis makes you bang your head against the wall because “it’s always the same problems, just a different time in history.” That’s essentially Lewis’s argument in Mere Christianity - human nature doesn’t change, only the costumes do. As an economist trained to track change and trend, is that a depressing insight or a clarifying one?

Yes! I think it can be both. Our problems across all of time are basically the same, but the dimensions of them change. We are still dealing with problems of economic inequality and discrimination and too much of some stuff and not enough of other stuff. Some argue that this is the inherent design of an economy - that it can only function if there isn’t enough of everything - and some argue otherwise. I am not sure if humans will ever overcome petty grievances - perhaps it’s just how we are designed. I think it gives an element of predictability, which is good, but it is disheartening. And we’ve made enormous progress in other areas, like science and healthcare, which is also important. It’s not all bad.

Lewis was a deeply communal thinker - the Inklings weren’t incidental to his work, they were essential to it. He believed good thinking required friendship, argument, and shared meals. Much of the economic anxiety you write about is tied to loneliness and atomization. Do you think there’s an economic cost to the collapse of that kind of intellectual community, and is there any modern equivalent that gives you hope?

His friendship with Tolkien is one I greatly admire. I think that we have community now, but it’s more fragmented. My career would look a lot different without social media platforms, for example. So I think that intellectual community is found in the halls of Twitter dot com and wherever else, but the form it takes is very lonely. It’s a lot of direct messaging and texting, not too different from letters, but less human. Being able to see how one curves an ‘a’ is a very intimate and warm thing to share. And that’s how it all feels - we have a lot of connection, but not a lot of warmth.

What lessons from his books do you think would be especially relevant to younger generations?

Every time I read or reread Lewis, I found what I needed. Resonance is subjective. But I think that the lessons from Screwtape are especially poignant at the moment. Being wary of things that seem too easy and simple, watching how you treat others during times of turmoil, paying attention to how those in power talk to you - those are all enormously important.

If you could ask C.S. Lewis one question about our current cultural moment, what would it be?

You wrote “the more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able to ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel” - where are we, on that feeling and acting scale?

To borrow from Ezra Klein, what are 3 books by Lewis or otherwise, that you would recommend to a group of C.S. Lewis fans?

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams

As an eight-year-old, I was obsessed, like many children before and after, with The Chronicles of Narnia. So intense was my devotion that I wrote C. S. Lewis a fan letter. I begged my mother to drive me to the post office as it seemed a more official place to launch my missive.

A few weeks later, I received mail from Lewis’s publisher: a poster featuring all the book covers and a majestic image of the lion Aslan. The accompanying letter informed me that C. S. Lewis had been dead for years.

It had never occurred to me that authors of the books I read could be dead. I knew regular people died, but to me it seemed the stories that made me feel so insanely alive, would make the writers immortal.

It was sad that there would be no more books from my favorite author. But there was also the almost incomprehensible fact that as I read the Chronicles, I’d been in a kind of one-way telepathy with someone who resided in the spirit world.

Death most connected me to Lewis’s books. Children, once they reach a certain age, think just as much about death as adults, and in the final book of the Chronicles, The Last Battle, Lewis gave me a way to think about the soul in the afterlife that both soothed and inspired me. Until then I had associated death with stillness, I had seen a few dead bodies at funerals in my father’s church. But Lewis replaced stillness with movement. In the “True Narnia,” Peter, Edmund, and Lucy can run as long and as fast as they want forever. “If one could run without getting tired,” Lewis writes, “I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.”1

Lewis approaches death in a different way in his later book, A Grief Observed, about the passing of his wife, Joy Davidman. His suffering changed him physically. His body had “such a different importance while it was the body of H.’s lover.”2 He refers to his loss as an amputation. “I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it had so many ways to hurt me.”3 He even questions those who insist on God’s goodness. “What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to the dentist?”4

Of the many sufferers I interviewed for my book This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith, nearly all of them felt their pain had a spiritual or metaphysical component. What had happened to their bodies often changed their ideas of God. Many people told me pain had blasted apart their faith. I was not unlike them. When I herniated a disc in my back, I spent a year in terrible pain. Pain sucked up all my attention. I found suffering unique in its ability to both fragment day-to-day life and also lead me into the metaphysical realm. I was trapped in a cycle of pain followed by periods of transfiguring relief. Pain changed my relationship to the physical world, my body, and the divine.

Many of the sufferers I interviewed, like Kristin Morandi, developed a new, expansive, and nuanced idea of the Godhead. At eighteen, Morandi was hit by a drunk driver, and the dashboard of her car cut deeply into her leg. As she waited for an ambulance, cool rain fell on her face and she could smell hot tar. As she waited, she felt she was not alone. “I felt a presence, but it was not singular.” She had a visceral sensation of divinity. Pain expanded, dilated, and humanized Morandi. Lewis’s pain does something similar. “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”5

The shattered God is a long way from “running without ever getting tired,”6 but both ideas resonate with me. Lewis struggles in A Grief Observed, with a God he can no longer believe in, while trying to understand the new God that is evolving out of the chaos of his loss and his suffering. The door that he’d thought was closed, opens. He can think of Joy’s incarnation, their bodies touching. “And when this occurs,” Lewis writes, “awe comes. . . . It is like seeing nature rising up from the grass.”7

-Darcey Steinke is the author of multiple nonfiction and novels, including her most recent book, This is the Door. Her work has been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, among many others. She has taught at Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton University, and the American University of Paris.

Read closely, and you’ll notice it echoes—like so much of Lewis’s work—the understanding of love he writes extensively about in The Four Loves.

Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts—infernal
heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song
hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering ‘Dare! Dare!’
To sap, to blood,
Telling ‘Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.’

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.

C.S. Lewis’s writing has always been able to evoke a sense of intangible reality breaking through the pages. It’s not just in Narnia that Lewis paints pictures of a world we wish to reach out and touch–—in every book he writes, Lewis amplifies the beauty of reality, offering, through the richness of his words, new dimensions and viewpoints on what may be familiar to us. And A Grief Observed is not to be excluded from this distinction.

Before he was a bestselling author of theological and philosophical writings, Lewis viewed himself as a poet. From a young age, Lewis was reading and writing poetry, inspired by Greek and Norse epic poems. This foundational love of poetry finds a home in A Grief Observed. Jenna Grime, in her paper “Faith and Reconciliation in the Poetry of C.S. Lewis,” writes that A Grief Observed “is a heartfelt stream-of-consciousness type work written in free verse.”1 Something rings true in Grime’s reorientation of this book as a type of poem, and it helps peel back another layer of who Lewis was an author, human, and husband.

Lewis initially discovered his love of poetry as a child in the midst of losing his mother to her battle with cancer. This is where I see the beginning of the intertwining of poetry with emotionally charged seasons of loss and despair in Lewis’s writing. It is also where I begin to see poetry as a sort of comfort for Lewis, reminding me of the way I want to pick up my favorite book or play my favorite song when I feel particularly low.

Lewis’s first published collection of poems, Spirits in Bondage, was written in the aftermath of his time as a soldier in World War I and was published under a pseudonym. It is a rumination on the horrors he faced and the questions of humanity that experience brought to the surface. While Spirits in Bondage began Lewis’s career as a published author, A Grief Observed comes as a bookend at its conclusion, published just three years before his death. In it, he grapples with the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and just like Spirits in Bondage, Grief is published under a pseudonym. Both books, on either end of the spectrum of C.S. Lewis’s body of work, are outworkings of his inner emotional turmoil. Both show a man, first in his twenties and then in his sixties, questioning his faith and asking God to illuminate a way forward. The books are deeply vulnerable and offer insight into the less than polished faith journey of a man who, by the time Grief was released, had been put on a high pedestal in Christian spaces.

Looking at A Grief Observed as a free verse poem rather than as prose also echoes the heart of the very subject Lewis was grieving—his wife, Joy, who was herself a published poet. Poetry was one of the things Jack (C.S. Lewis’s nickname) and Joy bonded deeply over (you can read Joy’s poems about Jack in A Naked Tree). Not only did their relationship inspire poems on both sides, but they also collaborated on C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, which he originally tried to write in verse until Joy came along and helped him find the right form for the story. Even after Joy died, poetry was a thread that tied them. While Joy was still living, she asked Lewis to write a poem for her epitaph, and he honored her request. He used poetry, in the midst of his grieving, to express all that she was to him. Her epitaph2 reads:

Remember
Helen Joy Davidman
D. July 1960
Loved wife of C.S. Lewis

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

Poetry elicits vivid, sensory experiences of human emotion, and Lewis masterfully channels this power in A Grief Observed. With unflinching honesty, he documents the tangled journey of grief—allowing us to witness without shame the raw impact of loss. When I approach A Grief Observed as a poem, I find that rather than answers, it offers a rhythm to sink into, one that acknowledges our emotions, embraces our questions, and accepts the silence of unanswered prayers. In its pages, Lewis reminds us that grief, though messy, is profoundly human—and innately poetic.

To Keith Manship, September 13, 1962

The whole problem of our life was neatly expressed by John the Baptist when he said (John, chap 3, verse 30) “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This you have realized. But you are expecting it to happen suddenly: and also expecting that you should be clearly aware when it does. But neither of these is usual. We are doing well enough if the slow process of becoming more in Christ and less in ourselves has made a decent beginning in a long life (it will be completed only in the next world). Nor can we observe it happening. All our reports on ourselves are unbelievable, even in worldly matters (no one really hears his own voice as others do, or sees his own face). Much more in spiritual matters. God sees us, and we don’t see ourselves. And by trying too hard to do so, we only get the fidgets and become either too complacent or too much the other way.

Your question what to do is already answered. Go on (as you apparently are going on) doing all your duties. And, in all lawful ways, go on enjoying all that can be enjoyed—your friends, your music, your books. Remember we are told to “rejoice.” Sometimes when you are wondering what God wants you to do, He really wants to give you something.

As to your spiritual state, try my plan. I pray “Lord, show me just so much (neither more nor less) about myself as I need for doing thy will now.”

Don’t worry. All is going quite nicely. 1

Lewis’s letters are especially rich because he considered it a part of his ministry as a Christian author to answer questions submitted by his readers, often complete strangers who had read one of Lewis’s books or listened to his radio talks. Sometimes the questions were a bit frivolous. One woman wrote to ask Lewis, “Are you handsome?” to which he replied, “Not that I know of.” At other times the questions were querulous. “Why did God make most people stupid?” asked another correspondent. Lewis replied tactfully that he would need to see more evidence of that, adding that many people’s stupidity was often caused by their defective education or their own willfulness, not by God.

Other questions were much more weighty. People wanted to know how to pray, if they could trust the Bible, or why a good God would allow so much evil and suffering in the world. Lewis answered such questions patiently, lucidly, and faithfully, often engaging in enough follow-up correspondence to fill a slender volume of its own. [See Letters to An American Lady (Eerdmans, 1967) and The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis (Crossway, 1987)].

Lewis acted as a mentor by mail, corresponding with his readers from the early stages of their spiritual quest to their eventual conversion and their ongoing journey as Christ-followers. For example, he first wrote to New Zealander Rhona Bodle in 1947, after she read one of his books and sent him a note saying she believed in God but that she didn’t feel at peace about the divinity of Christ.

Lewis replied: “I would recommend less anxiety about the whole question. You believe in God and trust Him. Well, you can trust Him about this. If you go on steadily praying and attempting to obey the best light He had given you, can you not rely on Him to guide you into any further truth He wishes you to know? . . . I don’t mean by this that you should cease to study and make enquiries: but that you should make them not with frantic desire but with cheerful curiosity and a humble readiness to accept whatever conclusions God may lead you to.”1

Lewis and Bodle exchanged letters for the next few years, with Lewis writing in 1948 that “it is not really you who are holding fast to Him but He to you.” In February 1949 he added, “The route you are following at present seems to be the right one. Adding to Pascal’s ‘if you had not found me you would not seek me’ (a sentence I have long loved), the very obvious further step ‘And if I had not drawn you, you would not have found me,’ and seeing both in the light of Our Lord’s words ‘No man cometh to me unless the Father have drawn him’—well, it is pretty clear that you are being conducted.”2

Later that year Bodle wrote to announce that she had indeed found Christ, and Lewis replied, “Welcome home!” and added humbly at the end of his letter, “God bless you: mention me sometimes in your prayers.”3

In general, readers of Lewis’s letters will find the same quotability, and the same humility, that they find in his many classic books on Christian faith and practice. They might even hear his voice telling them “Welcome home!” as they regale themselves again in the words that have made Lewis one of the most cherished and influential authors of the modern era.

-David C. Downing is the editor for a new collection of C.S. Lewis’s letters called Letters on Living the Faith. He is also the former R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College and the Marion E. Wade Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. Downing previously edited two collections of excerpts from C. S. Lewis, The Reading Life (Harper Collins, 2019) and C. S. Lewis on Writing (and Writers) (Harper Collins, 2022).

“God has impressed some sort of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. Space and time, in their own fashion, mirror His greatness; all life, His fecundity; animal life, His activity. Man has a more important likeness than these by being rational. Angels, we believe, have likenesses which Man lacks: immortality and intuitive knowledge. In that way all men, whether good or bad, all angels including those that fell, are more like God than the animals are. Their natures are in this sense ‘nearer’ to the Divine Nature. But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is ‘nearest’ to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God, and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of- approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.

Perhaps an analogy may help. Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff where we are, in space, very near it because it is just below us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are no cragsmen we can’t get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe. At many points during that détour we shall, statically, be far further from the village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But only statically. In terms of progress we shall be far ‘nearer’ our baths and teas.

Since God is blessed, omnipotent, sovereign, and creative, there is obviously a sense in which happiness, strength, freedom, and fertility (whether of mind or body), wherever they appear in human life, constitute likenesses, and in that way proximities, to God. But no one supposes that the possession of these gifts has any necessary connection with our sanctification. No kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the cliff ’s top we are near the village, but however long we sit there we shall never be any nearer to our bath and our tea. So here the likeness, and in that sense nearness, to Himself which God has conferred upon certain creatures and certain states of those creatures is something finished, built in. What is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is, by definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the likeness is given to us—and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused—the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do. Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their own collaboration or even consent. It is not so that they become sons of God. And the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is unison or unity with God in will…1”

Lewis lived through two world wars and, with them, through large shifts in societal norms and in the way people interacted. His reflections on friendship, a type of love he used the Greek word philia to define, sprang from his own era’s diminished value of true friendship. Lewis, who had spent many years as a bachelor, knew well the value of friendship. Of philia, Lewis wrote: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”1 Lewis’s own friendships brought much richness to his life through letters, evenings together at the pub, and discussions on faith and literature.

Although C.S. Lewis knew well the importance of philia, he could not have foreseen the scientific data we have today on the physical effects of loneliness. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy notes that loneliness is “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety,”2 even impacting mortality rates. This modern understanding builds on the survival instincts Lewis touched upon. Lewis theorized that early humans needed community in order to hunt and gather, and modern scientists claim that “gradually, our brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely, to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it.”3 Long before data backed up the importance of philia, Lewis’s spiritual journey was guiding him toward this truth.

While Lewis set about to rehabilitate its value during his time, he wasn’t the first to emphasize the importance of friendship. In the Bible, we see beautiful examples of friendship—in God ensuring that David had a companion in Jonathan while he was far from home, in Mary’s friendship with her cousin Elizabeth, with whom she was able to share the joy of her miraculous pregnancy, and even in Jesus’ friendships with His disciples during His earthly years of ministry. Philia is crucial in our lives—not just scientifically but spiritually and emotionally as well.

Lewis’s friendships were often born of aha moments when he discovered that his passions aligned with another person. He wrote about one such moment in Surprised by Joy, when a true connection happened with author Arthur Greeves, who would become his lifelong best friend:

I think it was shortly before the beginning of my last term at Wyvern that I received a message saying that Arthur was in bed, convalescent, and would welcome a visit. I can’t remember what led me to accept this invitation, but for some reason I did. I found Arthur sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of Myths of the Norsemen. “Do you like that?” said I. “Do you like that?” said he. Next moment the book was in our hands, our heads were bent close together, we were pointing, quoting, talking—­soon almost shouting—discovering in a torrent of questions that we liked not only the same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way; that both knew the stab of Joy and that, for both, the arrow was shot from the North.4

Lewis had a similar moment with J.R.R. Tolkien, which eventually led to the creation of a group of friends who called themselves “the Inklings.” They gathered often to discuss literature, art, and culture. They were their own kind of rebellion in the face of a changing world. Lewis described the phenomenon so often found in friend groups in this way: “In each knot of Friends there is a sectional ‘public opinion’ which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general.”5 The Inklings’s “rebellion” produced a rich catalog of material that continues to impact readers today, all originating from a single group of friends. You can read more about it in the excerpt below from The War for Middle Earth.

Read the Excerpt

While Lewis valued deep friendships, he also knew the dangers of a closed group of opinions and warned readers of it extensively in The Four Loves while also holding himself accountable to this concern. Surrounding oneself only with people who have a shared vision can cause a kind of deafness. When Lewis first met Tolkien, Lewis was agnostic and Tolkien was a believer, and yet they had a vibrant friendship, exchanging ideas and helping each other understand different aspects of the world. Lewis had other friends who challenged him in similar ways, such as philosopher and author Owen Barfield, who Lewis recounts having “an almost incessant disputation [with]…which lasted for years.”6 It was a relationship that nevertheless marked a turning point in Lewis’s life. Despite his own experience of some of the challenges that come with human relationships, Lewis still called friendship “the chief source of [his] happiness.”7

Lewis’s The Four Loves serves as both a compelling argument for understanding the value of friendship and a guidebook to cultivating it. Beyond his written words, Lewis’s life illustrates how philia can sustain, educate, and inspire us. His counsel is both practical and also carries the weight of lived experience, offering a powerful reminder that we are not alone in our longing to be entangled in the life-giving knots of friendship.

Once he became prime minister in 1940, Churchill played an indispensable role in mobilizing the British people for war and sustaining their war spirit over the next five years. Yet the reconstitution of “moral health” and “martial vigor” was also a cultural task.

Two of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian authors, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, took up this obligation—and transformed the direction of modern literature in the process.

They did so not as wartime propagandists, but as Oxford academics and authors who believed that their scholarship, teaching, and imaginative literature could help shake a generation loose from its moral cynicism and spiritual lethargy. And, especially during the crisis years of 1939-45, they vigorously sought each other out in friendship. “Every real Friendship is a sort of secession,” Lewis observed, “even a rebellion.”1

Their rebellion—a literary revolt—was against the spirit of the age: the substitute religions of Modernism, materialism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism. Lewis and Tolkien formed the nucleus of a small group of like-minded authors and friends who met weekly to share and discuss their works in progress. They called themselves “the Inklings,” and together they created a beachhead of resistance against the forces of disintegration threatening not only Great Britain, but also the civilized world.

In this endeavor, Lewis and Tolkien drew from deep wells: the collective wisdom of the literary canon of Western civilization.

As instructors of English literature at Oxford University, they brought this wisdom into their classrooms: ideas about good and evil, courage, virtue, honor, and sacrifice for a noble cause. Helen Tyrell Wheeler was a pupil of Lewis and attended lectures by Tolkien during the Second World War. War news, often wrenching, was unavoidable. “But at few times can there have been such splendidly exciting lectures and such overflowing lecture halls,” she recalled. “What it meant for my generation of English Language and Literature undergraduates was that what happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life, indeed, that they were the same.”2

What happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life.

Here is a remarkable insight from a young woman who came under the influence of these two scholars. Lewis and Tolkien helped a generation to understand that the truths expressed in the great works of literature from the ancient and medieval worlds bore upon the events of the modern world—a world at war.

Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings in December 1937 and, despite the terrors of wartime, nearly completed it before the Allied victory in 1945. The geo-political realities of these years—the cult of the dictator, the utopian schemes to perfect humanity, the malevolent march of Nazism—could not have been kept out of the author’s mind.

Consider: Just as Sauron, the Dark Lord, had acquired a fortress in the mountains from which to execute his evil designs, so, too, did the Führer at the Kehlstein in the Berchtesgaden Alps: the Eagle’s Nest. “My story is about power,” Tolkien explained, “exerted for domination.” The contagion of war, the lust for power, the existence of radical evil, and the courage required to resist it: The catastrophic events of the war brought all of these concepts into focus in The Lord of the Rings.

“I am a bachelor,” C.S. Lewis told his friend, sister Penelope, “and never appreciated children till the war brought them to me.”3 Four children, all girls—part of the great evacuation from London—appeared at Lewis’s doorstep the day after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. Shortly afterwards, Lewis scribbled what would form the opening lines of The Chronicles of Narnia. “This book is about four children…They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.”

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, the Pevensie children flee the terrors of a world at war only to enter Narnia, where another war is being waged: between the forces of Aslan the Lion King and those of the White Witch.

Art was imitating life—and life was imitating art.

The cataclysm of the Second World War laid waste to the beliefs that had built the West: the concept of a Moral Law, the value of every human life, the existence of a loving God. As the Sibyl warns the hero of The Aeneid, “The descent to the Underworld is easy.” Human civilization had descended into utter darkness, and Lewis and Tolkien were caught up in the maelstrom. “Night and day gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—there the struggle, there the labor lies.”

The story of the friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is a story of how two men helped each other to endure the midnight years of the twentieth century and to climb back into the daylight. Together with their other friends, the Inklings, they created a sanctuary of moral beauty and intense creativity in a world gone mad with malice and rage.

“Talent alone cannot make a writer,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There must be a man behind the book.”4 Behind the extraordinary works of these authors stood a cloud of witnesses: the classical-Christian inheritance of Western civilization. Lewis and Tolkien instinctively looked to this inheritance and were nourished by it in wartime.

Cambridge poet Malcom Guite argues that their mastery of this literature accounts for the enduring power of their epic works. “I think they saw in the ancient resources they had, in the older books they were reading, not an irrelevant world into which you could escape,” Guite explains, “but curiously enough exactly the diagnostic tool they need to critique the world they were in.”5

And they did so to magnificent effect: Like no other authors of their age, Lewis and Tolkien used their imagination to reclaim—for their generation and for ours—those deeds of valor and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in the deepest darkness.

-Joseph Loconte is the author of The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. He serves as director of The Rivendell Center in New York City and hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story.

From the world-building in his novels to his mythological retellings to even his autobiographical Surprised by Joy, Lewis invoked the spiritual imagination through story and, more precisely, astonishment. As he wrote to his goddaughter in the dedication to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,”1 suggesting that we grow wise when we grow young and open to the imagination of the uncommon.

For myself, the medium of wonder has often been poetry. As I recently confessed to my friend Miroslav Volf, “I wouldn’t even be a religious person were it not for poetry, which has not only repeatedly brought me into contact with an other, but has seemed to demand something of me in its wake . . . But poetry remains perpetually open. God moves through art but doesn’t get stuck there. I sometimes think he gets stuck in theology—fixed, frozen, and therefore inevitably falsified.”2

Lewis had a way of letting the transcendent move through his art. And for all his reasoned approaches, he left room for awe. He referred to the spiritual dimension as the distinct feeling of “numinosity,” echoing the term coined by German theologian Rudolf Otto. For Lewis, numinosity meant the singular “Other” quality of the divine. In the face of the divine Other, astonishment is the natural human response.

And Christianity is certainly astonishing. In my letters with Miroslav, published in Glimmerings, I reflected, “I often hear secular people marveling at the sheer preposterousness of Christianity—God walking around the world, zapping water into wine, modern people cheerfully eating his flesh and drinking his blood—but, for me, no small part of Christianity’s appeal is that very preposterousness.”3

It is, as I said earlier, an insult to common sense, which I cherish because I am quite sure that what we call common sense is uncommonly wrong.

Contemporary religion—and especially liberal Protestantism—is far too complacent in the face of this world’s wonders. That it so relentlessly stresses the “extraordinary in the ordinary” is a symptom of the sickness rather than, as it purports to be, a treatment.”

The experience of faith can be awe-inspiring as it can be confounding, and if pressed to be honest, the astonishment for me can run both ways. But the “numinosity” remains. The preposterousness remains. And in it, an ever-present invitation to respond.

-Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of the Arts at Yale Divinity School. He is the author, editor, or translator of fifteen books, including Glimmerings and Zero at the Bone. His work appears regularly in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Commonweal.