Lewis was a truly modest man. If his books came naturally into our conversation, he would talk about them with the same detachment as in discussing some stranger’s works. But he had no interest as far as I could see in his literary or theological position in the world. One evening this came up rather naturally.
We had been talking about one of our favourite books, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and I mentioned how disappointed I sometimes felt when, say, Sir Launcelot went out to deliver a helpless lady from some peril or other. Then, just at that point where you can’t admire him enough for his selflessness, he explains to someone, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he is doing it to “win worship”—that is, to increase his reputation. We recognised it as an inheritance from Paganism. Without intending any embarrassment, I asked Lewis if he was ever aware of the fact that regardless of his intentions he was “winning worship” from his books. He said in a low, still voice, and with the deepest and most complete humility I’ve ever observed in anyone, “One cannot be too careful not to think of it.” The house, the garden, the whole universe seemed hushed for a moment, and then we began talking again.
As those poignantly happy months drew to an end, and the time came for me to return to the United States, Lewis and I began planning for his retirement: the books he would write, the duties I would relieve him of, our study together of the old French sources that lie behind Malory’s Morte. Even now, years later, those happy prospects have the power to tease me with such hopes as Lewis’s Jill thought of in The Last Battle when “the picture of all those happy years … piled up… till it was rather like looking down from a high hill onto a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance”. But Lewis died suddenly on 22 November 1963.
At times, when asked about him, I have made it clear that I was with him for “only” three months. But I think I do a disservice to both his memory and his kindness by that word only. Have we not all felt a lasting bond with someone we have known only minutes, and yet failed—for such is the nature of things—to achieve any intimacy with those we have run into for half an hour or so over a period of years? Make of it what you will. I am ashamed to admit that I once thought that because the plans Lewis and I made together did not run on into the years, I was somehow cheated. If not wicked, it is ungracious. Recently, the grandmother of one of my friends was dying, and I went with him into those delectable peaks of Derbyshire where the people are as free from cant and overstatement as any I know. It was early spring and there was nothing my friend could find for his grandmother but a few sprigs of pussy willow. As he gave them to her, minutes before she died, she pressed them to her face and whispered, “They’re grand, my love. And enough.”
But of his books there never seemed enough for Lewis’s publishers. Yet much as Lewis loved to write, never was it, as it is with so many others, “zeal not according to knowledge”. He had to have something to say before he put pen to paper. Still, although he kept to deadlines set by himself regarding his books, it took the initiative of his English and American publishers to press him into preparing selections of his shorter pieces. Not because Lewis had not put all his effort into such addresses as are found here, but he needed prodding before such selections were made.
This volume, consisting originally of the addresses numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7, was published by Geoffrey Bles of London in 1949 under the title Transposition and Other Addresses and later that same year by Macmillan of New York as The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Since that time the volumes of essays on the two sides of the Atlantic have differed somewhat, and this book is an attempt to put things right. What spurred me into action was a tour I made of the United States in 1979 with the film Through Joy and Beyond: The Life of C. S. Lewis. After the film I ended the evening by reading aloud a portion of Lewis’s “Transposition”. What I had forgotten, and many nice people reminded me of, was that what I considered one of the most ravishing pieces of prose Lewis ever wrote had been added later, and was not therefore in the American version. Although this in itself was enough to justify resetting the text of the book, it occurred to me that it also afforded the ideal occasion for enlarging the volume by three addresses never published in the United States and one never published anywhere before.
The addresses are arranged chronologically except for (1) “The Weight of Glory” which is so magnificent that not only do I dare to consider it worthy of a place with some of the Church Fathers, but I fear I should be hanged by Lewis’s admirers if it were not given primacy of place. It was preached at the invitation of Canon T. R. Milford at Solemn Evensong in the twelfth-century Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 8 June 1941 to one of the largest congregations ever assembled there in modern times. Canon Milford, who was the Vicar of St. Mary’s, told me that the invitation sprang from his reading of Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The sermon was published first in Theology, vol. 43 (November 1941), and afterwards as a pamphlet by the S.P.C.K. in 1942.
(2) “Learning in War-Time” was also preached at the invitation of Canon Milford at Evensong in St. Mary the Virgin on 22 October 1939. This, too, was owing to the Canon’s appreciation of The Pilgrim’s Regress and, as he told me, because with so much unrest caused to Oxford undergraduates by World War II, Lewis—an ex-soldier and Christian don at Magdalen College—was thought to be just the man to put things into the right perspective. It too brought a great crowd to St. Mary’s, and Canon Milford arranged for everyone present to be given a mimeographed copy of the sermon bearing the title “None Other Gods”: Culture in WarTime. Lewis took as his text for the sermon Deut. 26:5—“A Syrian ready to perish was my father.” It was published that same year, in pamphlet form under the title The Christian in Danger, by the Student Christian Movement.
(3) It was while this book was in preparation that my friend, George Sayer, a pupil of Lewis’s at Magdalen during the war years and an intimate friend thereafter, sent me a copy of “Why I Am Not a Pacifist”. The talk was given to a pacifist society in Oxford sometime in 1940, and Lewis made a copy for Mr. Sayer, a most fortuitous event as the original has not survived. We know that Lewis never made any attempt to publish it, and it appears in print here for the first time.
(4) “Transposition” was preached in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford—a Congregational institution—at the invitation of its Principal, Nathaniel Micklem (1888–1976), on the Feast of Pentecost, 28 May 1944. It was reported in The Daily Telegraph of 2 June 1944 under the heading “Modern Oxford’s Newman” that “in the middle of the sermon Mr. Lewis, under stress of emotion, stopped, saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and left the pulpit. Dr. Micklem, the Principal, and the chaplain went to his assistance. After a hymn was sung, Mr. Lewis returned and finished his sermon … on a deeply moving note.”
Lewis has probably accomplished as much as any modern writer, both in his fiction and in his sermons, to make Heaven believable. My guess is that at sometime, but not necessarily in 1944, he may have felt that he had not succeeded as well as he might with “Transposition”. Though he was quite ill during the spring of 1961 when Jock Gibb, his publisher at Geoffrey Bles, was pressing him to edit a volume of his essays, something wonderful happened. With a simplicity that is perhaps an instance of Heaven coming to its own rescue, Lewis was shown what glories are involved by the corruptible putting on incorruption, and there came from his pen an additional portion that raises that sermon to an eminence all its own. This new portion begins on p. 107 with the paragraph “I believe that this doctrine of Transposition provides …” and concludes on p. 111 with the paragraph ending, “They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal.” This extended version of the sermon first appeared in Lewis’s They Asked for a Paper (London, 1962).
(5) “Is Theology Poetry?” was read to the Oxford University Socratic Club on 6 November 1944 and was first published in The Socratic Digest, vol. 3 (1945).