Forthcoming Lewis-Tolkien Documentary

A new documentary about C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien is set to be released sometime next year. For the trailer, see below:

Ushering in a Secular Society: C.S. Lewis

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warns us that we are "relapsing into Paganism." It might be rather fun if we were.  It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall.  But we shan't.  What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity 'by the same door as in she went' and find herself back where she was.  It is not what happens.  A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.  The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past. . . . Lastly, I play my trump card.  Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines.  This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered.  For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history.  This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.  It alters Man's place in nature.--C.S. Lewis, in 1955, who saw the real divide of the Old West from the New with the ushering in of a secular society.  

The God of Men—and of Elves: How C. S. Lewis became a Christian

by Martin Cothran

C.S. Lewis

The following article will appear in the spring issue of my Classical Teacher magazine:

From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it.

An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the Middle Ages until fairly recent times was a familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, a mastery of the history of these great civilizations, and an immersion in their literature. Medieval philosophers and theologians drank deeply from the well of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle in their quest to make intellectual sense of and to articulate Christian truths. And Christian thinkers since then have not only availed themselves liberally of the classical heritage in history and literature, but have been on the vanguard of classical learning.

The Prophetic C.S. Lewis

by Joseph Sobran

Deep political wisdom can be found in a writer who took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar who achieved his greatest fame as a popular Christian writer.

Joe Sobran

Lewis was sometimes laughably ignorant of current events. His friends were once amused to discover that he was under the impression that Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, was the king of Greece. But the very distance he kept from politics enabled him to see large outlines invisible to those preoccupied with the daily news.

During World War II, Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West and indeed of all sane civilizations. The great principle of this morality is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used amorally on all sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When peace came, the victorious states would feel released from moral restraints.

Lewis’s Aeneid, Labor Amoris

by Anthony Esolen

C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile
translated by C. S. Lewis; edited by A. T. Reyes.
Yale University Press, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages, $28.

Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one who attempts to employ his own art in order to illuminate something in the original, something he has grown to love deeply. He then is no traitor, as the overused Italian saying has it, but a hander-on, a giver of as much of the beloved as he can give. If one were to craft a portrait of a lovely woman, it would not be a photographic image, but rather an artistic rendering of her inner person, her soul, shining through the eyes, the face, the hands, the posture. All this is not to say that the painter, much less the translator, may simply indulge himself and do as he pleases. The words of John the Baptist, I believe, still apply: the poet I translate must increase, and I must decrease. But the manner in which those words will be put into practice depends upon what is seen, and that in turn depends largely upon love.

He will inevitably show us something in the original that we had missed, or that we had not seen in quite that way.

Therefore, when a lover of poetry as sensitive and intelligent as C. S. Lewis provides us a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, we should pay attention, not necessarily because it is going to be the best translation according to this or that criterion, but because he will inevitably show us something in the original that we had missed, or that we had not seen in quite that way. Here is an example, from Book One. Juno has bribed the wind god, Aeolus, to let loose a tempest against the ships of Aeneas and the Trojans. But when the sea god Neptune discovers it, he threatens the rebellious winds and calms the ocean. Virgil interrupts the scene with his first epic simile, one that clearly refers us to the calming of the fractious Roman state by Caesar Augustus:

As when in mighty commonwealths the rascal crowd
Stirred to rebellion raises oft their voice aloud,
And ready to their mischief find both fire and stone,
If chance some graver citizen, for merits known,
Pass by, they strain to hear him and are silent all,
And at his words, corrected, their wild passions fall:
So fell the rage of waters when their father’s eye
Looked forth.

Here Lewis employs a fine run of alliteration to link ideas: it is because the crowd is “rascal”—ignobile—that they are roused to “rebellion”—seditio—and find fire and stone “ready.” But when the “graver citizen” appears, says Lewis, picking up alliteration to be found in Virgil, they “strain to hear him and are silent all,” with the silence and the strain working together as part of a moral return to sanity. They are “corrected,” Lewis’ choice for the verbregit, “he rules”—literally, “he steers them right.”

It’s a muscular and evocative rendering, of the sort to be found quite often in the recently published translation. It should be noted that the work is fragmentary; Lewis translated Book One, the first half of Book Two, about 250 lines from the underworld scenes in Book Six, and a few scattered lines elsewhere. In some ways—in its energy, and in its elevation of the scene to national importance—it is superior to, say, that of Robert Fitzgerald, my choice for the Aeneid in the courses I teach:

When rioting breaks out in a great city,
And the rampaging rabble goes so far
That stones fly, and incendiary brands—
For anger can supply that kind of weapon—
If it so happens they look round and see
Some dedicated public man, a veteran
Whose record gives him weight, they quiet down,
Willing to stop and listen.
Then he prevails in speech over their fury
By his authority, and placates them.

The Fitzgerald version sometimes holds closer to the Latin: “stones fly”—saxa volant—and “anger”—furor—is retained as the sinister subject of its sentence. It is in general a good deal more precise, more inclusive of a variety of meanings implicit in the Latin. It is also, unfortunately, smoother, even perhaps, to its detriment, matter-of-fact. What Lewis calls a “graver citizen,” Fitzgerald calls, employing a typical circumlocution, “some dedicated public man,” and both are trying, and of course failing, to render an account of the Latin pietate,with its sweeping range of meanings: piety, duty to the father, patriotism, reverence for ancestors, and even, in Virgil, compassion for poor suffering mankind.

I have chosen this passage because it illustrates at once both success and failure, the love that sees, and the human limitations that cause us to overlook what might be seen. The words pietas and furor, in their various forms, are leitmotifs in the Aeneid. They become really ponderous in the significance they gain from their use in one context after another. Thus in the proem to the epic, Virgil wonders aloud why Juno would harass Aeneas, theinsignem pietate virum, literally, the man who bore the banner of piety. How to bring across the political implications of the word? Fitzgerald calls him “a man apart, devoted to his mission,” but Lewis drops the political and considers the soul instead, calling him “a man so good.” The problem is that such phrases cannot, without artistic blemish, be used again, so that when in a near-rhyme Virgil presents us later with the imaginary man settling the crowds, the pietate gravem . . . virum, Lewis can only focus on the man’s gravity, and Fitzgerald, upon his dedication, and thus we lose the fascinating connections between Aeneas, Neptune, and Augustus Caesar, and the implied connection between Juno and civil insurrection.

There’s a subtle artistic strand woven through the first thirty lines of the poem, a strand in the color of memory, and neither translator finds a way to show it to us.

Let me choose another word to illustrate the point: memor. It literally means “to be mindful of,” “remembering,” “mulling,” “recalling.” It suggests persistence; in the Aeneid, it is used of Juno, to describe a seething, never-forgetting, brooding, insult-nursing hatred. So Aeneas is said to suffer saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, “on account of the savage wrath of ever-remembering Juno,” as I might put it, with a little poetic license. A few lines later, Juno is said to be veteris memor . . . belli, “remembering the old war” at Troy, with other insults to her dignity lodged deep in her mind, alta mente repostum. Now this business of remembering is problematic, because when Virgil himself calls upon the Muses to bring the ancient story of Aeneas and of Juno’s enmity to mind, he uses the verbal form of that same word: Musa, mihi causas memora: “recall to my mind the causes, Muse.” How do our translators render these forms of remembering? Fitzgerald translates the verb as “tell”: “Tell me the causes now, O Muse.” Juno attacks Aeneas in her “sleepless rage,” a phrase that does nicely bring out the brooding, but that loses the sense of memory. When Juno thinks about the Trojan War, however, Fitzgerald says that she holds it “in memory.” Lewis translates the verb as “say”: “Say from what slighted majesty, O Muse.” He too loses the sense of memory in describing Juno’s wrath: Aeneas suffers “for angry Juno’s sake.” But again, when Juno thinks about the war, we encounter the mulling and brooding: “[Juno] her old grudge recalls, / Remembering . . .” In short,there’s a subtle artistic strand woven through the first thirty lines of the poem, a strand in the color of memory, and neither translator finds a way to show it to us.

Them’s the breaks, I might say. That’s why we study the original language. What Lewis does for us, Fitzgerald does also, and that is to show us something of the beauty and the complexity of Virgil’s poem. They do not show the same things; they do not, nor could they, show all that is to be seen. It is clear that C. S. Lewis entered deeply into the poetic ambience of the Aeneid, its mysterious literary mood, and that he did his best to reveal the very strangeness of Virgil in an English meter, alexandrine couplets, that is itself strange and haunting. For that we should be grateful.

Anthony Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. A senior editor forTouchstone, he writes regularly for Touchstone, First Things, Catholic World Report, and others. His most recent book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI, 2010) and he is also a translator of works including Dante’s Divine Comedy (3 volumes, Random House). This essay originally appeared in the University Bookman and is published here with their permission.

From Aeneas to Batman: Myth and History

by Bradley J. Birzer

With stealth and no small amount of cowardice, the Greeks creep out of their strange gift, a large wooden horse, under the cover of night and safely within the locked city walls. Rather than face Aeneas and the Trojans as men in battle, the Greeks unlock the gates, letting their murderous comrades in, and proceed to slaughter women and children wantonly. To almost all present, it seems the end of the Trojan civilization. Even Venus, the goddess of Love, and the mother of the great warrior and leader Aeneas, despairs. In answer to her anguish, Jupiter, the king of all gods, assures her, “And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state/Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate:/Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far)/In Italy shall wage successful war/Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field/And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build/Till, after ev'ry foe subdued.” Though destroyed at Troy, the Trojans, fierce but true men, would rebuild elsewhere. The new city, Rome, would become the eternal city. “Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become/The people Romans call, the city Rome,” Jupiter continued. “To them no bounds of empire I assign/Nor term of years to their immortal line.”[1] The Aeneid is, in large part, a story about timeless truths, and the great Stoic mythmaker, Virgil, is telling the ages that truth can not be destroyed. It can be forgotten, ignored, or even perverted, but it could never fully cease to exist. For truth to cease to exist, the world would cease to exist. Instead, almost buried, the truth can be replanted in new soil. And, though the wheat will grow with the tares, the wheat will still grow, waiting to be fed, watered, protected, and, ultimately, harvested.

Almost nineteen centuries after the siege of Troy, Representative John Quincy Adams stood in New York City and praised the first president of the United States, who had earned the reputation of being a new Cato the Younger, a new Aeneas, and a new Cincinnatus.[2] Indeed, at the time of his death in 1799, Washington was the most famous man in the western world. In his 1839 speech, Adams invoked the image of the first president of the United States as the Virgilian hero, but with a vitally important twist.

Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary—on the night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States—that in the visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor—a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a corselet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future history of his country?[3]

With almost perfect harmony, Adams mythologized Washington by combining the Virgilian, Stoic heroism as embodied by The Aeneid with the admonitions of St. Paul to arm oneself with the weaponry of Christ in the fight against evil.[4] Washington took the best of the western tradition and planted it on the banks of the Potomac, just has Aeneas had planted it on the banks of the Tiber. America, of course, then served as the culmination of the best of the western tradition in Adams’ imagination.


Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Myth: The Particular or the Universal?
Driven by the romantic impulse as found most recently in the arguments and writings of Edmund Burke, many in the nineteenth century reacted strongly to the dry, calculated liberalism and utilitarianism of the eighteenth century by embracing myth. Many of these myths proved specifically nationalist, providing a glue for the emerging nation states of that century. One can find the most blatant of the nationalist myths in Finland and in Germany. In Finland, for example, hoping to unify his people, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Finnish Kalevala. While Lönnrot’s vision proved benign, the German project did not. In Germany, both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to create a uniquely German myth by paganizing the origin and character of the emerging nation state. In his diary, Wagner recorded “I am the most German being, I am the German spirit. . . . But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn’t it, for it is humanly finer than all else? Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What glorious people it ought to become.”[5] Seventeen years earlier, Wagner had embraced a form of universalism, socialism for all of mankind.

I [revolution] will destroy every wrong which has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over the other, of the dead over the living, of the material over the spiritual, I will shatter the power of the mighty, of the law of property. Man’s master shall be his own will, his own desire his only law, his own strength his only property, for only the free man is holy and there is naught higher than he. Let there be an end to the wrong that gives one man power over millions. . . since all are equal I shall destroy all dominion of one over the other.[6]

Wagner successfully combined these two things—universal socialism and a pure German character (according his lights)—in his four-part grand opera, The Ring. Inspired by an era earlier than the then nineteenth-century divide between Lutheran north and Catholic south, Wagner embraced the pre-Judeo-Christian pagan myth of the Ring of the Niebelung and the Scandinavian Poetic Edda and the Volsunga, portraying the gods to be malicious and manipulative fools who deserved death. Wagner, English philosopher Roger Scruton explains, “proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world.”[7] Certainly, the death of Siegfried, leading to the fiery consumption of Valhalla in Wagner’s re-write, strongly suggests the apotheosis of man.

The Descent of the Gods

Below is one of the most moving moments from the third of the Ransom/Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis.  From Chapter 15, "The Descent of the Gods," of THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, one of the best and most underrated novels of the 20th century:

They danced. What they dance no one could remember. It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high. And no one while it lasted thought himself or his fellows ridiculous. It may, in fact, have been some village measure, not ill–suited to the tiled kitchen: the spirit in which they danced it was not so. It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

In re-reading the novel, I'm struck by how profoundly Platonic it is.  And, of course, it is deeply Christian--but not in any soft, effete, mushy, evangelical way.  No, Lewis presents a pure and moral Christianity, manly and confronting, threatening and severe.  It's the Christianity of Jesus on the Mount, not the "name it and claim it" Jesus of TBN.


Astounding to my eyes and ears.


If the "dance" of Heaven is anything like the dance in Ransom's kitchen (above), I'm eagerly awaiting eternity.

Quote of the Day: C.S. Lewis

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin.' The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Looking Up from Valhalla: Ayn Rand and the Paganization of the American Right, Part I

National Review’s cover this week features a very captivating art-deco style rendering of Ayn Rand.  Whether intentional or not (and most likely it is), the portrait divides Rand’s face in manichaen fashion, half light, half dark.  Though the article, “Ayn Rand Reconsidered: A Greatness Stunted by Hate,” by Jason Steorts, is relatively short, it packs a serious punch.  While praising the best of The Fountainhead, Steorts has nothing but contempt for Atlas Shrugged.

There is so much to be said against Rand as an artist. There is the inept dialogue—characters begin a great many sentences by shouting each other’s names … the heroes speak, every one of them, in exactly the same voice; the averagely intelligent advance the plot by blurting out their secrets. There is the Girl Scout banality of Atlas Shrugged’s heroine, who seems to have escaped from the young–adult section. There is the preposterous omnicompetence of the heroes, equally at home on the Harvard faculty or in a Vin Diesel movie, and the endless gushing about their exalted feelings, Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what she has not earned with character development. (NR, August 30, 2010, pg. 48)

From Steorts’s perspective, Rand, who had accomplished much with The Fountainhead (1943) while looking inward to the potential greatness of man, has begun to look outward at mankind with Atlas Shrugged (1957).  Then, she only sees dismal failure.

And, what about Rand’s abilities as a novelist, as an artist, as a creator?