Unpublished C.S. Lewis Manuscripts Found

What if two of the most famous and widely read 20^th Century authors who have each individually sold millions of copies of their books had written a book together?

C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia Chronicles and Screwtape Letters, and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, had planned in the 1940s to write a book together about Language. According to a letter written by Tolkien in 1944 to his son Christopher, the collaborative book was to be called Language and Human Nature. A news release from their publisher announced that the book was scheduled for publication in 1950. It was, however, never published. Scholars have thought, until now, that it was never started.

Steven Beebe, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State Department of Communication Studies, discovered the opening pages of the unpublished manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library and has recently documented that the manuscript was the beginning of the previously believed to be unwritten Lewis and Tolkien book.

Although C. S. Lewis started the book, there is no evidence that Tolkien began work on the project.

“What is exciting” said Beebe, “is that the manuscript includes some of Lewis’s best and most precise statements about the nature of language and meaning.  Both Lewis and Tolkien wrote separately about language, communication, and meaning, but they published nothing collaboratively.”

The article Beebe wrote documenting his discovery, “Language and Human Nature Manuscript Fragment Found: C. S. Lewis On Language and Meaning,” will be published next year in the Journal Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. The journal Seven publishes scholarship that focuses on the work of seven prominent 20^th Century British authors including both Lewis and Tolkien.

The partial book manuscript Beebe found was in a small notebook on which Lewis had written the word “Scraps.” Included in the tattered notebook are early fragments of two Narnia Chronicles, The Magician’s Nephew and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader along with unpublished ideas about a variety of topics.

Beebe discovered the book fragment by turning the little notebook upside down and reading from back to front.

“I was so surprised to find Lewis writing about language and meaning, using examples and illustrations not found in any of his published work,” said Beebe. “I knew I had discovered something interesting.But at the time, I didn’t know I had found something important.”

It was several years after finding the manuscript after doing additional research about Lewis and Tolkien that Beebe concluded that the manuscript was the beginning of the lost book.

In Lewis’s own distinctive handwriting the opening sentence clearly indicates that Lewis was writing a book about the nature and origins of language—the topic of the planned Lewis and Tolkien book. Further evidence that the manuscript is the beginning of the coauthored book project is the fact that Lewis wrote about “our statements” and used the phrase “authors consider,” rather than writing in the first person singular as Lewis often did. Because the newly discovered manuscript is copyrighted, it is not yet available for publication.Permission must be granted by the Lewis estate, and that process is in progress. When it is published, Beebe believes the manuscript will add new insights about Lewis’s ideas into the nature of language, with a special emphasis on the oral aspects of language, and about how meaning occurs when humans communicate.

Beebe teaches a course about Lewis and communication called “C. S. Lewis:  Chronicles of a Master Communicator,” both on the Texas State campus in San Marcos and in a special class that will be taught this July and August at Oxford University.   When teaching the class in Oxford rather than meeting in a in a classroom, most sessions are taught at various sites throughout Oxford, including Lewis’s home, the Kilns; Magdalan College, the college where Lewis taught; as well as the room in the Eastgate Hotel where Lewis first met his wife, Joy Davidman. Their love story was the subject of the movie Shadowlands, in which Anthony Hopkins played Lewis and Debra Winger portrayed Joy.

“My goal in teaching the course in Oxford,” said Beebe, “is to bring Lewis to life and have students discover Lewis’ approach to communication. Discovering Lewis’ unpublished ideas about language and human nature adds depth to our discussion of his approach to communication,” said Beebe. From txstate.edu

Ayn Rand vs Tolkien

I found this comparison of these two worldviews to be very interesting.

“Given the breadth and length of both novels, the comparison of Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings could go on much longer, revealing many new themes and interpretations. It seems, however, that even the few differences sketched above allow for a tentative answer to the questions raised in the introduction. As much as Ayn Rand’s novel, with its strictly modernist message, could have been at some point in the past an effective remedy against the plagues of socialism and collectivism, the world described in it does not fit today’s reality and does not help in introducing the idea of natural order. Today, it is no longer necessary to protect big business from people. On the contrary, it is people who need protection from big business, which now goes hand in hand with Leviathan in trying to create a homogenous and completely atomized society.

The Lord of the Rings shows not only the great danger associated with all attempts to defeat evil power by power, but it also teaches that collectives do not really exist, that every one of us is the hero of his own individual story, and that law and order can easily exist without the state. Despite its egoistic message, Atlas Shrugged is full of imperatives to act, to fight, to bring salvation. Rand’s characters suffer not only because the state reaches into their wallets, but because the society rejected their rational, “enlightened” vision of what is good and right.

Tolkien, on the other hand, disliked such imperatives. He hated the outlook that if something can be done, it has to be done, and once even admitted that the greatest deeds of mind and spirit are born in abnegation. That is most likely the reason his characters do not look for great challenges, nor wish to change the world, and instead live quietly, fulfilling Voltaire’s dictum Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

This is what makes The Lord of the Rings a much better means for conceptualizing the ideas of freedom than Atlas Shrugged. Reading Tolkien helps realize that, even after the “end of history,” the world and society can move in the direction of Merry Old England rather than a soulless homogenized mass of atoms. Moreover, The Lord of the Rings conveys an extremely important and optimistic message, namely that a plurality of many different cultures, languages, societies and visions, all existing together, yet separate and independent of each other, is still viable — not in a democratic regime, but in the new world of Hoppean natural order.”

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Juliusz Jablecki is summer fellow at the Mises Institute, and works with the Mises Institute, Poland.

Read the whole article here.

Fr. Seraphim Rose on Educating Children

“We must be ready every day to answer the influence of the world by the principles of a sound Christian upbringing.

This means that what a child learns at school must constantly be checked and corrected at home. We cannot assume that something he is going to learn at school is simply something that is profitable or secular and has nothing to do with his Orthodox upbringing. He may be taught useful skills and facts (although many schools in America today are failing miserably even at this; many school teachers tell us that all they can do is keep the children in good order in class without even teaching them anything), but even if he gets this much, he is also taught many wrong attitudes and philosophies. A child’s basic attitude towards and appreciation of literature, music, history, art, philosophy, even science, and of course life and religion—must come first of all not from school, for the school will give you all this mixed up with modern philosophy; it must come first from the home and Church, or else he is bound to be miseducated in today’s world, where public education is at best agnostic, and at worst openly atheistic or anti-religious. Of course, in the Soviet Union all this is forced upon the child, with no religion whatsoever and an active program of making the child an atheist.

Parents must know exactly what is being taught their children in education courses, which are almost universal today in American schools, and correct it at home, not only by a frank attitude to this subject (especially between fathers and sons—a very rare thing in American society), but also by a clear setting forth of the moral aspect of it which is totally absent in public education.

Parents must know just what kind of music their children are listening to, what is in the movies they see (listening and seeing together with them when necessary), what kind of language they are exposed to and what kind of language they use, and give the Christian attitude to all this.

Television—in households where there is not enough courage to throw it out the window—must be strictly controlled and supervised to avoid the poisonous effects of this machine which has become the leading educator of anti-Christian attitudes and ideas in the home itself, especially to the young.

I speak about the raising of children because this is where the world first strikes its blows at Orthodox Christians and forms them in its image; once wrong attitudes have been formed in a child, the task of giving him a Christian education becomes doubly difficult.

But it is not only children, it is all of us, who are facing the world which is trying to form us in anti-Christianity, by means of schools, television, movies, popular music, and all the other influences that pound in upon us, most of all in the big cities. We have to be aware that what is being pounded in upon us is all of one piece; it has a certain rhythm, a certain message to give us, this message of self-worship, of relaxing, of letting go, of enjoying yourself, of giving up any thought of the other world, in various forms, whether in music, or in movies, television, or what is being taught in schools, the way subjects are emphasized, the way the background is given, and everything else; there is one particular thing which is being given to us. It is actually an education in atheism. We have to fight back by knowing just what the world is trying to do to us, and by formulating and communicating our Orthodox Christian response to it……

The child who has been exposed from his earliest years to good classical music, and has seen his soul being developed by it, will not be nearly as tempted by the crude rhythm and message of rock and other contemporary forms of pseudo-music as someone who has grown up without a musical education. Such a musical education, as several of the Optina elders have said, refines the soul and prepares it for the reception of spiritual impressions.

The child who has been educated in good literature, drama, and poetry and has felt their effect in his own soul—that is, has really enjoyed them—, will not easily become an addict of the contemporary movies and television programs and cheap novels that devastate the soul and take it away from the Christian path.

The child who has learned to see beauty in classical painting and sculpture will not easily be drawn into the perversity of contemporary art or be attracted by the garish products of modern advertising and pornography.

The child who knows something of the history of the world, especially in Christian times, and how other people have lived and thought, what mistakes and pitfalls people have fallen into by departing from God and His commandments, and what glorious and influential lives they have lived when they were faithful to Him—will be discerning about the life and philosophy of our own times and will not be inclined to follow the first new philosophy or way of life he encounters. One of the basic problems facing the education of children today is that in the schools they are no longer given a sense of history. It is a dangerous and fatal thing to deprive a child of a sense of history. It means that he has no ability to take examples from the people who lived in the past. And actually, history constantly repeats itself. Once you see that, it becomes interesting how people have answered problems, how there have been people who have gone against God and what results came from that, and how people changed their lives and became exceptions and gave an example which is lived down to our own times. This sense of history is a very important thing which should be communicated to children.

In general, the person who is well acquainted with the best products of secular culture—which in the West almost always has definite religious and Christian overtones—has a much better chance of leading a normal, fruitful Orthodox life than someone who knows only the popular culture of today. One who is converted to Orthodoxy straight from “rock” culture, and in general anyone who thinks he can combine Orthodoxy with that kind of culture—has much suffering to go through and a difficult road in life before he can become a truly serious Orthodox Christian who is capable of handing on his faith to others. Without this suffering, without this awareness, Orthodox parents will raise their children to be devoured by the contemporary world. The world’s best culture, properly received, refines and develops the soul; today’s popular culture cripples and deforms the soul and hinders it from having a full and normal response to the message of Orthodoxy.

Therefore, in our battle against the spirit of this world, we can use the best things the world has to offer in order to go beyond them; everything good in the world, if we are only wise enough to see it, points to God, and to Orthodoxy, and we have to make use of it.” From The Orthodox Worldview by Fr. Seraphim Rose

This lecture by Fr. Seraphim  was recorded and can be  on purchased here.

Learning Letters in a Monastery Context

Here is a book that ought to be read by anyone interested in the liberal arts or classical education. The book is The Love of Learning and the Desire for God by Jean Leclerq O.S.B. This book opened my eyes to what was lost when the university model of a liberal arts education overtook the monastic model. You will have to read the book to see what I mean.

Originally presented as lectures to Benedictine novices almost forty years ago, this Book conveys an immediacy and relevance that must draw any reader, monastic or not, into the neighborhood of ideas and culture that has so often rejuvenated and renewed the wider Christian community. We are in the presence of a great teacher in the pages of this book, a teacher who offers countless insights into fundamental elements of Christian spiritual practice – reading, meditation, compunction, tears, biblical exegesis — while never detracting from the two great themes indicated in the title. The range of this study is astonishing; Leclercq can discuss the origins and meaning of grammar on one page, and on the next be exploring the ’’fellowship of the angels’’ as an image of monastic life, yet there is never a sense of randomness or discontinuity. We heartily affirm the comment on the back cover that this book is ’’the single indispensable guide for the study of monastic spirituality in the medieval West.’’ This is scholarship which bears the scent of paradise, not only investigating, but nurturing within the reader ’’the love of learning and the desire for God.’’. From Eighth Day Books catalog

Literature, Culture and the Western Soul

The following article appeared in The Orthodox Word Vol. 19 #1-2, 1983, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, CA.

To come to Orthodoxy from the world of today is to come from emptiness to riches, from shallowness to depth, from shams to a reality so all-encompassing that it can, at times, leave one quite uncertain as to the possibility of existing both in the Church and in the “real” world.

Our distress at the seeming impossibility of reconciling the external aspects of modern life with the depth of Orthodox thought, which seems by contrast so utterly otherworldly, springs in large measure from the fact that we inevitably bring some modern emptiness, shallowness, deadness, falsity with us. Our shallowness begins to creep into our spiritual life, no matter how well-intentioned we may be, and we soon reach a point where we can no longer ignore the fact that something is wrong.

To preach that everything Western is taboo is misguided, and to live as if it were true is impossible. We are Westerners: our souls were formed by the Western mentality and psychology, and the often painful effort of understanding ourselves can succeed only by our coming to a knowledge of the forces that have shaped us.

Instead of running away from our culture, or trying to deny its power in us, we must face it squarely and understand its essence and origin. This is the first step in forming an Orthodox world view, and this is the first task facing us today. If we are able to do this, we will be able to discern what in our culture is worth utilizing, and what is harmful. Perhaps more importantly, we will gain a knowledge of ourselves, an increased depth of soul, that will permit us to understand how we may become fruitful Christians.

We have not inherited Western culture at all. That is precisely our trouble. We have simply grown up on the degenerate and decaying vestiges of that culture. We live, not in the West, but on the fading memory of the West. Our present “culture” is an absence of culture, a vacuum that has left our souls shrunken and our spirits stifled. Before trying to plunge his spirit into the depths of Orthodoxy, today’s man must first feed his soul, for its malnutrition will not permit any profound growth of spirit. Modern Western man is like a plant with the shallowest possible roots, and he naturally cannot support any great growth. His spirit is no longer capable of soaring, because a lofty spirit must rise out of a deep soul which has the maturity, the sensitivity, to feel noble things and become ennobled by them.

The Fathers have always taught that the higher, spiritual part of man’s nature is founded in the first level of the soul, that which is sensitive to and best developed by the study of virtuous, noble, and beautiful things. Our faculties and responses, distorted by the Fall, must be restored to normalcy, and after that we can begin to progress in spiritual things. The “higher perception” which St. John Climacus calls an “attribute” of the soul is “buffeted” by sin, and we must retrain ourselves. The redirection and elevation of his soul is an essential task for every Orthodox Christian.- Literature, Culture and the Western Soul by the Sisters of St. Xenia Skete

You can read the entire article here. BTW, the article is on a wonderful Orthodox School site where you will find many gems on the education of children.  St. Micheal’s Orthodox School in Santa Rosa, Ca. expresses the true sense of what kind of Orthodox education we should give our children. I attended an Orthodox School conference last summer at Hellenic College and I was most impressed with what St. Micheal’s was doing because of their strong emphasis on the heart.