Growing With My Garden

  This splendid collection of Lewis’s essays, containing some of the addresses he gave during  WWII and first published in 1949, presents many of his most provocative and insightful thoughts on Christian behavior.  Don’t neglect to read the Introduction, in which Hooper recalls many of his interactions with Lewis.      We will post considerations of the essays on the following schedule:  Please comment and interact. March 6:  The Weight of Glory 13:  Learning in War-Time 20:  Why I Am Not a Pacifist 27:  Transposition Apr 3:  Is Theology Poetry? 10: The Inner Ring 17: Membership 24: On Forgiveness and     A Slip of the Tongue

  The text for this week’s reading begins with a focus on Damaris.  Williams undertakes to show the step by step process by which she comes to spiritual maturity.  The first step is to become aware of others as individuals with needs of their own, rather than as objects that interfered with her work.  She begins to see her father, and then others, in a different light, and she goes out to look for Quentin in order to help him.  She is beginning to be motivated by love of others.   Quentin is pursued by a bestial figure, but as Damaris shields him, a lamb appears and takes the place, we are told, of the lion.  The unbridled strength that is the cause of buildings falling and Quentin overcome by fright is checked by gentle loving action.  The lamb frolics for joy.  The bestial creature, which represents Foster, who had tried along with Berringer to summon and control the archetypal strength of the universe for his own purposes, perishe...

  As the chapter head tells us, the narrative begins to focus its attention upon Damaris’s conversion.  We are shown hr mental absorption with a completely abstract understanding of human experience–she is preoccupied with composing a graph of human thought.  As a  result she has a thorough-going contempt for the actual experience of people, and even wants to rid herself of her father when he seems to be ailing. Suddenly the archetypal Strength or Energy that gives things form and structure withdraws from the neighboring buildings, causing them to collapse.  Damaris reacts not with alarm but complacency; then a stench arises, driving her to a downstairs window where she is confronted with an appallingly huge and terrible flying creature.  For the first time in her life she feels the need for somebody to be with her, and she cries out for Anthony and her father. Her father appears but he, absorbed in his vision of beauty, calmly spurns her.  Then th...

  These chapters show wrong attitudes towards the nature of reality, and culminate with Anthony coming into the right attitude and achieving the correct relationship. Anthony visits Richardson, and learns that when the arrogant people seek to command and control the  celestial powers, they become hostile beasts, so that the lion becomes a dragon when people like Berringer and Foster seek to command it for their own self-centered purposes. Chapter Nine begins with a description of how Damaris’s state of mind prevents her from experiencing the peace of mind that can come from a right relation to nature.  Her mental preoccupation with “the relation of the Divine Perfection with creation” ironically prevents her from the sort of actually experiencing it which her father and Anthony are receiving. Her intellectual world was all that mattered to her, and getting her articles published only nourished her egotism.  When she encounters the deeply frightened Quentin an...

In Chapter Four, when Mr. Foster visits Anthony and Quentin, the mystery of the lion and the snake begins to unfold.  Williams is drawing upon Platonic metaphysics.  Plato taught that every object in this created world is derived from an archetypal idea.  For instance, behind all the trees in this world is the idea of Tree.  The infinite variety of individual trees is the result of a creating demigod trying to copy the idea and never getting it quite right; hence, all the incredible varieties of trees.  Because all individual trees are imitations of the idea of Tree, they are inferior to the idea.    In our novel, Williams is asking, what idea or principle makes all things hold together; that is, makes things cohere?  Is there not a principle of Strength? And is there not a principle of Beauty, that makes some things, such as butterflies, beautiful?  What if these Ideas could be summoned by someone who concentrates on them?  Foster’s...

In all his novels Williams explores the nature of reality–of the world our senses perceive and our minds try to understand–and the array of possible attitudes towards it.  Our spiritual health depends upon our exercising the right attitudes towards the life we encounter.  In The Place of the Lion, Anthony depicts the ideal set of mind; many of the other characters depict seriously wrong approaches.  As you read, carefully note the attitudes of each.    Anthony has jovial, confident, and expectant attitudes towards whatever may occur, convinced that ideas are “more dangerous than material things.”  Thus the main theme of the novel is introduced: what reality do ideas have, and what is their relation to the material world?  Meeting those who are on the lookout for a lion, he volunteers to help them.  He sees the quest as “enormous fun.”  Quentin, on the other hand, wants to “bolt.”  When they see Berringer, who has been overcome by the...

In a letter dated Feb. 26, 1936, to his close friend Arthur Greeves, C. S. Lewis writes: I have just read what I think a really great book, “The Place of the Lion” by Charles Williams.  It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archetypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archetypes start sucking our world back.  The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him.  The archetypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him.   But man continues and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them. It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book.  The reading of it ...