"Means of Grace and Treasured Relationships" Dr. Wayne Martindale Ep. 3 LFSS Season 6

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Welcome to the C.S. lewis Festival Scholar Series. I'm your host David Krause as co founder of the festival in 2003. Over 22,000 people have attended a variety of cultural, religious and educational events held every September along the beautiful shores of of Lake Michigan for this year's festival in September. Please Visit us@cslewisfestival.org for events and registrations. We continue our series on CS Lewis and the nature of friendship as we welcome back Dr. Wayne Martindale, emeritus professor at Wheaton College. Dr. Martindale delivers a very emotional talk Faith and Friends, the salvation and sanctification of C.S. lewis and now Dr. Martindale.

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Now being sandwiched in this program between Don King and Jerry Root reminds me of the occasion when Mark Twain introduced Rudyard Kipling. He said, I'm pleased to do this introduction because between the two of us we hold all knowledge. Mr. Kipling knows all there is to know and I know all the rest. Kind of the relationship between these two and me. My former colleague at Wheaton College, Alan Jacobs, emerged from his office after reading the first volume or a big chunk of the first volume of Walter Hooper's Collected Letters and he muttered, yes, Lewis was a prig. These are mostly pre conversion letters he had been reading. Of course. In the first volume Prig is someone full of himself who looks down at others he deems inferior. Now if you know Lewis mainly from the Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and the Chronicles of Narnia, this may come as a shock. But Jacobs was merely echoing Lewis's own assessment of those early years and surprised by Joy. He said that the time he spent at the prep school Malvern succeeded in making him into a prig and an intellectual snob. Joel Heck, in his recent book no Ordinary People, which is excellent and I will refer to, often said that while Lewis's brother Warning was organizing the Lewis papers, Lewis read over his early letters and acknowledged that their distinguishing feature was their egotism, stating, I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter. He also notes often that his besetting sin was pride, which in Mere Christianity he calls the great sin, the essential vice, the utmost evil, the complete anti God state of mind and the sin by which the devil became the devil. Given these self acknowledged flaws, how did Lewis come to be the self denying generous hearted man who recognized that every person has an immortal soul with overwhelming, overwhelming possibilities for good or evil and would write after his conversion, there are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. This reflects a radical change in how to evaluate Every individual. In godly terms. Lewis would write, in Christianity and literature, the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production of or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world. The short but true answer to the question of why he changed is that Lewis came to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. He was, as Walter Hooper says of him, the most converted man I ever met. There's no getting around the mysterious and supernatural work of God and transforming the human soul. Of course, it's also true that God uses many people and events in providentially saving and sanctifying a human soul. Lewis details many of the books, people and events that were part of his own process and surprised by joy. This paper will focus on the role of friends. Beginning with Barfield. This paper will focus on first is salvation and there are five people I want to mention in the course of that in two pairs and then one off. And the second half of the paper will focus on his sanctification. What got me thinking about the topic of this paper on the importance of Lewis's friends and his spiritual journey is the following arresting quote which I read in the recent three volume biography by Harry Lee Poe which Don King just mentioned. Here's the paragraph. Barfield frequently commented that he never changed his mind about anything, but Lewis was always changing his mind. To change the mind is the meaning of the word in the Bible that is usually translated repentance. Lewis was always submitting his life to Christ to be changed. He was always renewing his mind. He understood the New Testament concept of the atonement as involving dying with Christ. He continually submitted his habits and attitudes to be killed as he graphically portrayed in the Great Divorce. How this happened appeared in little ways over many years. That's the end of the quoted paragraph from Poe. Marvelous biography, much recommended. Not surprisingly then, I want to start this brief look at Lewis's spiritual formation with Owen Barfield. The friendship developed in their formative undergraduate years just after World War I and lasted until Lewis died in 1963. Barfield credits Lewis with, quote, absolute honesty of mind and with keenness in pursuing any point of difference or doubt to its final conclusion. This is balanced by what Barfield calls an irrepressible bent for comedy. Clearly they were important to each other. Lewis and Barfield met as Oxford undergraduates in 1919 as they were both turning 21 and just before going off to war. At this time Lewis was a self avowed aggressive atheist in his journey from atheism to theism. Not Christianity yet, but theism belief in God. There are two key things Lewis learned from Barfield. One, to recognize, then reject his chronological snobbery. Two, through the intense debate they called the Great War the existence of the supernatural. Chronological snobbery is the belief that the most recent is the best thing only because it's the latest thing. This kind of thinking is very much influenced by technological development. It's true that my first car is better than my dad's first car or his dad's horse. The danger comes in carrying this assumption about technology over to ideas. We discount old ideas not because they are untrue, but simply because they're old. Much of our education supports this kind of preference for the latest idea, doesn't it? The implication for taking Christianity seriously is obvious. How could something 2000 years old be relevant to me and my time and my life? Barfield convinced Lewis that the value of putting older ideas up against newer ones was to help reveal the blind spots about current thinking. And since we don't have the future to put up against it, all we have is the past. Not that the past was better than the present, but the difference is what helps highlight the assumptions. So thereafter, Lewis would become an advocate of reading old books. He crystallizes the truth he learned from Barfield in the final chapter of the Four Loves with this maxim. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date, and we can thank Barfield for his role in that. The second key thing that Lewis learned from Barfield is the irrefutable existence of the supernatural. The two butted heads over this idea for a good long time. It began in their undergraduate years in person and continued through letters and what Lewis called the Great War. Conveniently, in Hooper's collected Letters, he puts all of the Great War correspondence together in one place. They can read it very conveniently. Giving it the name by which World War I was known indicated both the ferocity and the importance of this battle of ideas. In a letter to Arthur Greaves in 1931, Lewis states that Greaves and Barfield were first class friends and Tolkien a second class friend, indicating the closeness and importance of the friendship at that time. In a further distinction, Lewis termed Barfield a second friend. In a particular sense, explained in Surprised by Joy. A first friend shares your ideas, your point of view, your values, your passionate interests, and was your alter ego, which describes Arthur Greaves. A second friend describes Barfield. Lewis said of Barfield, of course he shares your interests, otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them from a different angle. He has read all the right books, but has got the wrong thing out of everyone. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. Lewis insists that Barfield changed him more than he changed Barfield. And Lewis puts Barfield in the pack of those who had aligned with the Christian side against idealism, which was one of his many stops on the way to theism and Christianity. In addition to correcting Lewis's chronological snobbery and confronting him with the existence of of the divine, Barfield's essay on death got Lewis to thinking seriously about immortality. A group of six undergrads who loved ideas and poetry and wrote poetry formed a group that was a kind of forerunner to the Inklings. It included Lewis, Barfield, Neil Baker, who had introduced the two to each other, Cecil Harwood and two others named Walter Field and Eric Beckett. Barfield and Harwood, who were first friends in that special sense to each other, were introduced to Steiner's Anthroposophy in 1923 by Daphne Oliver, who later married Cecil Harwood. Barfield and Harwood soon embraced Anthroposophy. Lewis did not. His principal objection was Anthroposophy's teaching that human consciousness evolved and was increasingly able to reach the divine. Lewis believed that all truth we could know of a spiritual nature had been available from the beginning. Even before he was a theist, Lewis had come to believe that the moral world was in some sense fixed. This would become a key theme in mere Christianity and particularly the abolition of man. The opposing ideas of Barfield and Harwood helped Lewis refine his own position. But Lewis was persuaded by Barfield's arguments that the supernatural existed. Through their great war of ideas. Lewis became convinced in 1926 that the materialistic position was untenable and moved him to a belief in idealism. Hence to theism in 1930 and then to Christianity relatively quickly. In September of 1931. I'm thinking about an anecdote involving Samuel Johnson on idealism. Bishop Berkeley was one of the chief advocates of this. And the notion is that things exist primarily as they are perceived by some other being. So Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century literary man who gave us the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language and 1755 was asked, what do you think about Bishop Berkeley's concept of idealism? That things exist primarily in the mind and not in some objective reality disconnected from it. So Samuel Johnson went over to a large stone and kicked it and he said, sir, I refute it. Thus, After Lewis embraced Christianity, he broke off regular contact with Barfield for a time Because Barfield only ever wanted to talk about Anthroposophy and Lewis founding Christianity in the Bible what he thought far superior. Walter Hooper defines Anthroposophy as, in his Collected Letters, Volume three, as being based on a premise. Let me. Sorry, let me start over. As a system of theosophy involved by Rudolph Steiner and based on the premise that the human soul can of its own power, contact the supernatural. Central to it are the concepts of reincarnation and karma. Still quoting Hooper, while it acknowledges Christ as a cosmic being, its understanding is not that of orthodox Christianity. End of quote from Hooper. While Barfield was ahead of Lewis for several years in acknowledging the existence and importance of the divine, when Lewis continued to submit his life to Christ to be sanctified, Barfield remained stuck for quite a while in Anthroposophy. One key difference is that Lewis saw revelation as fixed. Barfield, on the other hand, saw it as a continuing process. Barfield became by necessity a solicitor or lawyer to support his family and help in his father's business. He would like to have made his way by writing and his elder brother died and it left a big gap of need in the family business which he felt he needed to plug up. But he helped Lewis establish and administer his charitable fund, putting his lawyerly skills into practice. So Lewis put all of his royalties into this fund he called the Agape Fund, sometimes Agaponi. It means by means of a complicated legal arrangement, Barfield and able to put Lewis had put into practice his beliefs about faithfulness to Christ in the practical matter of generosity with his finances. Barfield also became Lewis's literary executor. After his death, Barfield was baptized into a Christian church. Somewhat later in life, according to Jane Hippolyto and C.S. lewis and Owen Barfield adversaries and confidants. By 1925 he was a convinced Christian, although he did not formally join the Anglican Church until 1949. Perhaps she is right, but I find Anthroposophy hard to square with orthodox Christianity. In about 1950, Barfield wrote a poem entitled 2Cs Lewis, which is a comic tribute that serves as the epigraph to Barfield's memoir on Lewis. It's short, it goes like this. Remember, Lewis was for nearly 30 years a fellow at Magdalen College, which gets alluded to here before he went for the last few years to Cambridge. Here's the poem. My public, though select and small, is crammed with taste and knowledge. It's somewhat stout and fairly tall and lives at Magdalen College. To complete this BFF Circle Best Friends Forever. In his memoir on Lewis, Barfield said Lewis was first and foremost the absolutely unforgettable friend and dedicated his most important book, Poetic Diction, using Lewis's publishing pseudonym, to Clive Hamilton. Opposition is true friendship. Clive Hamilton is one of the four pseudonyms Lewis used. Lewis in turn dedicated his first scholarly book, the Allegory of Love, to Barfield, calling him in that dedication wisest and best of my unofficial teachers. One of the most insightful of Barfield's comments on Lewis is that somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything. The secret to Lewis's seamless integration of thought was of course in large part submitting every part of his life and thought to God. It also helped that he had a photographic memory and he had what we might call a giant ram capacity, easy access to everything he knew. The warmth and durability of the friendship is indicated by two other things. First, Lewis dedicated the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Barfield's adopted daughter Lucy, who was Lewis's godchild. And second, when Lewis left Oxford for Cambridge, he nominated Barfield to take his place, which very nearly happened. Another person who helped Lewis toward Christianity and made the journey with him was Lewis's pupil, Alan Richard Griffiths. Lewis was eight years older than his pupil and a little further along and that Lewis had moved from atheism to a belief in a universal spirit by the time they first met during what Lewis called the Great War, already referred to Lewis and Barfield had a years long debate, first in person, then in extended letters, about whether the divine existed as at one point Lewis produced a lengthy work against Barfield's Anthroposophy. He called this work his Summa and he loaned it to Griffiths, with the result that Griffiths moved from atheism to idealism. Following Lewis's own development over the few years leading up to Lewis's conversion, Griffiths was also being drawn to Christianity. Lewis described Griffiths as his chief companion on that journey. In the process they became genuine friends, going on walks together and corresponding when apart on February 810 along kind of successive letter over several days in 1930. Barfield and Griffiths are mentioned together in Lewis's letter, and therefore this is likely the time about which Lewis wrote these words in surprise by joy the fox had been dislodged from the Hegelian wood and was now running in the open, with all the woe in the world be draggled and weary hounds barely a field behind, and nearly everyone was now in the pack. Plato, Dante, Macdonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, joy itself, meaning joy is longing, not joy whom he later married. Everyone and everything had joined the other side. Even my own pupil. Griffiths, though not yet a believer himself, did his share. That's the end of the quote. Bart Griffiths even stayed with Lewis briefly. In that turning point year of 1930, Griffiths and Lewis were recommending books to each other, working through the implications of the philosophy and theology they were reading. Books like William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Joseph Butler's the Analogy of Religion. Butler argued that Christianity was superior to impersonal deism. Griffiths says of their relationship at this time, acquaintance ripened into friendship, adding that between 1929 and 1932, I was probably nearer to Lewis than anyone else. In writing about his shared journey with Lewis, Griffiths writes that an unseen hand seemed to be leading us both to the same goal. Shortly after he graduated from Oxford, Griffiths read the Bible with intensity and not surprisingly, it changed his life. He became a Christian at about the same time as Lewis. In 1931, though he grew up in an Anglican church, Griffiths came under the influence of John Henry Newman and switched to Catholicism. Such had been the joint nature of their journey to Christianity that Griffiths wanted Lewis to join him in Catholicism. Much like Barfield's hounding of Lewis about anthroposophy, Griffiths pursuit was dogged and Lewis's resistance was just as dogged. Lewis tried many times in letter exchanges to drop the denominationalism and talk more about mere Christianity. Humorously, in one letter to Griffiths, Lewis apologizes for not answering sooner Griffith's letter attempting to convert him to Catholicism. But the reason he was so slow in answering is he was busy answering another student's letter who was attempting to convert him to Hinduism. Still, Griffiths is one of four clergymen to whom Lewis submitted part two of Mere Christianity for critique. They continue to correspond on important topics and life events. In 1934, Lewis wrote to Griffiths in response to his most welcome letter. Lewis states of pantheism. Our positions about pantheism are exactly the same, for we both in places travel the same road to Christianity, and the result of the arrival is certainly not any ingratitude or contempt to the various signposts or hostelries that helped on the journey. Griffiths became increasingly burdened for the people of India and was at the same time fascinated by Hinduism. He wrote a number of books on Christianity and Hinduism and at least flirted with syncretism. And 1959 letter, Lewis Thanks Griffiths for sending him a copy of his book Christ in India, saying it Confirms what I had less clearly already thought, that the difficulty of preaching Christ in India is that there is no difficulty. One is up against true paganism, the best sort of it, as well as the worst. Hospitable to all gods, with a small G naturally religious, ready to take any shape, but able to retain none fear of the gods. Small G is harder to convert than materialism, as a fog is harder to remove than a tree. It's worth noting here, as elsewhere, Lewis is insistent on the centrality and utter uniqueness, excuse me, of Jesus Christ. We've talked about the key roles Barfield and Griffiths played in moving Lewis towards salvation. Of course they continue to be important to Lewis, these two friends, in various ways as they continue through life. Lewis gives us the sequence of changing positions in various places and the concluding pages of Surprised by Joy. Lewis tells us that in sorting through the perplexing multiplicity of religions, two keys were put into his hands. One was a statement made by a maudlin colleague who was the hardest boiled atheist he knew when he commented in passing rum thing, all that about the dying God seems to have really happened once. The other key was from Barfield, who had taught him respect for and delight in the pagan myths. He learned to search not for the one true myth out of all the other false ones, but where, as he says, religion reached its true maturity. Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all paganism been fulfilled. With Griffiths he had narrowed the field to Hinduism or Christianity. Hinduism he ruled out because it seemed to be less a fulfillment of myth than a mere quote. Oil and water, coexistence of philosophy side by side with paganism unpurged. Also, paganism made no historical claim. The ground was prepared for the famous turning point, conversion with conversation, excuse me, with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. tolkien, which took place at Magdalen College and continued through a late night walk around Addison's walk on college grounds. Joel Heck summarizes the topics of conversation took place that night. The three men talked about metaphor and myth, truth, paganism and Christianity, dying and rising, love and friendship and poetry and books from midnight until 3am at that point Tolkien left. Then Lewis and Dyson continued to walk while strolling up and down the cloister of new building until 4am Lewis lived in this building on modeling college grounds called New Building. It's called New because it had only emerged in 1733. We tend to focus on Tolkien in this scenario since he's become more famous and was more often in Inkling's meetings because he lived in Oxford while Dyson lived in Reading, but the friendship with Dyson was closer at this time. Further, Dyson spent the night in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen and then had lunch at the Kilns before Lewis and the Moors drove him to 26 miles to Reading, where he lived and taught. So that conversation that went until 4am continued through half of the next day. This is not at all to deprecate Tolkien's role. Rather, it's to reclaim the role of Dyson, who is often the forgotten man. Lewis wrote to Arthur Greaves in September 22, 1931, to apologize for not answering his letter of the preceding week, explaining that he had a guest for the weekend, which was Dyson. Evaluating that relationship for Greaves, Lewis says, I meet him, I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the second class, I. E. Not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien or McFarland. In telling Greaves about Dyson's visit, he adds, tolkien came too, as though the principal in this account was Dyson. Lewis writes to Greaves on October 1st, I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ, in Christianity. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it. The actual moment of his conversion was so undramatic that he describes it as a man, like a man being asleep and then realizing at some point he's awake on a journey to Whipsnade Zoo and the sidecar warnings motorcycle at the beginning. At the beginning of the trip, he didn't believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but by the time they arrived, he did. It is clear from my citations of letters to Arthur Greaves that he was a supremely important friend, and Arthur too, played a role in Lewis's conversion. So I'll say a little bit about him now to close out this section on his salvation before we move to his sanctification. Except for his brother Warren or Warney, Lewis's best friend was his Belfast neighbor, Arthur Greaves. They met when Greaves was 18 and Lewis 15. Lewis wrote more letters to Greaves than to Anyone else, about 300 letters over nearly 50 years gathered into a separate book called they Stand Together. Lewis put Greaves in his first tier of friendship, along with Barfield and Tolkien in the second tier. It was only with Greaves that Lewis shared his inmost secrets, including his foibles and failings during the earlier years of our acquaintance. Writes Lewis, he was meaning Barfield was always a Christian and I was an atheist. But Though God forgive me, I bombarded him with all the thin artillery of a 17 year old rationalist. I never made any impression on his faith. A faith both vague and confused and in some ways too indulgent of our common weaknesses but inexpugable. He remains the victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. The thing is symbolical of much of our joint history. He was not a clever boy. He was even a dull boy. I was a scholar. He had no ideas. I bubbled over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments. But he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously for he was always very inarticulate. He taught me to share. Hence in our commerce I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him and failed for all my efforts to. To teach him arrogance in return. Very touching transparency. On Lewis had written to Greaves on their religious differences that all religions, that is all mythologies, are merely man's own inventions. Christ as much as Loki. Yet in a blessed irony, Lewis's first book after his conversion, the Pilgrim's Regress, would be written during a two week stay in Belfast with Arthur, the Christian whose faith Lewis had rejected. And early in life Lewis gave him a complimentary copy and he dedicated the book to Arthur along with a love of art and the outdoors in all its nuance, the homely meaning domestic scene grieves taught Lewis much as he writes, he continued to feel, indeed he taught me to endeavor to feel with him at once a human affection and a rich aesthetic relish for his antediluvian aunts, his mill owning uncles, his mother's servants, the postman on our roads, the cottagers whom we met on our walks. Greaves taught Lewis, in Lewis's own words, that there were no ordinary people. Our focus thus far has been on the role of Lewis's friends in bringing him to salvation. For the rest of the presentation I'd like to shift to a focus on Lewis's sanctification, to the way his various friendships serve to make him increasingly more like Christ and the way some of these friendships help to more illustrate than to generate the extent of his devotion to the two great commandments of loving God and loving others. I'll begin this section with with the role of extensive letter writing. It may stretch the concept of friend a little. The two examples I will give are from people he never met, yet corresponded with for many years to appreciate what this massive correspondence cost him. We have to look at how much he would have liked to get rid of that responsibility. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes his ideal day. It has regimented times for rising and retiring. It has regimented times for eating and for reading and for writing and walking, plus this very telling requirement. I am describing the happy life I lived with Kirk. He was tutored for two and a half years by W.T. kirkpatrick, known as the Great Knock. It's taught him a lot about how to think or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is an essential of a happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock. Yet at this time in his life, Lewis was spending one and a half to two hours of every day at the beginning of the day answering the avalanche of letters that had come to him since the early forties. In writing this great multitude of letters, There are nearly 4,000 pages in the collected letters of C.S. lewis, edited by Hooper. Lewis was being faithful to the God of to the call of God on his life, day in and day out. He was dying to self and doing what he so often charged all of us to do to exercise our will in the face of feelings to the contrary and so build our character. Lewis explains in a letter to Arthur Greaves. My correspondence involves a great number of theological letters already which can't be neglected because their answers to people in great need of help and often in great misery. One otherwise unknown widow in Washington D.C. wrote fretful letters about her anxious worries over her health and her work and her failing finances. Lewis answered all of her letters 132 letters from Lewis with good cheer, practical advice and personal transparency and pastoral counsel. There were enough to make up a whole book edited by Clyde Kilby called Letters to an American Lady. Because she was still living, Kilby didn't use her name, which is Mary Willis Shelburne. At the time of their first correspondence, Lewis was 51 and marry a widow four years his senior. The major events that happen in Lewis's life at this season are his move from Oxford to Cambridge, his marriage to Joy, Joy's death accompanied by Lewis's own failing health. Part of the attraction of these letters for us is the insight and details that emerge from these events in Lewis's life. The letters show Lewis patiently and consistently answering her letters of complaints and questions, even long past the time when many would be exasperated by her insensitivity and self centeredness. The most affecting thing about this correspondence is its existence the next most affecting is the good cheer and consistently thoughtful pastoral counsel. I've always been taken aback by Mary's failure to take the hit not to write at the holidays, especially Christmas, and by Lewis's continued answers. On January 29, 1955, Lewis writes that he is settling into Cambridge, plus various delights like burst water pipes, repeated journeys to and fro, in fact, a period during which life seemed to consist entirely of journeying and letter writing. And Lewis says, the pen has become to me what the oar is to the galley slave. Then he urges her again not to write at the holidays, saying, you have never been absent from my pair for my prayers, so try not to be hurt by my silence, and always remember that there is no time in the whole year when I am less willing to write than near Christmas, for it is then that my burden is heaviest. But next Christmas she's writing away to Lewis, and he's answering. He asks rhetorically. Well, I mean, add one other thing. So, during the course of this correspondence, Mary had fallen on hard times financially. So Lewis shares with Mary one of his own greatest fears, and that is of falling into poverty. His father, Albert Lewis, had shared the same fear that at any moment they're going to wind up in the poor house, even though it was pretty far from the case. Despite the fear, Lewis gave away two thirds of his income every year. Try that. Exercise yourself during the next year to appreciate that. And when Lewis offers to help and she demurs, Lewis reminds her that we are all members of one another and must learn to receive as well as to give. He asks rhetorically, isn't the spiritual value of having to accept money just this, that it makes palpable the total dependence in which we always live anyway? For if you were what is called independent, that is, living on inherited wealth, every bit you put into your mouth and every stitch on your back would still be coming from the sweat and skill of others, while you, as a person, would not really be doing anything in return. It took me a long time to see this, though heaven knows, with the cross before our eyes, we have little excuse to forget our insolvency. He reminds Mary Shelburne, we are all debtors before God and must not, in a false humility that is actually pride, refuse needed help. Lewis directed that his American publisher channel some of his royalty funds to Mary Shelburne, a small stream of financial help that was still flowing when Kilby published these letters four years after Lewis's death. What keeps this council from being preachy is Lewis's transparency about his own struggle with pride and with slowness to learn. He doesn't put Mary down. Rather, he identifies with her pain and need and struggle, even putting the struggle in the context of being human. Clyde Kilby writes that Lewis's main motivation for writing these letters is that he believed that taking time out to advise or encourage another Christian was both a humbling of one's talents before the Lord and also as much a work of the Holy Spirit as producing a book. The second and more briefly treated example of correspondences through which he is being refined and also illustrating his sanctification is a very different sort of correspondent. The correspondent is an Italian Catholic priest named Don Giovanni Calabria, who was beatified by John Paul ii. Father Calabria founded a care, a work to care for orphans. Eventually the congregation called the Poor Servants of the Divine Providence has scores of priests and laymen, eventually numbering 2,500 children in about two dozen homes. Father Calabria had read a translation of the Screwtape letters in Italian. He reasoned that Lewis would not likely know Italian, but as a classic scholar, he would know Latin. So he wrote to Lewis in Latin, which is the language of the entire correspondence, which also makes up an entire book all by itself. These letters discuss mainly theological subjects. Calabria is yet another correspondent who wanted to convert Louis to Catholicism. Father Calabria thought the answer to Christian unity, which was his passion in life as well as caring for the poor, was in unifying under the Pope. Lewis pulls him back to mere Christianity and what all Christians have in common. The delightful irony in these Latin letters is that Louis could have handled the Italian. Lewis knew eight languages. His mother had tutored him at an early age in Latin and French. Kirkpatrick tutored him in Greek and Latin, later adding French, German and Italian. He learned on his own, and with Tolkien in the. And with Tolkien, the Anglo Saxon. Excuse me, Anglo Saxon or Old English. He was weakest by his own admission. And German, let's see, Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Old English. Oh, yes, and he also learned some Icelandic and he knew a little English. The first friendships we looked at with Barfield, Griffiths, Dyson and Tolkien began in Lewis's undergraduate years. Though these were all lifetime friendships, the part that interested us was those early days where Lewis was slowly and methodically finding his way to Christ, though it would be more accurate to say Christ was hunting him down and finally had cornered him. The correspondences we consider just now with Mary Shelburne and Don Giovanni Calabria lasted several years, but began well into his maturity. The first letter from Mary Shelburne, the American lady came in 1950, the same year Lewis got his first letter from Joy David Man Gresham he later married. The first letter from Don Giovanni Calabria came in 1947. For the final segment on sanctification I want to think about Lewis women and sanctification. We'll look at the two most important women in his life besides his mother, Janie King Moore and Joy Davidman. Mary Stuart Van Leeuwen has written an important book called A Sword between the sexes? CS Lewis and the Gender Debates. Sword between the sexes is a quote from grief, observed Lewis, that said there's a sword between the sexes until a proper marriage heals that breach. One of Van Leeuwen's important insights is that while Lewis's theory about hierarchy between men and women and even amongst men began as hard edged and soft and softened as he aged and gained experience with gifted get with gifted women at least his con from his conversion on he was exemplary in his treatment of women. So she draws a distinction between his theorizing about hierarchy or hierarchical relationship between men and women and his practice which was in her view better than his theorizing even from the beginning. An example of this is the evacuees. From the German bombing of London. From the fall of 1939 to the fall of 1943, the Lewis household had a contingent of young girls, usually three at a time. Lewis had warm words for the girls and the experience of having them. A particular example is Jill or June. She was known as June in those days at the Counts and later adopted the the name Jill. But she was there the longest. In September 1942, Jill was interviewed by Mrs. Moore as a candidate for housing for among those fleeing the bombing in London. Her school, which was in London, resumed in the fall and Jill went back. But the next September Mrs. Moore invited her to the kilns for two week holiday. She came and the holiday turned into a two year stay. She was a hard worker and her help was certainly needed. The gardener and handyman Fred Paxford had been called to work in a munitions factory and Mrs. Moore had varicose ulcers and could hardly get around. The war meant severe rationing of food and everything else, even for a good while after the war. So the Lewis household had a large garden. They kept 25 chickens and a few rabbits. These became Jill's responsibility. She had been accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but put off matriculating several times so she could stay on and help the family. Jill, or June as she was called then, was 16 when she arrived at the Lewis household. Warney wrote of her on the day she left for the Royal Academy. I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life. From 7 in the morning until 9 at night. Shut off from people her own age, she slaved on at the kilns. I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self accusing and the frequent crises of that dreary house. From a personal selfish point of view, I shall feel the loss of June very keenly. For in addition to her other virtues, she's a clever girl and with her gone it means that when Jay or Jack C.S. lewis is away, there's no one to talk to. Jill said of Jack Lewis that every smile, every kind word was like daylight, like the summer. I just took the crumbs that I was offered. He took a lot of trouble with me. He'd lend me a book and then talk to me about it as if my idiot childish opinions were of any interest. Minto, who is Mrs. Moore's nickname, once told me he thought I was very intelligent. I think he regarded me in a very benevolent way as a very young student. He would coach me in that sense, chill said in an interview with Steven Schofield. Lewis was the first person who made me believe I was an intelligent human being and the whole time I was there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think and understand. Maybe you have a similar debt to someone in your own life, perhaps a teacher. And if those of us who are teachers have been teachers, can appreciate the gift we can give to someone's self esteem. Joe later married Sigmund Freud's grandson Clement Freud, who served 14 years in parliament and was knighted. Along with raising five children, Jill had many roles in TV, film and live drama, receiving the honorary degree of Civil Law from University of East Anglia in 2001 for services to the theater. One wonders how much that confidence was showed her over two years Freedom. And Joe continued to stay in touch with the Lewis brothers and was on our way to the Lewis's for dinner when she telephoned ahead only to learn that Lewis had died 30 minutes before her call. Louis's relationship with the last two women, and we will consider, was certainly unusual, especially with Janie King Moore. Besides his brother and boyhood neighbor Arthur Greaves, the longest ongoing relationship in Lewis's life was with Mrs. Moore. They met because Lewis became friends with Mrs. Moore's son Patty when they were both in the Officer Training Corps at Oxford. Lewis's own mother had died of cancer when he was nine and his relationship with his father was fraught to say the least. Mrs. Moore welcomed Lewis into the hospitality of her home. As is well known, Lewis and Patty made a pact that if one of them survived the war, the survivor would care for the other's parent. Both boys were in combat in France. Lewis was wounded during a major German push and Patty was killed in a separate battle that was part of that same push. Lewis had already spent way more time with Mrs. Moore than his father on leaves and when recovering from wounds, so it is not surprising that he would take a further step and find accommodations with Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen during his undergraduate years, ultimately buying the kilns with himself and his brother warning and Mrs. Moore as joint owners. Mrs. Moore, 26 years Lewis's senior, was a mother substitute and possibly more during the decade plus that they lived together up to the time of Lewis's conversion. Whether or not the relationship had a sexual component is debated. Lewis claims to have had no conscience and no ethics at this stage, and acknowledges in facing up to the existence and claims of God that when he honestly examined the content of his life, he found what appalled him. A zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem, a fondle of hatreds. My name was legion. He writes of his struggle to acknowledge God and moral claims on his life as though he were hunted animal. And he wrote in the foreword to Joy Davidman Gresham's book Smoke on the Mountain, which is on the Ten Commandments. The story of every conversion is one of blessed defeat, when the self is defeated by God and enjoys words and God came in. Alistair McGrath argues convincing, convincingly, that Lewis was off on the date of his conversion to theism, which he puts at 1929, and it was actually 1930. With this newfound faith in God, Lewis began quietly but openly to attend chapel at Model College every morning, and he began to regularly attend the Anglican Church nearest his home, Holy Trinity. He also began to develop an ethical and moral conscience. Mrs. Moore was already angry with God over the death of her son. It is possible that she also resented Lewis's new allegiance to God. Whatever this change this made in their relationship, Lewis kept his promise to his fallen comrade to care for his mother and sister and to keep the promise to Mrs. Moore implicit in living under the same roof for over a decade. Living with Mrs. Moore would have been easier when she was younger, and some of her good qualities had greater dominance, like hard work, hospitality, care of animals and generosity. The house was full. In those years she was always inviting people over, often asking them to stay the night or even four weeks. But these good qualities began to abate and her selfish, complaining, demanding nature began to prevail. And you'll recognize some of the quoted stuff here from Don King's presentation. When Mrs. Moore died in 1951, Warny wrote, and so ends the mysterious self imposed slavery which Jay or Jack C.S. lewis has lived for at least 30 years. Lewis wrote to Mary Van Dusen, I have lived most of my, most of my private life in a house which was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours amid senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over do I begin to realize quite, quite how bad it was. Of course, sticking to commitments through challenges is at the very heart of sanctification. To be kind, patient and loving in such circumstances is beyond our four powers, apart from grace given by the Holy Spirit. Grace, biblically defined, is the desire and the power to do what God commands, and Lewis lived out the last many years of Mrs. Moore's troubled and difficult life with grace. By that definition, Lewis addresses such character development in many places in the Screwtape letters. In speaking of the law of undulation, the ups and downs of our feelings, the inevitable ebb and flow of our feelings, Lewis nails the importance of acting in opposition to them when an issue of right and wrong is before us. In letter eight, Screwtape, the senior tempter cautions Wormwood the beginner, do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys. I think we see a wonderful vivid example of that sense of abandonment and still doing what is required, still trusting God and a grief observed. I'd like to conclude by focusing on just one thing Lewis learned from being married to Helen Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis. Lewis said he found in marrying in his 50s a joy that had passed him by. In his 20s, he married her in a Christian ceremony. A year after he married her, technically in a civil ceremony. That's a longer story. He married her in a Christian ceremony in the hospital as a terminal cancer payment patient and brought her home to die but she went into remission and they had a rich three years together. She was, for one thing, Jack's intellectual equal. Like him, she had a photographic memory. Even while still a young person at home she could look at a score of Chopin for the first time and then play it from memory. When growing up, they would occasionally perform a Shakespearean play as a family. She would read the play through once and have all her lines, much to the consternation of her brother Howard. And when she and Jack would play Scrabble together, it was in all known languages. Have trouble playing it in English, frankly. And and a Grief, observed Lewis, characterizes their relationship early in the book for these few years H and I. Helen. He's using her her little known first name Helen Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis, because he thought people wouldn't recognize who he was speaking about. And he published it under a pseudonym because he didn't want people looking at him oddly, because of his having poured out his grief there. So in a grief, observe, Lewis characterizes their early their relationship early in the book. For those few years, H and I feasted on love, every motive. It solemn and Mary romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. Toward the end of a grief, observed Lewis summarizes all she was to him. What was H. Not to me. She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign and always holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldier, my mistress. But at the same time all that any man, friend and I have, good ones, has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love, we should have nonetheless been always together and created a scandal. Sometimes he would say something wrong just for the pleasure of watching her pounce on the idea, like a leopard setting him to rights. When she died and Lewis was giving free rein to his grief, he says he never doubted God's existence. But he did wonder if God were not some kind of cosmic sadist to allow such a rich marriage so unexpected only to snatch it away. We can understand something of his pain and even his awful thoughts about God. But as he reflected back on what he had written about grief, he realized that it was mostly about him, only secondarily about his wife Joy, and a distant third about God. This was, he quickly concluded, exactly the reverse of what it should be with God first, then Joy, then himself. What then was the purpose in all this pain. In a phrase overworked in the movie Shadowlands, Lewis the movie Lewis said in the Problem of Pain that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. I remember reading Flannery o', Connor, Grace Southern American writer. She was asked why she used the grotesque or the violent in all of her stories and her novels. She she always had four features in her work. One was the violin or the grotesque. The other one was a Christian theme and then local color, and I missed out one, but I won't take time to dredge it out. But she said, the reason I use the violent and the grotesque in stories that I intend to for to use for people to be drawn to Christ is that to a world that is deaf, you have to shout. And to a world that is myopic and has difficulty seeing, you have to write in bold letters. So God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world pain. Lewis had allowed an idolatrous view of God to creep in. God protects and keeps me safe in exchange for my obedience. He may have thought or at least felt. And haven't we as well? Did I do something wrong? You think of Job here, or is God just untrustworthy? If we have m have a mistaken ideal about who God is, what should he do about it? Lewis says, my idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered. Time after time he shatters it himself. He's the great iconoclast or breaker of images and idols. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is a supreme example. It leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are offended by the iconoclasm. Blessed are they who are not all reality is iconoclastic. Lewis was aware from the beginning of their Christian marriage when he brought Joy home to care for her as they both thought that she was in her dying days. He wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths, that early friend who made a parallel journey with Lewis. He was his pupil. He wrote to Griffiths, a new element of beauty as well as tragedy had entered my life. Certainly God has taken me at my word. I have for many years prayed, lord, Take me out of myself to seek and serve thee and others. You know, if you want to give yourself a good scared, pray that prayer. Clearly, Louis saw Joy's care than the overwhelming grief as an answer to his bold prayer. As the sharpest edges of his grief moderated, Lewis observes that when he's not looking at it, he senses her presence. And you can't in most cases get what you want. If you want it too desperately anyway, you can't get the best out of it. That's an agreement served eventually his perspective is corrected through what he so that he corrected enough so that he can praise and do order of him as the giver and her as the gift. Lewis comes to recognize that his image of God is egocentric and more for his own comfort, an image which God must in tough love shatter. This brings him back to the two great commandments to love God and to love others, and concludes, I better get on with it. Ironically, relief comes when God comes first and not our grief or our insistence on understanding why God is doing this painful thing. Grief is a process that Lewis recognizes that he cannot control and must accept, recognizing that half of our questions are unanswerable because they are nonsense on the order of how many hours are there in a mile? What seemed at first unbearable became bearable only when resolved in face. Even even then the loss continued to be painful. It is not called the refiners fire for nothing. Are the hardest pains worth it? The chronic pain, the enduring loss? Through life's hard places, through aging, through disabilities, and through the death of others and our own impending death, God is insistently asking us, am I enough? When there is nothing else but me? Am I enough? He wants us to answer the question Paul raises rhetorically in Romans 8 who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or takenness or danger or sword? Paul's answer is I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us. If we look for the answer to the why question, we could hardly do better than these two profound insights. The first, from the problem of pain, he has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. Love in its own nature demands the perfecting of the beloved. Mere kindness which tolerates anything except suffering in its object, is in that respect at the opposite pole from love. And for mere Christianity, though our feelings come and go, his love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins or our indifference, and therefore it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to him. Only someone who has been sanctified by the refiner's fire can say this in the face of life's more daunting trials. That was the plan from the very beginning, sure I can get this last sentence out. Praise be to God, whose providence supplied the means of grace and treasured relationships.

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Thank you, Dr. Martindale. This entire podcast has been made possible by the C.S. lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan and its generous sponsors. To learn more, please visit us at CS Lewis Festival. I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.