by Michael Ward
For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
All remain seated. The Choir sings
65
THE MOTET
during which the Procession moves to the memorial stone
LIKE as the hart desireth the water-brooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
My tears have been my meat day and night: while they daily say unto me, Where is now thy God?
Herbert Howells (1892–1983)
Psalm 42: 1–3
Douglas Gresham, younger stepson of C. S. Lewis, reads
from THE LAST BATTLE
“FURTHER up and further in!” roared the Unicorn, and no one held back
. . . . And soon they found themselves all walking together—and a great, bright procession it was—up towards mountains higher than you could see in this world even if they were there to be seen. But there was no snow on those mountains: there were forests and green slopes and sweet orchards and flashing waterfalls, one above the other, going up for ever. And the land they were walking on grew narrower all the time, with a deep valley on each side: and across that valley the land which was the real England grew nearer and nearer.
The light ahead was growing stronger. Lucy saw that a great series of many-coloured cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty . . . .
Aslan turned to them and said: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.” Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.” “No fear of that,” said Aslan.
“Have you not guessed?” Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. “There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
66
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
C. S. Lewis
All stand for
THE DEDICATION OF THE MEMORIAL
L-R: Walter Hooper, The Very Revd. Dr. John Hall,
Dr. Michael Ward, Douglas Gresham
67
Dr. Michael Ward, Senior Research Fellow, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, says: I ASK you, Mr. Dean, to receive into the safe custody of the Dean and Chapter this memorial in honour and memory of C. S. Lewis.
The Dean replies:
TO the greater glory of God and in thankful memory of C. S. Lewis, I dedicate this memorial: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Flowers are laid on the memorial stone by Walter Hooper, Trustee and Literary Adviser, the Lewis Estate.
The Dean says:
ALMIGHTY God, Father of lights and author of all goodness: we give thee humble praise for the life and work of thy servant, C. S. Lewis, and beseech thee that, as he has helped us look to a world beyond this world and to hopes better than our own, we may come with him to the fullness of everlasting joy which thou hast prepared for them that truly love thee, in the heavenly courts of thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
68
All sing
THE HYMN
ALL creatures of our God and King,
lift up your voice and with us sing
Alleluia, alleluia!
Th
ou burning sun with golden beam,
thou silver moon with soft er gleam:
O praise him, O praise him,
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Th
ou rushing wind that art so strong,
ye clouds that sail in heaven along,
O praise him, Alleluia!
Th
ou rising morn, in praise rejoice,
ye lights of evening, fi nd a voice:
Th
ou fl owing water, pure and clear,
make music for thy Lord to hear,
Alleluia, alleluia!
Th
ou fi re so masterful and bright,
that givest man both warmth and light:
And thou, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, Alleluia!
Th
ou leadest home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way hath trod:
69
Let all things their Creator bless,
and worship him in humbleness,
O praise him, Alleluia!
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,
and praise the Spirit, three in One:
Lasst uns erfreuen 263 NEH
St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
translated by William Draper (1855–1933)
after a melody in
Geistliche Kirchengesäng Cologne 1623
THE ADDRESS
by
The Most Reverend and Right Honourable
The Lord Williams of Oystermouth
The scene is the planet Mars. In the presence of the angelic ruler of the planet and representatives of its races, the wicked scientist Dr. Weston is trying to explain to the Martians exactly why it would be right for the human race to colonize the rest of the universe. Unfortunately, Dr. Weston has all the skill in foreign languages characteristic of British academics, and so has to find a translator. His translator is the philologist Ransom. And we watch, as the scene unfolds, and Weston’s vastly complicated, verbose, highfalutin’ words are rendered into plain Martian by Ransom.
Weston will talk about the manifest destiny of the human race, how its capacities lead it to ever-ongoing expansion and elevation at the expense of those less gifted and less powerful. And Ransom is able to render this in plain terms, telling the Martians that, since the human race thinks it is bigger and cleverer than them, it has the right to kill them. Weston, who is beginning to get a few words of the native language, interrupts at one point to try to explain that the human race is constantly moving onwards and upwards, constantly becoming greater and more complex, and moving into an unknown future. Sadly, the only words in Martian he can come out with are “strange,” “big.” It’s not a very compelling moral case.
But this wonderful and eloquent satirical scene is very typical of one aspect of Lewis’s apologetic that we sometimes overlook: his profound, sophisticated, and witty sense of the terrible things we do to language. You might even say that, for Lewis, the abuse of language is one of the things 70
which would tell you immediately that you couldn’t trust someone, that the person you were listening to didn’t understand what it was to be human.
Lewis is interested in de-mystifying the myths that we tell ourselves—
the myths about the intrinsic nobility of the human race, entitled to exploit not only its own planet but every other one in the universe; the myths we tell ourselves about how our will and our imagination can some
how make us more than human. And in spelling that out, he shows us how the aspiration to become more than human leaves us profoundly less than human.
The jargon-spouting Dr. Weston ends up, in the second volume of
Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy, as the terrifying Un-man, the de-humanized, diabolical figure that Ransom fights with in the caves of the planet Venus.
But we can see the same interest at work in the third volume of Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in the climactic scene of the banquet, where the skills of language and intelligence desert the speakers.
Now we have most of us been at banquets where something rather like that appears to have happened; but this is a more drastic instance. This is High Table choreographed by Quentin Tarantino. One by one, the speakers begin to lose the capacity to make sense and utter sense, and the disguised Merlin stands up in the midst of them, and cries out loudly, in Latin, that because they have turned their backs on the Word, the Word has abandoned them.
Intelligence has left them. Not the least impressive aspect of that narrative is how very slowly some people realize that the speakers are talking nonsense.
But that’s another story.
But in these two vignettes from the science-fiction trilogy, Lewis puts before us two of the most typical and most disturbing abuses of language that we can suffer from. There is the language we use to hide from ourselves, to tell ourselves that our ignoble habits and our selfish aspirations are really elevating and moral; and there is the language that prevents us, truly, from thinking about things, about reality, language turning in upon itself in an endless spiral of nonsense. And for Lewis, our delivery from those two kinds of error and corruption is an intrinsic part of the delivery and the renewal of our very humanity. The liberation of words is essential to the liberation of our human nature. Indeed, we could say that it is part of our growing into that humanity where, as Lewis says in his last and perhaps greatest fictional work, we have faces. We uncover ourselves to the truth.
Because God sees us in the face, we discover we have a reality, a truth, a face, and words to speak. And even as we grow into having words to speak that are honest and truthful and undefended, we are drawn nearer and nearer to that point where, as Lewis says in Till We Have Faces, “questions die away”;3
3. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, Part Two, chapter iv.
71
where we have nothing to say because there is too much to say; where, as we heard in that wonderful passage from The Last Battle, “the things that began to happen . . . were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.”4
All through Lewis’s work these themes seem to recur. To try to be more than human is to become less than human. To try to put speech between ourselves and our reality or the reality of the world is to be condemned to nonsense. And perhaps it’s that suspicion of putting speech, language, between ourselves and the world, that explains something of Lewis’s aversion to literary modernism. His critical judgments in this area were not, I think, infallible. But one can understand his deep anxiety over an interest in words that could actually stop us thinking about—indeed, seeing—things.
And it explains, too, his apparently rather odd indifference to the beautiful and majestic language of the King James Bible. It is, he says, so beautiful and so majestic, that it can actually get in the way of our realizing what the language is about. And we need a Moffatt, a Knox, or a J. B. Phillips, to startle us again with the freshness of what Scripture is saying.
And all of that also, perhaps, helps us to make sense of one of the strangest bits of apologetic in all of Lewis’s books. And that is the great testimony offered by Puddleglum, the marsh-wiggle, in The Silver Chair.
Puddleglum, you remember, and the children who are at the centre of the story are deep underground in the stronghold of the Witch, and the Witch is explaining to them that the only reality that there is is this underground world, lit by a lamp. There is no outside world. There is no sun in the sky.
The sun in the sky is just an imaginative projection from the lamp that hangs in the cave. There is no fresh air, there is no natural light. All that is is here, in this self-enclosed cavern. And Puddleglum, resisting both the strength of her rhetoric and the fumes of the intoxicating herbs that have been burned in the cave, protests that, whether or not she’s telling the truth, there is something about the very idea of an outside world that is more appropriate to life and joy and, yes, truth-telling, in a certain sense, than what the Witch is saying. And isn’t it odd that our imagination can produce so much more real and interesting a world than this narrow and impoverished cave?
Puddleglum is appealing not to reasoned argument here, but to a deep, inarticulate sense that we are in touch, that we are connected, that our language and our ideas are not everything, that we are summoned and prodded and lured into life, into knowing, into speaking. Something is given, something calls, something draws us onwards and outwards. What Puddleglum argues is that the self-enclosed world is just not good enough and not interesting 4. Lewis, The Last Battle, chapter 16, “Farewell to Shadowlands.”
72
enough to keep us thinking, talking, loving, and enjoying. Somehow, that self-enclosed, lamp-lit underground reality has to be exploded.
Lewis wanted above all to remind us that our very reality, our very life, depended on the life and reality of God. He wanted to remind us that there was no truth, no joy, no life that did not come to us unexpectedly from beyond. Think about yourself, think about, God forbid, your “spiritual life,”
think about the beauty and solemnity and emotional quality of the words you are using, and you will stay in your prison. It’s the man who is only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original and doesn’t notice it.
So to become free enough to notice our own self-deceptions, to no-
tice the seductions of jargon, to notice how very easily we settle down in the underground chamber—that is one of the great works of grace. And to be reconnected with the world for which we can’t always find appropriate words, where we’re searching, reaching, sometimes stumbling—that is the gift of the God who became, for us, and for ever, part of that real world in the flesh and blood of Jesus.
Lewis’s interest in words and what they tell us about humanity is one reason—not the only reason, but one significant reason—to remember today the fact that we honour him in Poets’ Corner; that we honour him as somebody who, in the words of a poet with whom he had a rather fraught relationship, “purifies the dialect of the tribe.”5 Lewis believed that to become human was to become a speaker of honest truth, and that that could only happen in the face of the God who helps us, who enables us, to drop our masks and our delusions and have faces in His presence. He shares, perhaps surprisingly, with George Orwell a deep diagnostic accuracy about jargon. He shares, even more surprisingly, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer an awareness of how even the most orthodox and polished religious language can become stale and cease to change anything internally or externally. Only the Word, the Word incarnate with the most capital of “W”s, can save us, not only from nonsense, but from the self-consuming boredom of endless inhumanity, Un-manhood. And when we allow the Word to speak in us and to us, that is when—as he says in a paper of the 1940s—we learn how “to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that we call realistic omits.”6
5. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Little Gidding,” II, iv, line 50.
6. Lewis, “Hedonics,” Time and Tide, 16 June 1945. Reprinted in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Walmsley, 688.
73
All remain seated. The Choir sings
THE ANTHEM7
LOVE’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of
rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.
Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts—infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.
Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”
Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.8
7. Available online: https://youtu.be/dOHlrgCizJI.
8. C. S. Lewis, “Love’s As Warm As Tears” (undated). See The Collected Poems of 74
Paul Mealor (b 1975)
C. S. Lewis
Specially commissioned for this Service
