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From joy to Joy

C.S. Lewis and the numinous in the world of relationships

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) is a monumental figure in understanding the nature of religious experience. In Naturalism and Religion (1907) he attacks the materialistic views of Charles Darwin and tries to open up a place for religious experience as something that cannot be understood in materialistic terms. He develops these themes in The Idea of the Holy (1917, trans. 1923), a classic work in the phenomenology of religion, the effort to “bracket off” the “natural attitude” (including materialistic biases) and allow religious experience to speak from within itself as to what it is.
Religious experience is what Otto calls the mysterium trenmendum, the awesome mystery experienced in the presence of the Wholly Other. He rejects Schleiermacher’s definition of religious experience as a “feeling of dependence” (and with it by implication Sigmund Freud’s idea of religious experience as an infantile dependency kind of neurosis) because such definitions read too much into religious experience, distorting it into something far too “subjective”. Religious experience is no mere feeling, no mere psychological “projection”.

Otto coins a variety of terms in describing religious experience. The favorite of C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) is the numinous. Like mysterium tremendum, the numinous suggests the supernatural presence that is frequently described by those who have had such experiences with words like: amazing, astonishing, exciting, fascinating, uncanny, ravishing, surprising, forceful, majestic, miraculous, awesome, powerful, mysterious, and supernatural. The numinous is not a projection of something inside the personality; it comes from a radically different beyond.

Neither Otto nor Lewis are irrationalists. Reason can help to understand such experiences up to a point. For Otto reason is what makes “belief” possible in contrast to “mere feeling”. For Lewis human beings are “rational animals” even when reflecting on faith. He insists that faith is very different from “nonsense”. Yet both Otto and Lewis describe at length how such experiences transport us beyond the rational and into the world of what Otto and Lewis call the “unrational” or “supra-rational”.

Otto finds the numinous in the Hebrew Bible in the way that God’s very name (Yahweh) is a source of awe. He finds it in the power with which the prophets speak, as in Isaiah’s descriptions of how God’s holiness is a consuming fire and in Ezekiel’s ecstatic dreams and visions. He finds it in the New Testament in the proclamation of the awesome mystery of Christ’s agony on the cross and the resurrection that follows it. The numinous is the call of the “elect” to “salvation”. Otto traces the development of the numinous through primitive, eastern, and western religious traditions, although it is clear that he, like Lewis, considers Christianity to be the culmination of this development. Both of them break ranks with classical phenomenology in this respect because they not only describe (Husserl has it that phenomenology is a descriptive, not a normative science), they evaluate, although they both consider that the standard for their evaluation comes from within rather than outside religious experience.

Lewis read Otto in the late 1920’s even before his conversion to Christianity in 1931. Thereafter he refers either directly or indirectly to the dimension of the numinous often in his writing. It allows him to appreciate reason in such a way that he can complain about the irrationality of thinkers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. At the same time it helps him understand the significance of the supra-rational in religious experience itself. He can consider the magic of his children’s stories as analogous to religious experience.

The most conspicuous place where he discusses the numinous is in the opening chapter of The Problem of Pain (1940). He introduces the numinous to his readers by distinguishing being told that there is a tiger in the next room (fear) from being told first that there is a ghost (the uncanny and the “fringes” of the numinous) and finally a “mighty spirit” (God) in the next room (a “profound” illustration of the numinous). He notes the obvious similarities between fear and thenuminous, but he finds a qualitative difference between fear of a tiger and “fear” (awe) of the Lord.

He, like Otto, finds “copious” examples of the numinous, from the primitive religions to the writings of poets like Wordsworth. He also tries to distinguish religious from moral experience. He describes the numinous as beyond the world of “good and evil” (He is perhaps more like Kierkegaard than he realizes) and uses this distinction as he describeshow we cope with the experience of pain. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”1 The numinous is always an intrusion into our ordinary lives. “The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered.”2

The numinous is not always named specifically in Lewis’s other works, but it is usually somewhere in the background of his children’s stories, his science fiction, and his theological fantasies. The Great Divorce (1944) is a typical example. To Otto the numinous is “the experience of reality”, not what most people mean by “reality” but a deeper, more spiritual reality that makes the ordinary world seem unreal or at least lacking in reality. Thus we discover at the end of The Great Divorce that Hell is only a crack even in the ground of ordinary reality and a mere speck in Heaven (reality). In other books he gives the numinous other names. In Surprised by Joy (1955) he calls it joy, and traces the effect that such experiences have had on him from an early age, as when his brother gave him a toy garden when he was six, through to his “certainty that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” in 1931.

In one way or another, the influence is always there. So it is hardly surprising when only a year before he dies, Lewis lists The Idea of the Holy among the ten books that have influenced him most in his vocational attitude and philosophy of life.3

My special interest in this paper, however, is in Lewis’s experience and descriptions of the numinous during his relationship with Joy Davidman (1915-1960). I found an obscure but relevant passage in Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. In “Appendix V” at the back of the book Otto has a fascinating final paragraph. Almost as an afterthought, almost as if he realizes that he just happened to think of one subject that he has forgotten until now and now has only time to mention briefly, Otto speaks of the Holy in the depths of human personality itself.

So far we have spoken of the personal and supra-personal as applied to the supreme, spiritual Being. But what is true here is no less true of that which was created in its image, our own human soul or spirit. In us, too, all that we call person and personal, indeed all that we can know or name in ourselves at all, is but one element in the whole. Beneath it lies, even in us, that ‘wholly other’, whose profundities, impenetrable to any concept, can be grasped in the numinous self- feeling by one who has experience of the deeper life. 4

I am not claiming that Lewis made conscious and deliberate use of this passage, but I believe at the very least that during the period of his life and work that is the focus of this paper, his course runs parallel to Otto’s. Lewis surely picks up where Otto leaves off.

In the passage quoted above, Otto shifts from the way that the numinous can be found in the world of nature to the way it can be found in human beings. I find a similar shift in Lewis from the joy that he finds in the toy garden his brother gives him as a child to the joy of “all that we call person and personal” that he finds in Joy Davidman. Hence the title of this paper: “From joy to Joy”.

Fortunately for Lewis, he does not wait as long in his life story as Otto does in his book to get to it. While many of Lewis’s commentators have been far more interested with his earlier years, perhaps because I am getting older myself, I am more interested in his later ones, i.e., those involving Joy Davidman. It is as if he, like Otto, realizes on meeting her that he, too, has forgotten something. His time with Joy is cut short by her death. But he still has a lot more time and space to write than Otto has in that short paragraph.

First a brief chronology of their relationship: Joy was an American poet who first became acquainted with Lewis by way of his works. She credited them with a major role in her conversion to Christianity in 1948. Lewis received the first letter from her on January 10, 1950 when she was 34 and he was 51, and they corresponded several times during the next two years. They actually met for the first time when she was in England on September 24, 1952. Their relationship deepened in the next few months and they became at the least very good friends.

She moved to England with her two sons as her marriage to an aspiring young American novelist, William Gresham, was disintegrating, due mostly to his alcoholism and womanizing. He wrote, asking Joy for a divorce in order to marry her cousin. She agreed. She was married to Lewis in a civil ceremony at the Registry Office on April 23, 1956, ostensibly so that she could remain in England as a British citizen. Her cancer was diagnosed on October 19, 1956. They were married “before God” in Winfield-Morris Hospital on March 21, 1957. After a long remission and an exceptionally happy married life with Lewis, she died on July 13, 1960. Lewis himself died on November 22, 1963.

From the very beginning Joy is described by Lewis and by his friends as being rather unconventional. Many of Lewis’s friends plainly do not like her because they find her to be blunt, crude, and overbearing. They obviously prefer to live in a more comfortable and orderly world. What they find objectionable, however, Lewis finds fascinating.

Not that either he or his friends know quite what to make of her. Perhaps it is because she embodies what Otto calls the “cruder” (primitive) phase of religious development, feeding as it does from “the early stages of mythic and daemonic experience.”5 Otto describes such experiences as “abrupt, capricious, and desultory.” 6 Perhaps it is her “American” temperament. In any case, although she often gives him a hard time, Lewis keeps coming back for more.

She is forever “challenging” him as some would say today. She has a wonderful way of catching him off guard, confounding him, and transporting him in dramatic and surprising fashion into a world beyond the rational. She is clearly all of the following to him: amazing, astonishing, exciting, fascinating, uncanny, ravishing, unpredictable, forceful, majestic, miraculous, awesome, powerful, and mysterious. (In case you haven’t noticed, these are the same words that I used earlier to characterise the numinous.)

She certainly transports him into the world of “non-ordinary reality”. Earlier she had found his works magical, leading her from atheism and communism to another world, that of Christian faith. Now she can return the favor and lead him to another world as well. Lewis had, of course, been converted long before he met Joy, but she clearly introduces him to a deeper experience and understanding of both romance and even faith itself than he had experienced before.

Otto himself comments on romance as analogous to religious experience when it transports the lover into a mysterious world beyond rationality.

Whatever falls within the sphere of the erotic is therefore always a composite product, made up of two factors: the one something that occurs also in the general sphere of human behaviour as the mood of poetic inspiration or joyful exaltation, and the like; and the other an infusion of a quite special kind, which is not to be classed with these, and of which no one can have any inkling, let alone understand it, who has not learnt from the actual inward experience of eros or love.7

For both Jack (Lewis’s nickname) and Joy this experience reaches into the depths of their religious experience. Their relationship is a powerful agent that helps to shape both of them into the very persons that they become “before God” in their years together.

Typical of Lewis’s experiences of joy in his early life is the experience I mentioned earlier when his brother Warnie brings him a toy garden.

That was the first beauty I ever knew. What a real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature–not indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.8

What better words than “cool, dewy, fresh, and exuberant” could describe Joy herself? But Joy is no toy garden for Lewis, although some of his friends are certainly inclined to think so, at least at first. Even Lewis himself does not seem to realize that he has just been hit by a formerly atheist-communist, presently Jewish-Christian truck. But bewilderment is a common initial response to the Holy. Lewis is definitely bewildered. He claims for a long time even to his closest friends that he has no romantic or sexual interest in her.

God alone knows how much of the delay in his public announcement that he is deeply in love with her is conscious and how much is unconscious. He is obviously embarrassed by the fact that when he first meets her, she is a married woman. Even when she is divorced, he knows that the Church of England will not be likely to grant them permission to marry because (at that time) the Church of England does not recognize divorce. Most of his friends do not like her anyway and would be shocked at the idea that they would marry.

But despite all of this, it becomes obvious in the months ahead that Lewis has traded his toy garden for a real human being, that joy has become Joy. Even in Surprised by Joy (1955), the autobiography of his early years published in the early days of his relationship to Joy, one cannot resist the temptation to conclude that the title is an indirect testimonial to her. But for the most part she remains “behind a veil.”

In Till We Have Faces (1956) Joy’s importance to him becomes obvious. Lewis has been bereft of inspiration to write for some time when he and Joy begin talking about his frustrated efforts over the years to retell the Cupid and Psyche myth. Their conversation becomes animated, inspiration returns, and she takes an active role in the writing of what some (myself included) consider to be his finest book. Lewis himself says that her suggestions are invaluable. Small wonder that he dedicates the book to her, acknowledging her before God and everybody.

It is more than a polite dedication to a friend. She not only helps to write the book. She is in it. At times it is difficult to tell whether she or Lewis is Orual. But it is in the character of Orual that we discover the truth that Otto describes in that last paragraph of “Appendix V” of The Idea of the Holy. As Orual says in Till We Have Faces:

I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 9

When does joy (Joy) begin to have a face for Lewis? The answer is somewhere in the vicinity of now as he writes Till We Have Faces. Orual has spent her life supposedly loving her half-sister, Psyche, who has been left for dead, chained to a tree in the wilderness as a sacrifice to the Gods. Orual discovers later that Psyche is still alive and living in the forest but believes her to be quite mad, caught up in what Orual takes to be a fantasy world that Psyche has projected in her mind.

But Lewis stands Freud on his head. The one who blames others for projecting is the real projector. The supposed projection, on the other hand, is real. In the end Orual discovers that the sister she has supposedly loved and understood is a projection, a figment of her imagination, someone she has created in order to possess and control. She finally meets the real Psyche in all her otherness.

I stood up then; all wet with a kind of tears that do not flow in this country. She stood before me, holding out something for me to take. Now I knew that she was a goddess indeed. Her hands burned me (a painless burning) when they met mine. The air that came from her clothes and limbs and hair was wild and sweet; youth seemed to come into my breast as I breathed it…. 10

Is it going too far to imagine that Lewis has similar feelings when he falls in love with Joy? A moment later Orual continues:

For all that had then but flashed out in a glance or a gesture, all that one meant most when one spoke her name, was now wholly present, not to be gathered up from hints nor in shreds, not some of it in one moment and some in another. Goddess? I had never seen a real woman before.

“Did I not tell you, Maia,” she said, “that a day was coming when you and I would meet in my house and no cloud between us?” 11

Finding parallels between an author and her/his works can be a dangerous activity since any work of art is more than self-expression. Art becomes art within the minds and lives of its audience. But Lewis’s life as well as his art have surely become parts of ours, as the popularity of Lewis’s autobiographies and the many biographies about him have shown. His life as well as his works seem to melt into ours. For me that may be more true than for most because my wife Bonnie, who, like Joy, suffers from a chronic and progressive illness, has had an effect on me from the very beginning of our relationship that (if I myself do not project) is similar to the effect that Joy has on Jack.

Till We Have Faces is published in 1956, the same year as Jack and Joy are married in a civil ceremony. Nominally, the ceremony takes place simply as a way for Joy to remain in England and have British citizenship. But they have already entered a new and deeper stage of their relationship. She is becoming more and more real to him.

And as Psyche becomes real to Orual, so does God. Orual has had a complaint to the gods concerning what she considers to be their injustices concerning her own ugliness and the supposed loss of Psyche. It infuriates her that the gods do not answer her complaints at the end of Book I. But when she has the long awaited chance to make her complaints to the gods directly, the complaints become increasingly meaningless even to her as she makes them. She comes to an interesting conclusion as she nears the end of Book II:

I ended my first book with the words No answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.”12

What clearer embodiment of Otto’s final paragraph of Appendix V could we ask for?

Then comes the greatest challenge that both Jack and Joy have to face. On October 19, 1956, Joy trips on a phone cord and falls to the floor, shattering her left femur. This leads to her hospitalization and diagnosis of cancer that probably began in her right breast and had metastasized. On March 21, 1957 Jack and Joy are married in Wingfield-Morris Hospital by Rev. Peter Bide, who also performs a healing service for Joy who is believed to be dying. In April she moves into the Kilns, Lewis’s home near Oxford, and (as usual) she surprises everyone. She steadily and mysteriously improves. By December she is able to walk again. By June of 1958 her cancer is diagnosed as arrested. She renovates the Kilns, which had fallen into disrepair at the hands of the two bachelor brothers. (She remarks at one point that the many bookcases and books are the only thing holding the house upright.) They take vacations. With her two sons they lead a relatively normal married life. Jack describes this time as the happiest years of his life.

Perhaps the clearest testimonial to this happiness is The Four Loves (1960), a reworking of tapes that he had completed in 1958 for the Episcopal Church Broadcasting System in America. The four loves are Affection (Storge in Greek), Friendship (Philia), Erotic Love (Eros), and Charity (Agape). He obviously believes that his relationship with Joy is an embodiment of all four.

The first is Affection, the “humblest and the most widely diffused of loves in which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals” as in a mother nursing her baby, whether a human being, a cat, or a dog. It can stand by itself in either the human or the animal world, but in the human world it can be an ingredient in the “mixed drink” that any particular expression of love can be. The second is Friendship, the least “natural” of the loves in that it is less instinctive and more rational. It is the sharing of a vision, a “standing together” in an immense solitude. The third is Erotic Love, what we usually think of as “being in love”. It is when we want a particular person, at its best as Lewis puts it, a playful reminder that we are both angels and tom-cats.

The fourth kind of love is Charity. In his description of Charity he turns to descriptions that are reminiscent of Otto’s definition of the numinous.

The natural loves [the first three] are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first vaguely described as “decency and common sense”, but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of the mere feeling if the feeling is to be sweet.”13

He is quick to point out that all three of the natural loves are beautiful and good in themselves, and uses the analogy of a garden to say that without the flowers the garden is not a garden, and yet a garden needs gardening. It needs someone who can plant and shape and prune and weed. Thus, still using the imagery of a garden, he extends and deepens his experience of joy in the toy garden when he was six to his experience of Joy in the interpersonal garden he discovers as he nears sixty. Aging can have its pleasures.

He goes on to describe Charity as the kind of love that can deal with both vulnerability and suffering. Charity realizes that to love at all is to be vulnerable. But Charity finds the solution to the problem of suffering not by avoiding it but acknowledging it, experiencing it, and offering it to God. He uses the Biblical illustration of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem as an example. He will soon enough have an example of his own.

Joy’s cancer returns in October of l959. Although they are able to take a vacation in Greece in April of 1960, Joy’s health is obviously deteriorating. She is hospitalized in June, but again she surprises everyone, even if this time it is only momentarily. She rallies and is able to return home to the Kilns. However, she is rehospitalized and dies on July 13, 1960.

A Grief Observed (1961) is a moving account of Jack’s effort to deal with her death. It is first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, not so much that he wants their relationship to remain a secret now as it is that he doesn’t want the book to result in an unwanted outpouring of public sympathy to him personally. Despite this, some send him the book not knowing that he wrote it but hoping that it will be of help to him in dealing with his grief. Thanks to an associate of his who recognizes Lewis’s style in the book, T.S. Eliot is one of the few who realize at the time of its publication who the real author is.

In the book the author eulogizes “H.” (for Helen, Joy’s first name) in words that are again reminiscent of Rudolf Otto (and William Blake for that matter):

Her mind as lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard, that passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff or cant or slush: then sprang and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. 14

For the reader the book itself becomes a leopard, leaping off the page at the reader with a power that goes far beyond his much earlier book, The Problem of Pain (1940).

There Lewis warns the reader that he is not speaking about pain from experience, that he is actually something of a coward concerning pain personally. “I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable.”15 He goes on to say that he is convinced that pain is to be borne, that a little courage helps more than such knowledge. But he does not venture very far into the world of his own experience. He says nothing, for example, of the death of his mother when he was a child.

He does not contradict what he says in The Problem of Pain in A Grief Observed, but he is now experiencing what he is writing about, and in doing so he shows us that he is no longer “a great coward”. The book is an embodiment of Joy and his relationship with her as he moves from the role of an insightful academic to what Otto describes as a prophet:

It is by His “life” that this God [the God of Isaiah] is differentiated from all mere “world reason”, and becomes this ultimately non-rational essence, that eludes all philosophic treatment. This is the God that lives in the consciousness of all prophets and apostles of the Old and New Dispensation alike.16

Lewis stated in The Problem of Pain that:

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.17

With Joy’s illness and death, the megaphone goes off. At first all he can do is to pour out his grief. He realizes that pain is a process and resolution cannot be reached prematurely. But toward the end of the book he returns once more to the image of a garden as he corrects his earlier descriptions of what she is like:

I ought to have said “But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.”

And then, of her, and of every created thing I praise, I should say

“In some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.”

Thus up from the garden to the Gardener…. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.18

He realizes again that there are different kinds of reality, that there is life and there is life, that there is beauty and there is beauty, that there is reality and there is reality.

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to: you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still after she is dead.19

An image or a memory is a fixed and static, a lifeless thing. It is more than her memory that he loves. It is her “foursquare and independent reality” [italics mine].

Once very near the end I said, “If you can–if it is allowed–come to me when I too am on my death bed.” “Allowed!” she said “Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.” She knew she was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy in it. There was a twinkling as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed through her.”20

Lewis had an understandable fear of the maudlin, as in those spiritualist channels on television (that most of us have come neither to love nor to adore), but he realizes that reality is beyond the material world as we usually observe it. He reports a strange experience of her presence after her death.

I said, several notebooks ago, that even if I got what seemed like an assurance of [Joy’s] presence, I wouldn’t believe it. Easier said than done. Even now, though, I won’t treat anything of that sort as evidence. It’s the quality of last night’s experience, not what it proves but what makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own. Mind, not “soul” as we tend to think of soul. Certainly the reverse of what is called “soulful”. Not at all like a rapturous re-union of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement. Not that there was any “message”–just intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so–well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the senses or the emotions at all.21

Which of the two, life or death, is more real, more powerful, more meaningful? Which of these two really has the last word? Such things are not easy to put in clear and rational, much less materialistic, terms. So what kind of vocabulary does this leave us? Both Otto and Lewis would agree that we are once again in the world of the numinous, of a different kind of reality.

The Shadowlands film may leave some things to be desired. But whether or not Joy ever in fact used exactly those words, both Otto and Lewis would, I think, like the way she says it in those moments in the Golden Valley under the shelter with the rain falling outside. There she insists concerning her death that “the sadness then is part of the happiness now.” It is all a question of reality.

It is perhaps forgivable if I add my own appendix. I myself just happen to think of one subject that I have forgotten until now and now have only time to mention briefly. I cannot resist a final comment about physician assisted suicide, a current social policy issue at Discovery Institute, one of the co-sponsors of this conference. Joy had a long and lingering illness that included an incredible amount of physical pain and the realization that she was going to die. Death seemed immanent three years before she actually died, but she had a miraculous recovery, what today we would usually call a remission.

The cancer eventually recurred, and the pain escalated. But she refused to simply lie down and die. As reported by Brian Sibley, she did tell her physician as she returned to the hospital on June 16 to “Finish me off quick. I won’t have another operation.”22 But he did not do that, and again she surprised everyone. She rallied and was able to return home. But this time it was a momentary respite, only a few days. She was admitted to Radcliffe Infirmary, where she died on July 13, 1960. Her last conversations with Jack were deep and emotional ones, as described in A Grief Observed. “Death with dignity” is an easy phrase to bandy about, but not all that many people really do it that way. So far as I can tell, Joy Davidman Lewis did, and it was without physician assisted suicide.

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NOTES

1 The Problem of Pain (1940) Geoffrey Bles, London, p.81

2 The Problem of Pain, p.85

3 The Christian Century, June 6, 1962.

4 Otto, Rudolf. (1985) The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, New York, p.203.

5 Otto, p.132.

6 Otto, p.133.

7 Otto, p.46.

8 Surprised by Joy (1955) 1997 ed. by Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, p.7.

9 Till We Have Faces (1956) Harcourt Brace and Company, p.294.

10 Till We Have Faces, p.306.

11 Till We Have Faces, p.306.

12 Till We Have Faces, p.308.

13 The Four Loves, p.163.

14 A Grief Observed (1961). Seabury Press, New York, p.8.

15 The Problem of Pain, p.vii.

16 The Idea of the Holy, p.76.

17 The Problem of Pain, p,81.

18 A Grief Observed, p.50.

19 A Grief Observed, p.52.

20 A Grief Observed, p.59.

21 A Grief Observed, pp.57-58.

22 Sibley, Brian. Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, Hodder and Stoughton, London, p.140.