Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper
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was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1945-68.
107 Henry Habberley Price (1899-1984), philosopher, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics in 1921. In 1924 he was elected a Fellow and lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford, where he remained until 1935. In that year he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic and moved to New College where he remained until his retirement in 1959. He was a frequent speaker at the Socratic Club. See his biography in the Oxford DNB.
108 i.e., an admirer of Jean-Paul Sartre.
109 Francis Joseph ‘Frank’ Sheed (1897-1981), publisher and author, was born in Sydney, Australia, and read law at Sydney University, taking his BA in 1917. In 1920 he went to London where he came across the recently formed Catholic Evidence Guild, devoted to out-of-doors speaking to explain the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He was bowled over by the excitement of the Guild’s task, and he joined. There he met Mary ‘Maisie’ Josephine Ward (1889-1975), and they were married in 1926. That same year Frank and Maisie founded a publishing firm, Sheed and Ward. In 1933 they opened an office in New York, through which Sheed and Ward became the most influential Catholic publisher in the English-speaking world. Maisie died on 28 January 1975 and Frank on 20 November 1981.
110 Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), cultural historian, was born at Hay, Brecknockshire, on 12 October 1889 and educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, taking his degree in 1911. He had sufficient means to be able to follow his own highly original path of historical research and reflection. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was the result of fourteeen years of research. His second, Progress and Religion (1929), articulated the major theme of his subsequent writings, that religion is the dynamic of all social culture. The Making of Europe (1932) discussed a specific case of this, showing that the ‘dark ages’ were in fact the most creative period in the culture of the Western world. Dawson developed the topic further in his Gifford Lectures for Edinburgh University, Religion and Culture (1948), about which Lewis wrote to him on 27 September 1948 (see Supplement). Dawson became a Roman Catholic shortly after going down from Oxford and was an influential member of the group of writers which formed around the Catholic publishing house of Sheed and Ward. Dawson’s achievements were mainly overlooked by the academic world. He was eventually offered a chair in the United States at Harvard where he was Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, 1958-62. He died on 25 May 1970.
111 Henry Fitzgerald Heard (1889-1971), science writer and philosopher, was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, after which he lectured for Oxford University’s extra-mural studies programme, 1926-9. He took a strong interest in developments in the sciences and his The Ascent of Humanity (1929) marked his first foray into public acclaim. He served as a science and current affairs commentator for the BBC, 1930-4. In 1937 he moved to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, to accept the chair of Historical Anthropology at Duke University. His most famous book, The Five Ages of Man, was published in 1963. He died on 14 August 1971.
112 Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963), English novelist, won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where in 1916 he took a First in English. His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), was followed by others satirizing contemporary society through characters who flout convention. While in Italy he wrote Brave New World (1932). His move to California in 1937 coincided with a move away from his ‘philosophy of meaninglessness’ to something more transcendental and mystical. The books that followed, such as Brave New World Revisited (1958), spelt out the temptations presented by life in the modern world with its materialist values and dangerous technological advances. Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Lewis–22 November 1963.
113 This was probably Fr John Philip Gleeson, who took a B. Litt. from Campion Hall in 1951.
114 Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001), philosopher, was born on 18 March 1919 at Glanmire, North Strand, Limerick. Her conversion to Catholicism as a teenager led to a lifelong interest in philosophy. She was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she took a First in Greats in 1941. The following year she moved to Cambridge where, as a research student, she became the pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1936 she returned to Oxford as a Research Fellow at Somerville College. She was a Fellow of Somerville, 1964-70, and Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, 1970-86. She died on 5 January 2001. On her debate with Lewis about Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Bles, 1947) see her biography in CG.
115 Colin Hardie, one of the Inklings, was Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.
116 New Testament.
117 The Rev. Dr Austin Farrer was Chaplain and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. See Austin and Katherine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.
118 Basil Mitchell (1917–), philosopher, was educated at the Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took a BA in 1939. He was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Keble College, Oxford, 1947-67, and Nolloth Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Oxford University, 1968-84. An active member of the Socratic Club, he followed Lewis as its president in 1955.
119 Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89), Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, 1959-78, was a proponent of logical positivism, and the author of Language, Truth and Logic (1936).
120 On 2 February 1948 Elizabeth Anscombe gave a paper to the Socratic Club on Lewis’s Miracles entitled ‘A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’. It was published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 (1948) and is reprinted in her Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981). Anscombe’s argument concerned the nature of causation, one of its crucial points being that Lewis should have distinguished in chapter 3 of Miracles between ‘irrational causes’ and ‘non-rational causes’. Lewis accepted that he might have made his argument clearer and this he attempted to do by revising chapter 3 for the Fontana paperback of Miracles. See the letters to Jocelyn Gibb of 11 July and 8 August 1959.
121 Professor Dorothy Emmet (1904-2000), philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, 1946-66.
122 lili had become engaged to the writer Clement Freud, and their engagement was announced in The Timer. ‘Clement Raphael third son of Ernst and Lucie Freud of St Johns Wood London to June Beatrice second daughter of H. W. Flewett M.A. and Mrs Flewett of Gipsy Lane London SW15.’
123 This note was added later in Lewis’s hand, lili sent him a copy of the Wilton Diptych, the full title of which is Richard II Presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund. The diptych