Notes
1 See especially Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984), pp. 217-22.
2 Clearly much more needs to be said to render this notion precise, and much has been said in the Philosophy of Mind about mental content and ‘intentional objects’. (The ‘contemplated object’ of Alexander corresponds roughly to the ‘intentional object’ of Husserl; I have used Alexander’s terms because they are the terms with which Lewis was working.) It is an important question what we should say about the case in which the contemplated object does not exist, perhaps chiefly because it bears on the question what we should say if the contemplated object does exist. Should we count the mental representation of the existing object as the contemplated object, even in the case where that representation does correspond to, and perhaps is produced by, an object in the external world (as we seem forced to do in the case where the contemplated object does not exist)? The question is too large to be settled here, and I will go no further in examining it in the present paper. I will use the expedient of assuming that a contemplated object may or may not exist and that when it does exist, the object itself, and not its mental representation, is rightly called ‘the contemplated object’; but the reader should not take this assumption-for-the-sake-of-argument to have settled the issue.
3 It follows that the “is external to” relation is symmetric. This relation has not to do with spatial enclosure; the “is external to” relation in “the fridge is external to the beer” is not symmetric. It has to do, rather, with independence of identity.
4 The stated principle could not be made precise without saying whether a part of my body is external to me. Interesting as that discussion would be, I must pass it up in the present paper. A physicalist will, of course, contend that my body is part of me (is indeed an improper part of me). Many dualists will deny that my body is a part of me; many dualists will not. My sympathies are with the latter kind of dualist. But as I am unsure what Lewis, Chesterton, and Tolkien would have said on the issue, I leave it open in this paper.
5 A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), ch. XI, p. 72.
6 A being might be promoted or demoted in the order, but only in a way that maintains the order (e.g. a higher being might promote a lower being from one position to another, but only so long as the first being has authority to grant the latter position).
7 “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1980), p. 5.
8 The Four Loves, (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), p. 5.
9 “Weight of Glory”, p. 15.
10 Ibid., p. 13.
11 Till We have Faces: A Myth Retold (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1984), p. 308.
12 “Weight of Glory”, p. 12.
13 Four Loves, p. 3.
14 Ibid., p. 169. It might also be noticed on this head that in Mere Christianity Lewis contends that God created free creatures because freedom is a necessary condition for love, and love is a necessary condition for “infinite happiness”. See Mere Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), bk. IV, ch. 6, p. 159: “…mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.”
15 The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1942), p. 25.
16 Ibid., p. 122.
17 Ibid., p. 69.
18 Mere Christianity, bk. IV, ch. 11, p. 191.
19 Ibid.
20 Mere Christianity, bk. III, ch. 12, p. 129-30
21 Preface to Paradise Lost, ch. I, p. 3; Mere Christianity, p. 191; The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945), p. 74.
22 Surprised by Joy, pp. 165-69; 217-22.
23 The Screwtape Letters, p. 35.
24 St. Thomas Aquinas (Suffolk: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1943), p. 85.
25 Ibid., p. 146.
26 Ibid., p. 147.
27 Orthodoxy, in Heretics/Orthodoxy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), p. 283.
28 Ibid., p. 285.
29 Ibid., p. 232.
30 Heretics, in Heretics/Orthodoxy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), p. 66.
31 Ibid., p. 67.
32 Orthodoxy, p. 233.
33 “On Fairy Stories,” , p. 20.
34 Ibid., p. 20. Incidentally, Tolkien also prescribes Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy, which presents familiar objects from a new angle (like the word “coffee-room” from the inside of a glass door).
35 Ibid., p. 19.
36 Ibid., p. 20.
37 Ibid., p. 22.
38 The Lord of the Rings, Part Three: The Return of the King. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 220.
Works Cited
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