C.S. Lewis at Cambridge University

C.S. Lewis becomes a Fellow of Magdalene College when appointed Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. For years, Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and others hope that Lewis will become a professor in Oxford. Despite his important scholarly work, there is little hope that Lewis will ever gain a professorship in Oxford, probably because of disapproval among some of the English faculty members of Lewis’s Christian apologetics. They dislike the idea of a professor of English literature gaining fame as an amateur theologian. At the same time, Lewis is increasingly burdened by difficulties at Magdalen College. The time commitment that his tutorial work involves keeps him from writing. In addition, the nature of the English faculty at Oxford University is changing, including more modern authors in the reading curriculum, which Lewis resists.

Cambridge University is less sceptical about Lewis’s religious popularity. On 18 January 1954, Cambridge University states its need for a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, hoping C.S. Lewis would hold it. Although he does not apply, Lewis is elected to the new Chair in May 1954. Initially, he is reluctant to take the position, due to his ties to Oxford. He cannot sell The Kilns, his Oxford home, to move to Cambridge. His friends then suggest that he will live in Cambridge during the week and travel back to Oxford at weekends. Lewis agrees, and on 4 June 1954, he accepts the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. On 29 November 1954, his fifty-sixth birthday, he delivers his inaugural address, entitled “De Descriptione Temporum”, which means: about describing the times.

On 1 January 1955, C.S. Lewis moves to his new quarters above the Parlour and Old Library of Magdalene College. These rooms are in the ‘North Range’ of First Court, the oldest part of the College (where you now enter the College from the street), on the second floor of Staircase 3. Lewis begins his duties as a professor, which involves occasional lecturing and no tutoring, leaving him much more time to read and write. He usually goes home to The Kilns in Oxford during weekends and holidays. The regular Inklinks meetings in Oxford on Tuesday mornings are moved to Monday to accommodate him.

The Pepys Building, the most important ornament of Magdalene College, is named after the great diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), who gave his library to the College. On the evening of 23 February 1961, C.S. Lewis gives a lecture on Pepys’s birthday.

The Faerie Queene

At Cambridge University, C.S. Lewis gives lectures on the epic poem The Faerie Queene from the British poet Edmund Spencer (1552–1599). Lewis first reads The Faerie Queene between September 1915 and March 1916 as part of his reading program under the tutorship of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in Great Bookham. Lewis rereads the poem many times throughout his life, and lectures on it. He plans to use his lecture notes as the basis for a book, but he dies before he can write it. His former student and later colleague, Alister Fowler (1930–2022), takes Lewis’s notes and amplifies them into a readable and coherent account, as close to Lewis’s views as possible. In 1967, it is published as Spencer’s Images of Life (edited by Alaister Fowler). The book shows how to read The Faerie Queene according to Lewis. The poem should be read as a good story and requires us to empathise with the way of thinking of the time it was written, the time of the Elizabethans. For the reader of The Faerie Queene, the historical is nothing more than a point of departure. The proper interpretive movement is from the real, historical people into the work of art. In Lewis’s view, the poem is not a story or an epic but a pageant of the universe, of nature, of life.

Studies in Words

In September 1960, C.S. Lewis publishes Studies in Words. In this scholarly work, he provides a linguistic study of seven words: nature, sad, wit, free, sense, simple, conscious, and conscience. For each word, Lewis considers its Latin basis and studies how branches of meanings have extended from the main trunk of its earliest form. A key reason for doing this is to warn readers against falling into the trap of reading Medieval and Renaissance words as though they primarily carry the same meaning as today. According to Lewis, the chief danger will not occur when a word’s meaning has obviously changed. The more fundamental problem occurs when the contemporary meaning is close enough to fit, misleading the reader into an understanding of an older passage. In the last chapter of the book, Lewis talks about language in general: what it does, how it describes, and how it wounds. He comments upon the purpose of poetry and about what happens to the emotional content of words as they undergo linguistic shifts.

An Experiment in Criticism

In October 1961, C.S. Lewis publishes An Experiment in Criticism. In this book, he explores the act of literary criticism and the significance of systematic reading, elucidating notions that were often implicit or explored only in his earlier works. In the study of literature, Lewis is opposed to reading commentaries and criticisms before or even instead of the works themselves. He argues for looking at books from the point of view of the reader. Instead of judging our literary taste by what we read, Lewis proposes that we judge literature by how we read it. We must define what constitutes good reading rather than good books. Instead of classifying books, Lewis classifies readers, and how they use and receive books. What a reader gets from reading, is a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of his own psychology rather than its assertion. It is about a desire to get out of himself, and to see through other eyes. According to Lewis, all good reading is to get ourselves out of the way and to encounter fully what an author provides. It is not about what we do with books but what books do with us.

The Discarded Image

In June 1961, C.S. Lewis becomes ill and is diagnosed with a seriously enlarged prostate. Surgery is scheduled, but it turns out that Lewis’s health is not good enough to withstand an operation. He is forbidden to go to work in Cambridge. Therefore, he rests at home in Oxford, where he reads a lot, takes blood transfusions, and puts his papers and lectures in order. From this, he produces what is published posthumously in 1964 as The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The book is based on several series of lectures given by Lewis over many years, some of which he repeats many times. During the first months of 1962, Lewis’s health gradually improves, and on 4 April he returns to Cambridge.

Resignation

In late June 1963, C.S. Lewis feels very weak and needs long periods of rest because he suffers from kidney failure. When admitted to the Acland Nursing Home in Oxford, he suffers a heart attack on 16 July. It seems he is dying, but his condition improves. He returns from the hospital with a nurse at home. Not expecting to live long, Lewis writes a letter of resignation to Cambridge University in August 1963. Shortly before he dies on 22 November 1963, he learns that the Fellows of Magdalene College have elected him an Honorary Fellow.

Visit

The rooms C.S. Lewis occupied at Magdalene College are not open to the public today. You can usually visit the small fifteenth-century chapel where Lewis attended services and preached his last sermon, ‘A Slip of the Tongue’ at Evensong on 29 January 1956. A small plaque with Lewis’s name hangs at the top right of the chapel entrance.


Sources

Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis. Companion & Guide
Jeffrey Schultz & John West, The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia