C.S. Lewis at Magdalen College

Looking for an academic position in Oxford, the twenty-six-year-old C.S. Lewis applies for a fellowship in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College in April 1925. Since he could teach both English and philosophy, it turns out that he is the preferred candidate, and he is elected on 20 May 1925. His appointment carries both tutorial duties and a requirement to give lectures to the broader student body. From 1925 onwards, Lewis works as a tutor and lecturer in English and philosophy in Oxford’s English School. During his years at Magdalen, he gives numerous tutorials. Once a student has passed a preliminary examination, he works entirely in his own specialised field. In most studies, a student’s basic responsibility is to visit his assigned tutor for a tutorial once a week. A tutorial is an hour-long meeting focusing on discussing an individual student’s essay. The pupil reads an essay aloud, with the tutor interrupting to challenge, correct, or extend the discussion of a particular point. A successful tutorial comprises a debate between the tutor and pupil, proposing and considering different viewpoints and perspectives. At the end of the tutorial, the tutor assigns the essay for the next week.

Rooms

Magdalen College is founded in 1458 by William of Waynflete (1398–1486), Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England. It is named after St Mary Magdalene and becomes quickly one of Oxford’s most prominent colleges. On taking up his fellowship, C.S. Lewis is allocated three rooms on the first floor of Staircase 3 of the New Building, constructed in the 1730s. These rooms, which are not open to the public today, look north out over the Grove, where the college’s deers herd has grazed since the eighteenth century, and south to the Great Tower.

Chapel

Following his conversion to a belief in God in June 1930, C.S. Lewis begins to attend daily services in the college chapel. He remains a regular worshipper throughout the remainder of his time at Magdalen College. He commits to attend the 8.00 a.m. service every day during term time. On Sunday 8 June 1941, Lewis delivers his sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’ at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. After his death on 22 November 1963, a memorial service for C.S. Lewis is hold in the chapel of Magdalen College on 7 December 1963. A plaque in memory of Lewis is at the chapel, marking the stall he occupied during services, nearest the altar on the south side. Magdalen College owns a bronze bust of C.S. Lewis sculpted by Faith Tolkien, daughter-in-law of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).

Kolbítar

During his time at Magdalen College, C.S. Lewis participates in several societies for college teachers or undergraduates, where papers on philosophy and literature are read and discussed. In 1927, Lewis becomes a member of an Old Icelandic reading group called Kolbítar, which means ‘men who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal’. The society is founded in 1926 by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, to read the Icelandic sagas and myths in the original Old Icelandic or Old Norse. When Tolkien becomes a professor in 1925, he introduces a class in Old Icelandic texts because he feels that Old Icelandic deserves a prominent place among early and medieval studies. At the same time, he establishes the Kolbítar. The original members, all college teachers, can read Old Icelandic, but they soon are joined by a few who cannot, like Lewis. He is enthralled to learn to read Norse mythology in the original. Realising a childhood dream allows him to revisit some of the early brushes of northernness that shaped his youth.

The Allegory of Love

As a fellow in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, C.S. Lewis publishes several scholarly works. In 1925, Lewis’s former tutor, Frank Perry Wilson (1889–1963), suggests that he writes a book on certain aspects of medieval thought. Lewis starts writing in 1927 and works intensively on it between 1933 and 1935. In this work of literary criticism and history, he makes little-known medieval literature significant. The book is published in May 1936 as The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition. In March 1939, Lewis publishes a collection of essays on literary and linguistic subjects, with some interesting reflections on the curriculum of the Oxford English School under the title Rehabilitations. And other essays.

The Personal Heresy

In April 1939, C.S. Lewis publishes the book The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. It offers six essays on literary criticism between Lewis and Eustace Tillyard (1889–1962), a fellow in English at Jesus College in Oxford. On 13 May 1929, Lewis reads a paper on ‘The Personal Heresy’ at the Michaelmas Club, an undergraduate discussion group whose members read papers on philosophy and literature. In his paper, Lewis discusses what he considers the mistaken view that all poetry expresses the poet’s personality. According to Lewis, all criticism should be of books, not of authors. The critic’s role is neither to reconstruct the poet’s psyche between the poem’s lines nor to deconstruct the poem as a concealed biography. The critic’s role is to help the reader see with even greater clarity the world depicted in and through the poem that the poet has intentionally composed. With this, Lewis opposes Tillyard, who believes that poetry is first and foremost the expression of the poet’s personality and shows the author’s state of mind when writing. Lewis’s paper becomes the basis of a debate with Tillyard in a series of articles published in the Essays and Studies journal between 1934 and 1937, eventually collected and published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy in 1939.

A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’

Since the 1930s, C.S. Lewis has been developing an original approach to the epic poem Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton (1608–1674). It involves both an exposition of its theology and an explication of the epic poem’s style and form. Lewis reads Paradise Lost for the first time when nine years old. A deep and abiding love for Milton begins during 1914–1917 when he is a pupil of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921). As a fellow of Magdalen College, Lewis lectures in the English School primarily about medieval and Renaissance literature. Still, Milton remains one of his favourite poets, and he gives some lectures on him. In March 1941, Lewis is invited by the University College of North Wales in Bangor to deliver that year’s Ballard Mathews Lectures. On the successive evenings of 1–3 December 1941, he gives three lectures on Milton’s Paradise Lost. In October 1942, the revised and expanded lectures are published as the book A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’.

The Abolition of Man

In 1942, C.S. Lewis studies the ethics of religions other than Christianity. He also investigates the secular ethics of various philosophical systems. His students make him aware that school textbooks assume and take for granted the subjective nature of all literary and moral values. Lewis is appalled and devotes three Ridell Memorial Lectures at Durham University to this. On the successive evenings of 24–26 February 1943, he argues for the objectivity of values and the natural law. Lewis’s lectures reflect his conviction that if scientists ever succeed in their purpose to dominate nature, man will be abolished. According to Lewis, an honest study of different cultures indicates the existence of an objective universal moral law that transcends time and culture, which he calls The Tao, a concept he derives from East Asian philosophy. For Lewis, those who deny the validity of moral judgments are usually self-contradictory because they cannot escape making moral judgments themselves. When people no longer believe in any objective truth, there is no constraint on what they might do to reshape society in their own image. This mentality is the wellspring of tyranny. In January 1943, Lewis’s lectures are published as The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The book is not well received at first, but over time it proves to be a prophetic work, for the moral subjectivism that Lewis predicts has come to pass with a vengeance in the Western world.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama

In 1951, Magdalen College gives C.S. Lewis a year off from college duties to complete his most ambitious scholarly work: a history of English literature from the sixteenth century. In 1935, the delegates of Oxford University Press conceive the idea of the Oxford History of English Literature. It is considered a series of twelve volumes, each of which will be a single author’s work. In June 1935, Lewis is asked to write Volume 3 on the sixteenth century and agrees. He writes much of the book by the time he gives The Clark Lectures in April and May 1944. Lewis then delivers four lectures entitled ‘Studies in Sixteenth-Century Literature’ at Trinity College in Cambridge. In 1952, the first draft of Lewis’s book is completed. Revisions, bibliography, and chronological tables take another year, and in September 1954, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, is published. In 1990, several of the names of the original works in the series are changed. Lewis’s volume is given the new title Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century.

Vice president

On 6 November 1940, C.S. Lewis is nominated, elected, and admitted to the vice presidency of Magdalen College. However, it is not a success because of his ineptitude as an administrator. On 5 November 1941, Lewis is nominated for a second year, but the admission procedure, in which he would be sworn in as a vice president, is postponed. In December, historian Kenneth McFarlane (1903–1966) is nominated and admitted to the vice presidency because Lewis has decided not to continue in the role because of other obligations that prevent him from carrying out the office’s duties.

From Oxford to Cambridge

By the early 1950s, C.S. Lewis has been a fellow at Magdalen College for almost thirty years. The tutorial system’s heavy demands are beginning to take their toll, but prospects for advancement are few. In 1945, J.R.R. Tolkien is elected to one of two chairs of English Language and Literature at Merton College, but his plan to have Lewis installed in the other is never fulfilled. Instead, the post is offered to Lewis’s former tutor, Frank Perry Wilson. Another disappointment comes in 1951, when Lewis is proposed as a candidate for Professor of Poetry but not elected. He lacks the ambition and desire to engage in the politics required by such advancement. Besides, his wholehearted commitment to Christianity does not always increase his popularity and status at the University of Oxford. It has become a convention that one’s religion is a private matter. However, Lewis’s preference to discuss any subject from a Christian point of view makes some university members uncomfortable and others downright hostile. Therefore, Lewis comes to feel increasingly isolated at Magdalen College. In addition, the nature of the English faculty at Oxford University is changing, including more modern authors in the reading curriculum, which Lewis resists. Thus, despite his important scholarly work, there is little hope that Lewis will ever gain a professorship in Oxford.

Cambridge University is less sceptical about C.S. Lewis’s religious popularity. On 18 January 1954, Cambridge University states its need for a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, hoping 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 and becomes a professor at Magdalene College in Cambridge.

Read more about Magdalen College


Sources

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