C.S. Lewis did not write ghost stories, but he lived in a country that celebrated the strange genre. For some bizarre reason, the telling of ghost stories became associated with Christmas Eve. It’s a wonder to me why Lewis didn’t include this impropriety in his brilliant essay on Xmas.
“Christmas Eve was traditionally the time to tell scary stories round the hearth,” opens an article in The Guardian. I had never before associated Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with this bizarre tradition. Nor had I connected it with Amy Grant’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” (Far better the theme of Grant’s Nativity song “Breath of Heaven.”)
I presume I can thank my Scandinavian heritage for the absence of ghost stories in our Christmas season traditions. Mercifully we also avoided the plague of seasonal trolls and gnomes.
One of the most noted of authors of ghost stories had much in common with C.S. Lewis. M.R. James (1862-1936) was a medievalist scholar who taught at Cambridge. In fact, “James came to sharpen his craft – by telling his stories after the Christmas service at King’s College, Cambridge (where he was provost) to an audience of uneasy fellows.” In the same article no less than H.P. Lovecraft himself is cited as describing James as “a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank.”
I suppose it is a sign of his minimal interest in ghost stories that I cannot find any reference to James’ fiction in C.S. Lewis’ writing. Lewis does, however, refer to one of James’ scholarly works, The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses.
In a 1955 letter, Lewis describes how experiencing a relationship with Christ is different than simply knowing about him.
Yes, Jesus Himself, of course: the heart. Not only the God in Him but the historical Man. I don’t know that I ever got much from reading things about Him. Perhaps, in a queer way, I got most from reading the Apocryphal Gospels (The whole Apocryphal N.T. is done in one vol. ed. M.R. James). For there you find things attributed to Him that couldn’t be true. You even find wise & beautiful sayings which nevertheless just don’t ring true. And have you noticed–reading the true sayings in the real Gospels–how hardly one of them could have been guessed in advance?*
References to Ghosts
As befits a person writing over a fifty year period, C.S. Lewis’ comments about ghosts vary. This is emphasized by the change in his worldview which accompanied his conversion from atheism to Christianity.
A 1915 letter to Arthur Greeves reveals Lewis’ affinity for the supernatural. He is describing his reading of “Roots of the Mountains” by William Morris (1834-1896).
Tho’ more ordinary than the [“Well at the World’s End” here and here], it is still utterly different from any novel you ever read. Apart from the quaint and beautiful old English, which means so much to me, the supernatural element, tho’ it does not enter into the plot, yet hovers on the margin all the time: we have ‘the wildwood wherein dwell wights that love not men, to whom the groan of the children of men is as the scrape of a fiddle-bow: there too abide the kelpies, and the ghosts of them that rest not . . .’
In Lewis’ essay “The Novels of Charles Williams,” he describes the uniqueness of Williams’ work.
We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs: on the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts.
The first thing to grasp is that this is not a mixture of two literary kinds . . . Williams is really writing a third kind of book which belongs to neither class and has a different value from either.
He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were, at some point, invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’
In 1939 he wrote to his brother about a play by W.B. Yeats featuring a ghost.
The plays were worth seeing: one, by Yeats [“Purgatory” in Last Poems and Two Plays], his last one, was really powerful: conversation between a tramp and his son outside the ruins of a great house and then the ghost of its last mistress at the window, re-enacting her past life-she being the one who had finally let the whole thing down, marrying a horse-dealer . . . all the usual tragedy of the Irish aristocracy.
Not quite true, of course, because probably most of the preceding generations had been pretty good wasters too: but an effective play.
I have previously explored C.S. Lewis’ actual encounter with Yeats. It was quite odd. In 1921, he had written to his father.
I have been taken recently to see the mighty Yeats. It was the weirdest show you ever saw, and I fear he is a Kod [slang, I believe, for a fraud or a hoaxer]. You sit on hard antique chairs by candlelight in an oriental looking room and listen in silence while the great man talks about magic and ghosts and mystics . . .
What fluttering of the dovecote! It is a pity that the real romance of meeting a man who has written great poetry and who has known William Morris and Tagore and Symons should be so overlaid with the sham romance of flame coloured curtains and mumbo-jumbo.
In 1940 Lewis shared with Warnie his notion that if the seances were real — they had been popular during England’s flirtations with spiritualism — it did not suggest the spirits are particularly bright.
Part of Thursday afternoon I spent with unusual pleasure in the dark, pleasantly smelling, warmth of the old library with a slow dampish snow falling outside-flakes the size of matchboxes. I had gone in to look for something quite different, but became intrigued by the works of Dr Dee [(1527-1608) of Trinity College Cambridge], a mysterious magician and astrologer of Queen Elizabeth’s time.
The interesting thing about this was the fact that it was so uninteresting: I mean that the spirit conversations displayed, so far as I could see from turning over a few pages, just exactly the same fatuity which one observes in those recorded by modern spiritualists. What can be the explanation of this?
I suppose that both are hallucinations resulting from the same kind of mental weakness which, at all periods, produces the same rubbish. One can’t help, however, toying with the hypothesis that they are all real spirits in the case, and that we tap either a ghostly college of buffoons or a ghostly home for imbeciles.
In 1946 he complimented Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), a longtime friend and correspondent. Pitter’s First Poems are available here.
I’m not sure I’ve understood The Bridge as a whole: but I love ‘shapes of sorrow and empty vessels,’ etc. Nice things in Seaborn. The Cygnet comes off as well as things like air-raids can come off in poetry. I don’t mean because they’re modern.
But as a rule, the bigger a thing is, physically the less it works in literature. One ghost is always more disquieting than ten: no good fight in a story can have more than a dozen or so combatants: the death of a million men is less tragic than that of one.
By the way, that final comment will prove of great value to any modern writer!
I’ve accumulated several other Lewisian references to ghosts, so what say we continue this discussion in our next post? In the meantime, perhaps you will care to read some of the linked volumes, or to comment on the odd link between ghost stories and Christmas Eve.
* The Apocrypha Anecdota: A Collection of Thirteen Apocryphal Books and Fragments by Montague Rhodes James is available here. He also wrote The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament: Their Titles and Fragments.
Several of James’ ghost stories are available in these collections: The Five Jars and A Thin Ghost and Others. Dr. Dewi Evans has compiled The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James and made them available in several formats on his website.
Mere Inkling Press 
Intriguing. Did you consider this theme in light of Halloween?
A logical assumption, but no. I dislike nearly everything associated with Halloween, and try not to think about it any more than society forces me to. The rule with our kids (and now their kids) is that they can have any costumes that are not evil (e.g. Freddy Krueger) or occultic (e.g. witches).
The simple fact is that I came across a reference to M.R. James, noting he was a professor, and alluding to his prominence in telling ghost stories. What struck me was that the custom was linked to Christmas Eve. I had never seen that connection before, even though it is no secret.
I’m just glad this guy was a professor and not a pastor… not that a pastor can’t tell a scary story now and then (when it doesn’t “compete” with a holy day).
Well, it answers that part of “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” 🎵
We each have our preferences, don’t we? Easter is most important for me, because of the Resurrection. But Christmas and Thanksgiving are right up there because of all the warm family fellowship that reinforces the holy meanings of the day. After that, any big family get together.
Yes, indeed, more on this next time. Fascinating and well summarized. Thanks.
Glad you found it interesting, Keith. The next post will be a bit heavier. So after that I’ve drafted a “light” post on “C.S. Lewis and Squirrels.” (Animal posts are invariably popular!)
I just shared the squirrel post with my critique group this morning, and they all enjoyed it.
But before we get to frolic with Squirrel Nutkin and Pattertwig, we’ll get another dose of ghostly apparitions.
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Hi Rob,
Yes, I guess the closest thing Lewis wrote pertaining ghosts are the demonic forces in Screwtape. He had a good handle in the spiritual and material world interacting, right?
Thanks,
Garyc
On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 3:27 PM Mere Inkling Press wrote:
> robstroud posted: ” C.S. Lewis did not write ghost stories, but he lived > in a country that celebrated the strange genre. For some bizarre reason, > the telling of ghost stories became associated with Christmas Eve. It’s a > wonder to me why Lewis didn’t include this impropr” >
As I have read his work, Lewis’ understanding of ghosts and the supernatural was quite biblical. He certainly had keen insight into the spiritual warfare that Jesus and the Apostle Paul (in particular) warned so clearly about.
Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell and All Hallows’ Eve are (among other things) “ghost stories,” and Lewis appreciated them. Williams’s short story “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” is perhaps the only work of fiction by C. W. that, so far as I know, Lewis shows no evidence of having known.
(We may read it here: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/williams/charles/et-in-sempiternum-pereant/)
Two things seem to have influenced Lewis to shy away from occultic-type material: (1) his witnessing of Dr. Askins’s mental breakdown, and (2) his conversion to orthodox Christianity, which would include the biblical prohibitions against spiritualism, etc. He prayed for the departed, but didn’t pray to the saints.
I don’t know of any evidence that Lewis had read M. R. James’s stories, though the critical edition of Tolkien on Fairy-Stories shows that -he- had.
It would be interesting to know more about Lewis’s thoughts on the possibility of apparitions of the departed, etc.
Since I have written a number of ghost stories, I have (however tardily) given this subject some thought. I’m a layman of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
The LCMS publishing house, Concordia, has issued Dr. Robert Bennett’s two books relating to possession, — I Am Not Afraid, and Afraid. Perhaps you’re aware of them already. Dr. Bennett believes that ghosts do not appear; people might have hallucinations, or they might see demons impersonating dead loved ones, etc.
An older book by an LCMS professor, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, called Principalities and Powers, takes what may be a more nuanced stance towards this topic, or may be in error. I won’t attempt to summarize it in this comment.
It’s interesting that, when Jesus walked on the water towards His disciples, and they thought they saw a ghost, He didn’t rebuke them; it seems like it would have been a good “teachable moment” in which He could have told them, “Ghosts never appear to people,, as you ought to know from the Scriptures,” but He just told them to have courage, it is He. Again, after His resurrection He told them that a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones as they can see He does. He -didn’t- tell them they should know better than think that He could have been a ghost since, as they should have known, ghosts never appear to people, period. See St. Matthew 14: 22ff, St. Mark 6: 49ff, , St. Luke 24:39. Our Lord does not, in these passages, appeal to the Scriptures to convict His disciples of an error they should have known better than to fall into. He appeals to reason: I’m not a ghost, so don’t be afraid; ghosts don’t have flesh and bones, etc.
Dale Nelson
Dale, thank you for the very thoughtful letter. Thank you very much for the background on Inkling ghost story connections. My reservations are not for the genre–I enjoy “scary” media–but the association with Christmas.
Thank you as well for the link to Williams’ short story. I look forward to reading it.
For some reason I’ve never investigation the case of Dr. Askins. How bizarre. Whether syphilitic insanity, demonic activity or an (unsurprising) combination of the two… it must certainly have been horrid.
As for Jesus’ dispelling confusion (i.e. misperceiving that he is a specter), I must confess I’m not a linguist. However, my understanding is that the the “familiar spirits” perceived of as the disembodied spirits of the deceased are more accurately understood as something else.
This agrees with my understanding of the experience of Christian exorcists. Demons may well impersonate the deceased, but that’s a subject that leads well beyond the focus of Mere Inkling.
The only cases of real people who had died speaking with the living would be the Transfiguration miracle (a unique event) and Samuel’s prophecy that Saul would die the next day after disobeying the Lord (which culminated in that very intercourse with a medium). It appears in that (again, unique) case (I Samuel 28) that God allowed the real Samuel to be present to speak God’s word of judgment to the wayward king.
As for what many people “sense” as the presence of departed loved ones… I believe that is almost always an emotional reaction to our memories of those for whom we grieve. This would especially be true when they do not persist for long after their passing, and when there is no “negative” consequence, such as suicidal ideation.
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I know this comment is late however I recall another incident of Lewis discussing ghosts. I believe it was in a letter to Arthur Greeves before Lewis’ conversion where he was contemplating the idea of fear and how often that which we fear is the result of the separation of spirit and body; ie ghosts removed from their bodies and revenants being corpses without a spirit.
I’ll have to attempt to find that correspondence when I have an opportunity. Sounds quite interesting. As a Christian, of course, Lewis possessed a much different view of “spirits.”
(Thanks for commenting with your insight, since visitors will also benefit from your thoughts despite the date of the original post!)