Into the Wardrobe

I have read a quote from Lewis on here about greatness being like a leaf on a tree. That the better we are (closer to God's plan) the less like we are with other people's greatness. That excellence has a uniqueness to it.


That a rough paraphrase, I searched and searched and can't find the quote....

Any help is awesome.

I remember several Lewis references or metaphors to branches, and growing toward God, but nothing about leaves, until I was reading today in "Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature", pg 6, "Was neuere lef up-on lynde lyghter ther-after," (talking about Love,i.e. God)

Yeah, that doesn't sound familiar to me, either. The "God's plan" doesn't sound like a phrase Lewis would ever have used; it sounds to "Evangelical" to have been him.

I sometimes think Lewis is going to be one of those people who have all sorts of sayings attributed to them that they never said, like Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. If there's some witty quip floating around, somebody will attribute it to one of those two gents. Andy Rooney and George Carlin are more recent guys of this sort, constantly having some list or other attributed to them in those emails that start out FWD: fwd: fwd: FWD: IT'S TRU!!!

You people know who you are. . .

Lewis certainly believed in and expressed the idea that it is evil that tends to have a sameness and blandness to it and good that fosters variety and uniqueness. He mentions this sort of thing in a lot of places -- I can't think of a specific reference that talks about a leaf on a tree, at least in connection with "uniqueness" (which would seem a bit contradictory -- we normally think of leaves on a tree as all being bascially alike). But the idea of goodness, rather than evil, fostering variety and uniqueness can be found in all three of the space trilogy books though most prominent in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Also Screwtape Letters and Pilgrim's Regress, and Mere Christianity (I think it is -- I might have MC mixed up with Problem of Pain or Miracles).

And apart from explicit mentions of the idea, one sees the idea expressed simply in the way he writes about things that are evil or good. As I've mentioned before, Lewis is a counterexample to the standard idea put forth by a lot of writers and film makers and actors that bad characters are more interesting than good, and that good characters tend to seem all the same and bland. Lewis was certainly able to write about bad characters in a vivid manner to bring out the horror, but he could write even more vividly and wonderfully and with great variety about goodness and good characters.

By the way, one place where Lewis does use the image of leaves on a tree is in an illustration about "reality" that he uses in the essay "Transposition", found in "The Weight of Glory and other [essays?]" where he describes a woman in a prison cell who tries to teach her son about the "real" world using pencil drawings. I'm not sure that image can be connected very directly to the idea of uniqeness and variety talked about above, but there is certainly some intermingling of ideas there that one could apply to the concept.

--Stanley