The Headless Way
Direct access to our essential nature
is freely available to everyone here and now
NoFacebook page on Facebook Facebook
Headless Way page on Facebook Facebook
Sign up for our Newsletter Newsletter
Sign up for our Online Course eCourse

Reviews of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth

by Douglas Harding (see submenu for complete list)

Extract from a letter to D.E. Harding from C.S. Lewis, Easter 1950.

"Hang it all, you've made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven't been on a book (I mean a book of doctrine; imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I. Who or what are you? How have I lived forty years without my having heard of you before and my sensation is that you have written a book of the highest genius."

___________________________________________________

Extracts from the Preface to The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth by C.S. Lewis. (First published by Faber & Faber.)

"This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy."

"If [this book] should turn out to have been even the remote ancestor of some system which will give us again a credible universe inhabited by credible agents and observers, this will still have been a very important book indeed."

"It has also given me that bracing and satisfying experience which, in certain books of theory, seems to be partially independent of our final agreement or disagreement. It is an experience most easily disengaged by remembering what has happened to us whenever we turned from the inferior exponents of a system, even a system we reject, to its' great doctors. I have had it on turning from common 'Existentialists' to M. Sartre himself, from Calvinists to the Institutio, from 'Transcendentalists' to Emerson, from books about 'Renaissance Platonism' to Ficino. One may still disagree (I disagree heartily with all the authors I have just named) but one now sees for the first time why anyone ever did agree. One has breathed a new air, become free of a new country. It may be a country you cannot live in, but you now know why the natives love it. You will henceforward see all systems a little differently because you have been inside that one. From this point of view philosophies have some of the same qualities as works of art. I am not referring at all to the literary art with which they may or may not be expressed. It is the ipseitas, the peculiar unity of effect produced by a special balancing and patterning of thoughts and classes of thoughts: a delight very like that which would be given by Hesse's Glasperlenspiel (in the book of that name) if it could really exist. I owe a new experience of that kind to Mr. Harding."

back to top

 

Full book catalogue
Headless on Youtube


Click here for workshops with Richard Lang


Click here for information on online hangouts
Click here fora free e-course
Click here for our online shop
Click here to get the free Headless iPhone app
Click here for downloadable videos of Douglas Harding
Click here for the Latest News
Click here to Donate