A substantial and apparently unpublished letter to friend and fellow Inkling, Colin Hardy, densely written on two sides of Magdalen College letter paper, approx. 1000 words. It is likely that Lewis is responding to a paper entitled "The Oedipus Myth", presented by Hardie at the Socratic Club on 26 May 1947. In this letter Lewis tackles the Fall and its relation to myth, its interpretation in relation to the emergence and development of human consciousness and apparently attempting reconcile the Fall narrative with the historical view of evolution.Lewis begins by commenting that, "in the P[roblem]. of Pain I explicitly confess I am tackling the Fall story on a shallow level. Behind this remark lies my belief that every good myth has layers of significance...". Using Oedipus as an example, he goes on, looked at one way "the incest becomes the centre and asking dangerous questions (and also the sphinx) becomes marginal. But you can also, with Plutarch, make Oedipus the type of curiosity... and the incest can become less important... I sometimes think that these different patterns as radiating from a common centre which itself remains outside all human consciousness...".Lewis then moves on the dealing with the Fall: "I don't think it conflicts with anthropology or psychology. What you recover in those sciences is, in my view, not the absolute beginnings of man but the first period of prehistoric human life after the Fall. That period would be full of the struggle from ape-like unconscious into consciousness... So you need not regard my view as alternative to yours but as a harmless unverifiable addition... The Archetypes wd certainly symbolise this struggle. I merely add another layer...". Lewis continues to dissect the mythical dimension of the Fall narrative attempting to reconcile it with its historical counterpart, which leads him to a philosophical treatment of the origins of consciousness in the aftermath of the Fall, "in order to be conscious (simpliciter) it is necessary to be not a mere unity... To become aware of itself it must objectify itself. Hence in absolute Thought the Father begets the Son (His "Objectivity") and the unity is still preserved (as Holy Ghost proceeds). My Paradisal man (Historical?) was a little working model of that. But consciousness secundum quid (i.e. for a man who was now semi-ape)... real disharmony comes in." Lewis proceeds to lay out his view of how human conflict is caused by the development of consciousness, "On those terms (but not the simpliciter) the emergence of consciousness does produce 'severance', so that now we lose the tree of life by holding onto the tree of knowledge". Lewis concludes with his strong belief of the danger of "stopping too short - of assuming that the sense 'we've been here before' is fully satisfied by any past even we read... there has always been an earlier "before". It beckons you back and back and until I had a total knowledge of all reality I shd never feel sure I had got to the Archetype of Archetypes."

An exceptional letter between two members of the Inklings demonstrating how discussions within that group promoted the creative process. Written in the intellectually dense and incisive matter typical of Lewis's correspondence with his academic friends, the letter covers his favourite subjects of theology and mythology and is redolent with vivid literary analogies. The disquisitory nature of the letter is akin to the synopsis of an essay and the material covered might easily stretch to a short book if written in the more accessible style of Lewis's published work, yet the blend of academic rigour, literary flair and the synthesis of reason with imagination, which characterises Lewis's work are all very much in evidence.
Colin Hardie (1906-1998) was a British classicist and academic. From 1936-41 and 1945-73, he was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a tutor in classics, coinciding with Lewis's time as a Fellow there from 1925-54.

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