FOR me, 22 November is an especially resonant day. It is St Cecilia’s Day; so, naturally, one meditates on music; and it is also the anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s death, so a day to remember that great soul, that kindler of the imagination for Christ.

Lewis was famously rude about a lot of church hymnody, which he dismissed as “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music”, and that might even be true of some of the fare that was served up in his day. But, in fact, he had a real ear for music, and a deep delight in it. He came to love Wagner as a young man — chiefly, the Ring cycle — as part of his obsession with Norse mythology. Something of the beauty, mystery, and yearning of the legends and their attendant music was what sustained him spiritually through the years of his atheism, until he found in Christ the true source of the piercing and yet joyful longing which that potent mix of music and mythology had stirred in him.

It is true that he was careful thereafter to emphasise that it was not the music or the books themselves, but something coming through them that was the truly spiritual element, and he was wary of falling into a kind of aesthetic idolatry, something that he had been prone to in his undergraduate days. So, he says, self-admonishingly, in The Weight of Glory: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. . . For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

And yet, for all that caution, his appreciation of music became more and more deeply grounded in his theology. In The Magician’s Nephew, the creation of Narnia is brought about by song and music: “The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool.”

But perhaps the best, and least expected, place in which Lewis reveals his deepest thoughts about music is in The Screwtape Letters. At a recent Lewis conference in Belfast, the musicologist Sophie Jones drew our attention to the passage in which Screwtape rants against the two heavenly qualities of music and silence: “[The house] bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: ‘the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.’” (The “human writer” here is, of course, George MacDonald.)

Screwtape’s means of countering heavenly music and heavenly silence is, of course, mere noise. “Music and silence — how I detest them both!. . . [Hell] has been occupied by Noise — Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile — Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. . . The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.”

Alas, if Lewis spent a day or two with us now, he might conclude that hell had made considerable progress.