by C. S. Lewis
If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method. This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius—I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version . . .
How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College (Warren was in Shanghai and possibly in danger from the Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city.)
21 February 1932
I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore: the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt Western Rd with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p—Bang!
Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’. Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.
I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it’, then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train? . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns
20 March 1932
Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot—that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated ‘P’ in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane. Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room.
The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me)147 who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?
You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man. As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, he is worth describing, or seems so to me because I had to go for a walk with him. He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is toa-tee that ‘sensible, well-informed man’ with whom Lamb dreaded to be left alone.
My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to take a bus to the Station and start our walk along a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy strip of water—a walk, in fact, which was as good a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday morning ‘around the river bank’. I blundered at once by referring to the water as a canal. ‘Oh—could it be possible that I didn’t know it was the Thames? I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?’ I foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word ‘picturesque’. He then called my attention to the fact that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he know that?) and would like to know how I explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.
By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.
Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker . . .’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of how it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’) For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mi
ll of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc.’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)
But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality I mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever’ . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College
8 April 1932
I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the thing that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of characters. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser has no characters) was all nonsense . . .
By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem.) I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.
To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore . . .
The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult . . . Sometimes, relying on his remark ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’ I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them . . . For some reason which we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it . . .
TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College
[April? 1932]
As regards our argument about Gethsemane, I quite see that it sounds odd to attribute to perfect man a fear which imperfect men have often overcome. But one must beware of interpreting ‘perfect man’ in a sense which would nullify the temptation in the wilderness: a scene on which, at first, one would be tempted to comment (a) As regards the stone and bread ‘Imperfect men have voluntarily starved’ (b) As regards Satan’s demand for worship ‘Most men have never sunk so low as to feel this temptation at all’.
If we are to accept the Gospels however, we must interpret Christ’s perfection in a sense which admits of his feeling both the commonest and most animal temptations (hunger and the fear of death) and those temptations which usually occur only to the worst of men (devil worship for the sake of power). I am assuming that the stones and bread represents hunger: but if you prefer to regard it as primarily a temptation to thaumaturgy (‘If thou be the Son of God, command these stones’) then it falls into my second class.
The consideration of this second class at once raises the question ‘Are there not temptations proper to the very best and the very worst, which the middle sort of men do not feel?’: or, again ‘Do not common temptations attack most fiercely the best and the worst?’ I should answer Yes, and say that fear of death was one of these: and in respect of that fear I wd divide men into three classes.
A. The very bad to whom death represents the final defeat of the systematic self-regarding caution and egoism which has been the sole occupation of life. (False freedom defeated)
B. The virtuous. These in fact do not conquer fear of death without the support of any or all of the following
(1) Pride . . .
(2) Fear (Charge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat!)
(3) Taedium vitae (My baby at my breast, that lulls the nurse asleep.)
(4) Abandonment of the exhausting attempt at real freedom wh. makes the Necessary appear as a relief (The ship glides under the green arch of peace).
C. The Perfect. He cannot resort to any of the aids wh. class B. have, for they all depend on defect. His position is thus closely parallel to class A: death for Him also is the final defeat, but the time of real Freedom. (I am taking it for granted that the spiritual essence of death is ‘the opposite of Freedom’: hence the most mortal images are rigidity, suffocation etc.)
No doubt, He also knows the answer—that voluntary death (really voluntary, not the anodynes and dutch courages) makes unfreedom itself the assertion of freedom. But voluntary submission does not mean that there is nothing to submit to.
What is it to an ordinary man to die, if once he can set his teeth to bear the merely animal fear? To give in—he has been doing that nine times out of ten all his life. To see the lower in him conquer the higher, his animal body turning into lower animals and these finally into the mineral—he has been letting this happen since he was born. To relinquish control—easy for him as slipping on a well worn shoe. But in Gethsemane it is essential Freedom that is asked to be bound, unwearied control to throw up the sponge, Life itself to die. Ordinary men have not been so much in love with life as is usually supposed: small as their share of it is they have found it too much to bear without reducing a large portion of it as nearly to non-life as they can: we have drugs, sleep, irresponsibility, amusement, are more than half in love with easeful death—if only we could be sure it wouldn’t hurt! Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death. I am sure that if the thing were presented to you in a myth you wd be the first to cry out upon the prosaic critic who complained that the Sun was discredited because it fled from the Wolves.
Your idea of Christ as suffering from the mere fact of being in the body, and therefore tempted, if at all, to hasten rather than postpone his death, seems to imply that he was not (as the Christian mystery runs) ‘perfect God and perfect man’ but a kind of composite being, a δαιμωυ or archangel imprisoned in a vehicle unsuitable to it (like Ariel in the oak) and in constant revolt against that vehicle. This is mythological in the bad sense. The Son was certainly not incarnated in such a sense as not also to remain God (if He had been, the universe wd have disappeared).
I don’t pretend to have an explanation: b
ut I take it that the precise differentia of the Christian doctrine is that ‘Something wh. eternally is in the Noumenal world (and is impassible, blessed, omniscient, omnipotent etc) nevertheless once was in the phenomenal world (and was suffering etc).’ You can’t regard the earthly life of Jesus as an episode in the eternal life of the Son: as the slavery to Admetus was an episode in the immortal life of Apollo.
I need not say that on my view, the doctrine (do you hold it) that what was incarnated was ‘One of the hierarchies’ (or ‘one of’ the ‘anythings’) appears to me quite incompatible with the position given to Christ by his own words and by his followers. Aut deus aut malus angelus is as true as the old aut deus aut malus homo.