Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  Yes, I’ve read the Scale of Perfection with much admiration. I think of sending the anonymous translator a list of passages that he might reconsider for the next edition. I’ve also read the work of R. W. Chambers which you mention.160 It is first class as an essay on the continuity of the devotional tradition, but not, what it professes, the continuity of prose style. At least I think some of the passages he quotes as similar in style are really similar only in matter. I doubt if he recognises that More’s style is greatly inferior to Hilton’s. But Chambers is a very good man. If you have his Man’s Unconquerable Mind, read the essay on Measure for Measure. He simply treats it as an ordinary Christian story and all the old stuff about ‘Shakespeare’s dark period’ vanishes into thin air. I see what you mean by calling G. Eliot’s Dorothea a saint manquée: nothing is more pathetic than the potential holiness in [the] quality of the devotion which actually wrecks itself on Casaubon. If you like such leisurely novels, let me recommend John Galt: specially the Entail.

  About active service—I think my account was true in what it said, but false in what it excluded. I quite agree that the obedience and comradeship are very good things: and I have no sympathy with the modern view that killing or being killed is simpliciter a great evil. But perhaps the truths are rather odious on the lips of a civilian, unless some pastoral or civil office absolutely obliges him to utter them.

  Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate. Diabolus simius Dei. And, of course, their occasion is the failure of those who left humanity starved of that particular good. This does not for me alter the conviction that they are very bad indeed. One of the things we must guard against is the penetration of both into Christianity—availing themselves of that very truth you have suggested and I have admitted. Mark my words: you will frequently see both a Leftist and a Rightist pseudo-theology developing—the abomination will stand where it ought not . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  3 February 1940

  This has been an interesting week in some ways. On Monday Williams began his lectures in the beautiful carved Divinity School.161 A good audience. I attended with Tolkien and Hopkins and afterwards repaired to the Mitre Bar, joined by Williams, to drink sherry. I think he will retain most of his audience.

  That afternoon I had the coldest dawdle round the estate with old Taylor [a neighbour] that I have yet had. In spite of the bitter wind we had to stop to examine every track and speculate what kind of animal it was—but indeed I am rather ashamed that a man of over seventy should have so much more gust for natural philosophy and so much less shrinking from the wind than I. (Between ourselves, too, I have a sort of faint hope that what I can put in with such as F. K. [Foord-Kelcey] and old Taylor may be accepted as a kind of penance for my many sins against the P’daitabird: the blackest chapter in my life.) . . .

  We had the usual pleasant party on Thursday evening in college with the welcome addition of Havard, who has been bidden all along but has hitherto been prevented from attending by various accidents. He read us a short paper on his clinical experience of the effects of pain, wh. he had written in order that I might use all or part of it as an appendix to my book. We had an evening almost equally compounded of merriment, piety, and literature. Rum this time again. The Inklings is now really v. well provided, with Fox as chaplain, you as army, Barfield as lawyer, Havard as doctor—almost all the estates!—except, of course, anyone who could actually produce a single necessity of life, a loaf, a boot, or a hut . . .

  [On 27 January Warren was promoted to the rank of Major. Not long after this he spent some time in a hospital with a ‘high temperature’. It is not clear what caused him so much illness during his time in France.]

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  11 February 1940

  We have your letter (with note enclosed for me) telling us that you are again in hospital. It is impossible, on your hint that you might be sent home, not to wish that this may happen, though I see your point of view about it too. But surely if you keep on returning to bed with these high temperatures even the invincible army must decide in the end that keeping you in France at all is too costly? Anyone who knows your medical history for the last ten years must realise that active service even at the base is for you ‘an impossible pleasure’. Let us, while you are ill, have short notes at pretty frequent intervals, will you? . . .

  On Monday C. W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb—because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on unchastity might have evoked in their grandparents—the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion—I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins? . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  18 February 1940

  Barfield has been up to spend an evening with me: rather unfortunately it was Thursday, for, though he knows most of that set and harmonises with them very well, I should have preferred to have him to myself. He is going to take a part time job in—of all disgusting things—the Inland Revenue.

  He is very much depressed having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general—which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it’s like on the Mannerheim line at this moment. I took the line that the present rapidity of communication etc. imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones’s in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be met in the same way. Of course I know the more obvious reply, that you can’t do them any good by being miserable, but that is hardly the point, for in the case of the Jones’s next door we should think ill of the man who felt nothing whether his feeling did them good or not.

  I am afraid the truth is in this, as in nearly everything else I think about at present, that the world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam’ thing about it. Even its theology—for that is a most distressing discovery I have been making these last two terms as I have been getting to know more and more of the Christian element in Oxford.

  Did you fondly believe—I did—that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my ‘sterness’ was their ‘slush’. They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. ‘Under judgement’ is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Cal
vin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face . . .

  But, in a private letter, one may, for a moment, bewail happier days—the old world when Politics meant Tariff Reform, and war, war with Zulus, and even religion meant (beautiful word) Piety. ‘The decent church that crowns the neighbouring hill’—Sir Roger at Church—‘Mr Arabin sent the farmers home to their baked mutton very well satisfied’ . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  25 February 1940

  Plague on this nonsense of putting back the clock which has docked me of an hour’s sleep and which for the next few weeks will give me darkness at shaving and dressing time when I want light and light after tea when it is an impertinence; and which also, by abolishing 3.30 Evensong has sent me back to Mattins and the old morning rush.

  I am just back from it now. The change was aggravated by the fact that, as Bleiben announced ‘We are now approaching that time of the year in which the Church revises her Electoral Roll’. We had the whole bag of tricks of course, followed by a full exposition of the Free Will Offering scheme. He preached a very good sermon, however, on Joseph, as the type of man who has an almost unique series of excuses for being ‘embittered’, ‘disillusioned’ and all the usual bunk but doesn’t take them.

  Reflection on the story raised in my mind a problem I never happen to have thought of before: why was Joseph imprisoned, and not killed, by Potiphar? Surely it seems extraordinarily mild treatment for attempted rape of a great lady by a slave? Or must one assume that Potiphar, tho’ ignorant of the lady’s intention to make him a cuckold, was aware in general (like Bishop Proudie and many other husbands) that her stories about the servants were to be taken with a grain of salt—that his real view was ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that Joseph did anything of the sort, but I foresee there’ll be no peace till I get him out of the house’? One is tempted to begin to imagine the whole life of the Potiphar family: e.g. how often had he heard similar stories from her before? . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  3 March 1940

  One pleasant thing which happened this week was a visit from Dyson on Thursday which produced a meeting of all Inklings except yourself and Barfield. Fox read us his latest ‘Paradisal’ on Blenheim Park in winter. The only line I can quote (wh. seems to me very good) is ‘Beeches have figures; oaks, anatomies’. It was in the Troilus stanza and full of his own ‘cool, mellow flavour’ as the tobacconists say. He has really in some respects a considerable similarity to Miss Sackville West. Dyson, according to Tolkien (you know how bad an observer of such things I am) was looking changed and ill, but he was in his usual form and, on being told of Williams’ Milton lectures on ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’, replied ‘The fellow’s becoming a common chastitute’ . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College (on Maundy Thursday)

  [21 March] 1940

  About Spain—after, first, Hitler’s, and, now, Mussolini’s, abandonment of anti-Communism I am prepared for almost anything. There are people in Europe quite depraved enough to stage that whole ceremony without having the slightest belief in Christianity or the slightest intention of treating it as anything more than a bait. Let us hope—and indeed pray—that France is not one of them. Even if he is not, he might be sincere in a sense which bodes very ill for us. I mean, his Christendom might be, on the Papist side, what Ulster Orangeism is on the Protestant side. One can imagine Condlin, if he were a Dictator, whipping up a kind of Protestant revival which wd be in a sense sincere, but which would be quite ready to ally itself with Germany or Russia or both for the destruction of Italy and Spain. I can never forget Tolkien’s Spanish friend who, after having several colleges pointed out to him by name from the roof of the Radder, observed with surprise ‘So this was once a Christian country?’

  Mind you, I think the Pope is sound. Something might be done through him to persuade France to put the Christian-Totalitarian issue first, at any rate for the present, and the Papist-Protestant second. Of course I absolutely agree with you that Papistry even of the most obscurantist and persecuting kind would be better (I mean in terms of this world) than the great rebellion of the other force not only against Grace but against Nature.

  Why should quiet ruminants as you and I have been born in such a ghastly age? Let me palliate the apparent selfishness of this complaint by asserting that there are people who, while not, of course, liking actual suffering when it falls to their own share, do really like the ‘stir’, the ‘sense of great issues’. Lord!, how I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. ‘Dynamic’ I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation party—which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place . . .

  TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

  26 March 1940

  (1) About obedience. Nearly everyone will find himself in the course of his life in positions where he ought to command and in positions where he ought to obey . . . Now each of them requires a certain training or habituation if it is to be done well; and indeed the habit of command or of obedience may often be more necessary than the most enlightened views on the ultimate moral grounds for doing either. You can’t begin training a child to command until it has reason and age enough to command someone or something without absurdity. You can at once begin training it to obey: that is teaching it the art of obedience as such—without prejudice to the views it will hold later on as to who should obey whom, or when, or how much . . . since it is perfectly obvious that every human being is going to spend a great deal of his life in obeying.

  (2) Psychoanalysis. In talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable. I may therefore have been betrayed into statements on this subject which I am not prepared to defend. No doubt, like every young science, it is full of errors, but so long as it remains a science and doesn’t set up to be a philosophy, I have no quarrel with it, i.e. as long as people judge what it reveals by the best human logic and scheme of values they’ve got and do not try to derive logic and values from it. In practice no doubt, as you say, the patient is always influenced by the analyst’s own values. And further, in so far as it attempts to heal, i.e. to make better, every treatment involves a value-judgement. This could be avoided if the analyst said, ‘Tell me what sort of a chap you want to be and I’ll see how near I can make you’: but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived, not from his science (it couldn’t) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patients’s . . .

  Another way in which any therapeutic art may have bad philosophical results is this. It must, for the sake of method, take perfection as the norm and treat every departure from it as disease: hence there is always a danger that those who practise it may come to treat a perfectly ideal perfection as ‘normal’ in the popular sense and consequently waste their lives in crying for the moon . . .

  I see no reason why a Christian shd not be an analyst. Psychoanalysis after all merely defines what was always admitted, that the moral choices of the human soul operate inside a complex non-moral situation . . . The Christian view would be that every psychological situation, just like every degree of wealth or poverty, had its own peculiar temptations and peculiar advantages: that the worst could always be turned to a good use and the best could always be abused, to one’s spiritual ruin . . . This doesn’t mean that it wd be wrong to try to cure a complex any more than a stiff leg: but it does mean that if you can’t, then so far from the game being up, life with a complex or a stiff leg, is precisely the game you have been set . . . We must play the parts we find
ourselves given . . . Once make the medical norm our idea of the ‘normal’ and we shall never lack an excuse for throwing up the sponge. But these are all illegitimate abuses of analysis.

  (3) Christianity. My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that there I should find a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could. They told me I would final moral perfection—but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.