Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expense is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather, no occasion of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons! . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  5 January 1951

  Whether any individual Christian who attempts Faith Healing is prompted by genuine faith and charity or by spiritual pride is I take it a question we cannot decide. That is between God and him. Whether the cure occurs in any given case is clearly a question for the doctors. I am speaking now of healing by some act such as anointing or laying on of hands. Praying for the sick, i.e. praying simply, without any overt act, is unquestionably right and indeed we are commanded to pray for all men. And of course your prayers can do real good. Needless to say they don’t do it either as a medicine does or as magic is supposed to do, i.e. automatically. Prayer is a request . . . One cannot establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics . . . It remains a matter of faith and of God’s personal action; it would become a matter of demonstration only if it were impersonal or mechanical. When I say ‘personal’ I do not mean private or individual. All our prayers are united with Christ’s perpetual prayer and are part of the Church’s prayer. (In praying for people one dislikes I find it helpful to remember that one is joining in His prayer for them.)

  TO MISS RUTH PITTER: from Magdalen College

  6 January 1951

  What is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one doesn’t like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself? One might as well read everyone who had the same job or the same coloured hair, or the same income, or the same chest measurements, as far as I can see. I whistle, and plunge into the tunnel of term.

  [Mrs Moore died at ‘Restholme’ on 12 January.]

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  7 February 1951

  If ‘planning’ is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme, then one cd only say after examining that programme in detail . . . Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, becomes wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good . . .

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  5 March 1951

  How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’. Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we shd need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment . . .

  I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all of our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures . . . But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly . . .

  I am glad you all liked ‘The Lion’ [the Witch and the Wardrobe]. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but v. few children . . .

  TO MRS HALMBACHER: from Magdalen College

  [March 1951]

  The question for me (naturally) is not ‘Why should I not be a Roman Catholic?’ but ‘Why should I?’ But I don’t like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less.

  TO MISS VERA MATHEWS: from Magdalen College

  27 March 1951

  I have just got your letter of the 22nd containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really trying to pretend it didn’t happen. It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high-minded people who make out that it ‘doesn’t matter’. It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel v. strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some great good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if Our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind . . . Certainly they often seem just at that time to be very near us . . .

  TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: from Magdalen College (after becoming a Christian)

  17 April 1951

  My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible; for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

  There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr mind on the denominational question) get confirmed. Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

  TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE: from Magdalen College

  19 April 1951

  I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

  Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in it’s enjoyment of its object . . .

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College

  23 April 1951

  A succession of illnesses and a holiday in Ireland have so far kept me from tackling Lubac. The Prelude has accompanied me through all the stages of my pilgrimage: it and the Aeneid (which I never feel you value sufficiently) are the two long poems to wh. I most often return.

  The tension you speak of (if it is a tension) between doing full & generous justice to the Natural while also paying unconditional & humble obedien
ce to the Supernatural is to me an absolute key position. I have no use for mere either-or people (except, of course, in that last resort, when the choice, the plucking out the right eye, is upon us: as it is in some mode, every day. But even then a man needn’t abuse & blackguard his right eye. It was a good creature: it is my fault, not its, that I have got myself into a state wh. necessitates jettisoning it).

  The reason I doubt whether it is, in principle, even a tension is that, as it seems to me, the subordination of Nature is demanded if only in the interests of Nature herself. All the beauty of nature withers when we try to make it an absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

  As to Man being in ‘evolution’, I agree, tho’ I wd rather say ‘in process of being created’.

  I am not nearer to your Church than I was but don’t feel v. inclined to re-open a discussion. I think it only widens & sharpens differences. Also, I’ve had enough of it on the opposite flank lately, having fallen among—a new type to me—bigoted & proselytizing Quakers! I really think that in our days it is the ‘undogmatic’ & ‘liberal’ people who call themselves Christians that are most arrogant & intolerant. I expect justice & even courtesy from many Atheists and, much more, from your people: from Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  25 May 1951

  About loving one’s country, you raise two different questions . . . About there seeming to be (now) no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As Macdonald says, ‘No one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.’ Surely, where we love, the very faults and blemishes of the object are a spur to love more? Or say there are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are loveable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.

  But the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little reality. A treaty between the govts of two countries is not like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.

  I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and in that is very like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself ground for affection. And it is good, because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links and debts for literature etc . . . But I would distinguish that from the talk in the papers . . .

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  5 June 1951

  My love for G. MacDonald has not extended to most of his poetry, though I have naturally made several attempts to like it. Except for the Diary of an Old Soul it won’t (so far as I’m concerned) do . . .

  As for me I specially need your prayers because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease’. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present. Indeed (I do not know whether to be ashamed or joyful at confessing this) I realise that until about a month ago I never really believed (tho’ I thought I did) in God’s forgiveness. What an ass I have been both for not knowing and for thinking I knew. I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything: any moment a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality. Selah! But pray for me always, as I do for you . . .

  TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’ (daughter of ‘Mrs Catherine Arnold’): from Magdalen College

  13 June 1951

  (1) I think you are confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The former is a doctrine peculiar to the Roman Catholics and asserts that the mother of Jesus was born free of original sin. It does not concern us at all.

  (2) The Virgin Birth is a doctrine plainly stated in the Apostle’s Creed that Jesus had no physical father, and was not conceived as a result of sexual intercourse. It is not a doctrine on which there is any dispute between Presbyterians as such and Episcopalians as such. A few individual Modernists in both these churches have abandoned it. The exact details of such a miracle—an exact point at which a supernatural enters this world (whether by the creation of a new spermatazoon, or the fertilisation of an ovum without a spermatazoon or the development of a foetus without an ovum) are not part of the doctrine. These are matters in which no one is obliged and everyone is free, to speculate. Your starting point about this doctrine will not, I think, be to collect the opinions of individual clergymen, but to read Matthew and Luke I and II.

  (3) Similarly, your question about the resurrection is answered in Luke XXIV. This makes it clear beyond any doubt that what is claimed is physical resurrection. (All Jews except Sadducees already believed in spiritual revival—there would have been nothing novel or exciting in that.)

  (4) Thus the questions that you raise are not questions at issue between real P. and real Ep. at all for both these claim to agree with Scripture. Neither church by the way seems to be very intelligently represented by the people you have gone to for advice, which is bad luck. I find it very hard to advise in your choice. At any rate the programme, until you can make up your mind, is to read your New Testament (preferably a modern translation) intelligently. Pray for guidance, obey your conscience in small as well as in great matters, as strictly as you can.

  (5) Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them: when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour. (I hope all of this is not very dull and disappointing. Write freely again if I can be of any use to you.)

  P.S. Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  12 September 1951

  I have not a word to say against the doctrine that Our Lord suffers in all the sufferings of His people (see Acts IX. 6) or that when we willingly accept what we suffer for others and offer it to God on their behalf, then it may be united with His sufferings and, in Him, may help to their redemption or even that of others whom we do not dream of. So that it is not in vain: tho’ of course we must not count on seeing it work out exactly as we, in our present ignorance, might think best. The key text for this view is Colossians 1.24. Is it not, after all, one more application of the truth that we are all ‘members one of another’? I wish I had known more when I wrote The Problem of Pain . . .

  TO MISS VERA MATHEWS: from Magdalen College

  12 September 1951

  Since then I have been in really quiet and unearthly spots in my native Ireland.173 I stayed for a fortnight in a bungalow which none of the peasants will approach at night because the desolate coast on which it stands is haunted by ‘the good people’. There is also a ghost but (and this is interesting) they don’t seem to mind him: the faeries are a more serious danger . . .

  TO DR WENDELL W. WATTERS: from Magdalen College

  25 October 1951

  Yes. I’m not surprised that a man who agreed with me in Screwtape (ethics served with an i
maginative seasoning) might disagree with me when I wrote about religion. We can hardly discuss the whole matter by post, can we? I’ll only make one shot. When people object, as you do, that if Jesus was God as well as Man, then He had an unfair advantage which deprives Him for them of all value, it seems to me as if a man struggling in the water shd refuse a rope thrown to him by another who had one foot on the bank, saying ‘Oh but you have an unfair advantage’. It is because of that advantage that He can help.

  But all good wishes: we must just differ: in charity I hope. You must not be angry with me for believing you know: I’m not angry with you . . .

  TO A CHARITABLE READER: from Magdalen College

  October 1951

  I feel sure you will not be offended if I tell you that I have—with great reluctance—sent your gift straight on to someone else, whose need is much greater than mine . . . an elderly lady who has always had a struggle to make both ends meet and who . . . is now on the verge of actual want . . . Amongst the elderly, living on dwindling investment income in a world of rising prices, there is already discomfort, hardship, and I fear in many cases, real suffering . . .

  TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S SECRETARY: from Magdalen College (in reply to the offer of a C.B.E.)

  3 December 1951

  I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.