Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  [As far back as 1935 Jack had promised the Delegates of Oxford University Press to write the volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for their ‘Oxford History of English Literature’. It reached what he called its ‘embryonic state’ as the Clark Lectures which he gave in Cambridge in 1944. However, he needed much more time than he had previously had if he were ever to complete it. Because of the importance of the undertaking Magdalen College gave him a year off, beginning Michaelmas Term of 1951, to finish the book. It was, as it turned out, completed by June of 1952. Remembering the great amount of work which went into it, Jack always referred to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama (1954)—vol. III in the ‘O.H.E.L.’ series—as ‘the O Hell!’]

  TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR: from Magdalen College

  20 December 1951

  How the years flick past at our time of life, don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution will be all huddled up in his mind as recent events.

  My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd have known it for a mistake.

  This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation. Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly—a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  26 December 1951

  I am v. glad you have discovered François de Sales. I would regard his prose and Geo. Herbert’s verse as the sweetest of religious writings. And how remarkable it is that such a man’s mere statement that anxiety is a great evil at once helps you to escape from that evil. That indeed seems to be one of the magical Laws of this very creation in which we live: that the thing we know already, the thing we have said to ourselves a hundred times, when said by someone else becomes suddenly operative. It is part of C. Williams’ doctrine, isn’t it?—that no one can paddle his own canoe but everyone can paddle someone else’s . . .

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  8 January 1952

  ‘Whether it is any good praying for actual things’—the first question is what one means by ‘any good’. Is it a good thing to do? Yes: however we explain it, we are told to ask for particular things such as our daily bread. Does it ‘work’? Certainly not like a mechanical operation or a magical spell. It is a request which of course the Other Party may or may not, for His own good reasons, grant. But how can it change God’s will? Well—but how v. odd it would be if God in His actions towards me were bound to ignore what I did (including my prayers). Surely He hasn’t to forgive me for sins I didn’t commit or to cure me of errors into which I have never fallen? In other words His will (however changeless in some ultimate metaphysical sense) must be related to what I am and do? And once grant that, and why should my asking or not asking not be one of the things He takes into account? At any rate He said He would—and He ought to know. (We often talk as if He were not very good at Theology!)

  I certainly believe (now really, long since with a merely intellectual assent) that a sin once repented and forgiven, is gone, annihilated, burnt up in the fire of Divine Love, white as snow. There is no harm in continuing to ‘bewail’ it, i.e. to express one’s sorrow, but not to ask for pardon, for that you already have—one’s sorrow for being that sort of person. Your conscience need not be ‘burdened’ with it in the sense of feeling that you have an unsettled account, but you can still in a sense be patiently and (in a sense) contentedly humbled by it . . .

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

  10 January 1952

  I have, if not thought, yet imagined, a good deal about the other kinds of Men. My own idea was based on the old problem ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’ If we follow Scripture it wd seem that she must have been no daughter of Adam’s. I pictured the True Men descendants (in Genesis VI. 1–4, where I agree with you), interbreeding and thus producing the wicked Antediluvians.

  Oddly enough I, like you, had pictured Adam as being, physically, the son of two anthropoids, on whom, after birth, God worked the miracle which made him Man: said, in fact, ‘Come out—and forget thine own people and thy father’s house’. The Call of Abraham wd be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing, and regeneration in each one of us wd be an instance too, tho’ not a smaller one. That all seems to me to fit in both historically and spiritually.

  I don’t quite feel we shd gain anything by the doctrine that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As for the (rudimentary) presence in each sex of organs proper to the other, does that not occur in other mammals as well as in humans? Surely pseudo-organs of lactation are externally visible in the male dog? If so there wd be no more ground for making men (I mean, humans) hermaphroditic than any other mammal. (By the way, what an inconvenience it is in English to have the same word for Homo and Vir.) No doubt these rudimentary organs have a spiritual significance: there ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man. And how horrid the ones who haven’t got it are: I can’t bear a ‘man’s man’ or a ‘woman’s woman’.

  I will order They Shall Be My People and look forward to it. Congratulations. For my own part, I have been given a year’s leave from all teaching duties to enable me to finish my book on XVIth century literature, so I am plugging away at that as hard as I can. My hope is to kill some popular mythology about that fabulous monster called ‘the Renaissance’. There are five fairy tales already written, of which the second has now appeared.

  ‘Jane’ died almost a year ago, after a long but, thank God, painless illness. I beg you will often pray for her. She was an unbeliever and, in later years, very jealous, exacting, and irascible, but always tender to the poor and to animals . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  31 January 1952

  That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John IX. 1–4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It wd certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is ‘absolutely’ contrary to my will: i.e. if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused the pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e. granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother spanking a child would be in the same position: she would rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she would like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.

  On the heathen, see I Tim. IV. 10. Also in Matt, XXV. 31–46 the people don’t sound as if they were b
elievers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell (i.e. Hades, the land of the dead: not Gehenna the land of the lost) and preaching to the dead: and that would be outside time and would include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a) All justice and mercy will be done, (b) but that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers.

  TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

  29 February 1952

  I learn from ‘Mrs Arnold’ that you are taking the plunge. As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually—there are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty) by waking up, that it was only a dream. All blessings and good wishes.

  TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

  18 March 1952

  Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’

  Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the father of lights and who has promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine: give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  1 April 1952

  The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment (i.e. War, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial and I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

  Quakers—well I’ve been unlucky in mine. The ones I know are atrocious bigots whose religion seems to consist almost entirely in attacking other people’s religions. But I’m sure there are good ones as well.

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  13 May 1952

  In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’ . . . I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed remarriage’. The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church remarriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.

  It wd seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.

  Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him . . .

  TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

  15 May 1952

  Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited. It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you . . . Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean that it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be operative when you can feel it least.

  Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to feel depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.

  Of course none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit’. Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride. Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.

  If S—answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist) but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath. You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water. I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter. God bless you.

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

  28 May 1952

  It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail: it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.

  Yes, Pascal does directly contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong. What I ought to have said was that the Cosmological argument is, for some people at some times, ineffective. It always has been for me. (By the way do read K. Z. Lorenz King Solomon’s Ring on animal—especially bird—behaviour. There are instincts I had never dreamed of: big with a promise of real morality. The wolf is a v. different creature from what we imagine.)

  The stories you tell about two perverts belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire wh. he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the s
uccessful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than the (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.

  I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.

  TO ‘MISS HELEN HADOW’: from Magdalen College

  20 June 1952

  I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else’, but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me’. In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the speciality. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, ‘I’m only one of the crowd like everyone else’. But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are ‘members’ (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people as the mass.

  About confession, I take it that the view of our Church is that everyone may use it but none is obliged to. I don’t doubt that the Holy Spirit guides your decisions from within when you make them with the intention of pleasing God. The error wd be to think that He speaks only within, whereas in reality He speaks also through Scripture, the Church, Christian friends, books etc . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  20 June 1952

  Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitable humility.