Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.s) where the B.V.M. is treated really as a divinity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself . . .

  TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalen College (Jack needed his friend’s advice in finding a suitable name for the Narnian story which eventually was given the title The Silver Chair. He had only just come to know Mrs Joy Davidman Gresham from New York.)

  26 September 1952

  We also have had visitors. For heaven’s sake don’t let June [Lancelyn Green] increase her toils by bothering to write to me. But let me have her and your advice on my immediate problem wh. is the title of the new story. Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night Under Narnia is ‘gloomy’. George Sayer & my brother say Gnomes Under N wd be equally gloomy, but News Under Narnia wd do. On the other hand my brother & the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us & is a great reader of fantasy & children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?

  TO CHARLES MOORMAN: from Magdalen College

  2 October 1952

  I am sure you are on a false scent. Certainly most, perhaps all the poems in [Charles Williams’s] Taliessin volume were written before the last novel, All Hallows Eve, was even conceived, and there had been Arthurian poems (not of much value) in his earlier manner long before. I can’t tell you when he first became interested in the Arthurian story, but the overwhelming probability is that, like so many English boys, he got via Tennyson into Malory in his ’teens. The whole way in which he talked of it implied a life-long familiarity. Much later (but even so, before I met him) came the link-up between his long-standing interest in Arthuriana and a new interest in Byzantium.

  Everything he ever said implied that his prose fiction, his ‘pot boilers’, and his poetry all went on concurrently: there was no ‘turning from’ one to the other. He never said anything to suggest that he felt his themes ‘would not fit with ease into tales of modern life’. What would have expressed the real chronological relation between the novels would have been the words (tho’ I don’t think he ever actually said them) ‘I haven’t got much further with my Arthurian poems this week because I’ve been temporarily occupied with the idea for a new story’.

  The question when did he first come across the doctrine of ‘Caritas’ puzzled me. What doctrine do you mean? If you mean the ordinary Christian doctrine that there are three theological virtues and ‘the greatest of these is charity’ of course he would never remember a time when he had not known it. If you mean the doctrine of Coinherence and Substitution, then I don’t know when he first met these. Nor do I know when he began the Figure of A.174 His knowledge of the earlier Arthurian documents was not that of a real scholar: he knew none of the relevant languages except (a little) Latin.

  The VII Bears and the Atlantean Circle [in That Hideous Strength] are pure inventions of my own, filling the same purpose in the narrative that ‘noises off’ wd in a stage play. Numinor is a mis-spelling of Numenor which, like the ‘true West’, is a fragment from a vast private mythology invented by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. At the time we all hoped that a good deal of that mythology would soon become public through a romance which the Professor was then contemplating. Since then the hope has receded . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  20 October 1952

  I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I should suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one shd use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words, or wordless prayer, or in what proportion one should mix all three, seems entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience. I myself find prayers without words the best when I can manage it, but can do so only when least distracted and in the best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.

  Your question about old friendship where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends very much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship, as in all other forms of love is, as you know, to turn from the demand to be loved (or helped or amused) to the wish to love (or help or amuse). Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much time one shd spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crowd’ is a bad sign. (We mustn’t take it as a sign of our increasing spirituality of course: isn’t it merely a natural neutral development as one grows older?)

  All that Calvanist question—Free-will and Predestination—is to my mind indiscussible, insoluble. Of course (we say) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes (they say), but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arises as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter and just finding them chattering with the cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk about human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’ There are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction become perhaps nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not voluntary, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it alone.

  TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalen College

  21 October 1952

  Your letter was more than usually welcome: for tho’ reason assured me that so busy a man might have 100 motives for not writing, I had also a lurking fear that you might be offended. Forgive me the suspicion. It arose not at all because I judge you to be that kind of ass, or any kind, but because, we being ‘of one blood’, the loss of you wd be a very raw gash in my life . . .

  I have just finished Vol I of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, tho’ a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home & no duties . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College

  8 November 1952

  I am returning your letter with the questions in it numbered so that you’ll know wh. I am answering.

  (1) Some call me Mr and some Dr. And I not only don’t care but usually don’t know which.

  (2) Distinguish (A) A second chance in the strict sense, i.e. a new earthly life in which you wd attempt afresh all the problems you failed at in the present one (as in religions of Re-Incarnation). (B) Purgatory: a process by which the work of redemption continues, and first perhaps begins to be noticeable after death. I think Charles Williams depicts (B) and not (A).

  (3) We are never given any knowledge of ‘What would have happened if . . .’

  (4) I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teache
rs they follow. In the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. XXV. 31 and following) those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us, not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.

  (5) It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

  (6) Kill means murder. I don’t know Hebrew: but when Our Lord quotes this commandment he uses the Greek . . .

  (7) The question of what you wd ‘want’ is off the point. Capital punishment might be wrong tho’ the relations of the murdered man wanted him killed: it might be right tho’ they did not want this. The question is whether a Xtian nation ought or ought not to put murderers to death: not what passions interested individuals may feel.

  (8) There is no doubt at all that the natural impulse to ‘hit back’ must be fought against by the Xtian whenever it arises. If one I love is tortured or murdered my desire to avenge him must be given no quarter. So far as nothing but this question of retaliation comes in ‘turn the other cheek’ is the Christian law. It is however quite another matter when the neutral public authority (not the aggrieved person) may order killing of either private murderers or public enemies in mass. It is quite clear that St Paul . . . approved of capital punishment—he says ‘the magistrate bears the sword and should bear the sword’. It is recorded that the soldiers who came to St John Baptist asking, ‘What shall we do?’ were not told to leave the army. When Our Lord Himself praised the Centurion He never hinted that the military profession was in itself sinful. This has been the general view of Christendom. Pacificism is a v. recent and local variation. We must of course respect and tolerate Pacifists, but I think their view erroneous.

  (9) The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?

  (10) When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. If you and I ever come to love God perfectly, the answer to this tormenting question will then become clear and will be far more beautiful than we cd ever imagine. We can’t have it now.

  TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

  19 January 1953

  I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much, because in those days I never dreamed I would become a ‘popular’ author and hoped for no readers outside a small ‘highbrow’ circle. Don’t waste your time over it any more. The poetry is my own . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  6–7 April 1953

  I don’t think gratitude is a relevant motive for joining an Order. Gratitude might create a state of mind in which one became aware of a vocation: but the vocation would be the proper reason for joining. They themselves would surely not wish you to join without it? You can show your gratitude in lots of other ways. Is there in this Order, even for lay members such as you would be, not something like a noviciate or experimental period? If so, that would be the thing wouldn’t it? If not, I think I can only repeat my previous suggestion of undergoing a sort of unofficial noviciate by living according to the Rule for six months or so and seeing how it works. Most of the things you probably do anyway and are things we ought to do. (The only one I’m doubtful about is the ‘special intention’ clause. I’m not quite sure what the theological implications are.) . . . Is the vow irrevocable or can you contract out again?

  About putting one’s Christian point of view to doctors and other unpromising subjects I’m in great doubt myself. All I’m clear about is that one sins if one’s real reasons for silence is simply the fear of looking a fool. I suppose one is right if one’s reason is that the other party will be repelled still further and only confirmed in his belief that Christians are troublesome and embarrassing people, to be avoided whenever possible. But I find it a dreadfully worrying problem. (I am quite sure that an importunate bit of evangelisation from a comparative stranger would not have done me any good when I was an unbeliever.)

  I think our official view of Confession can be seen in the form for the Visitation of the Sick where it says, ‘Then shall the sick person be moved (i.e. advised, prompted) to make a . . . Confession . . . if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matters.’ That is, where Rome makes Confession compulsory for all, we make it permissable for any: not ‘generally necessary’ but profitable. We do not doubt that there can be forgiveness without it. But, as your own experience shows, many people do not feel forgiveness, i.e. do not effectively believe in ‘the forgiveness of sins’ without it. The quite enormous advantage of coming really to believe in forgiveness is well worth the horrors (I agree that they are horrors) of a first Confession. Also, there is the gain in self-knowledge: most of us have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade. I certainly feel that I have profited enormously by the practice. At the same time I think we are quite right not to make it generally obligatory, which might force it on some who are not ready for it and might do harm . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College

  17 July 1953

  I’m v. glad you’ve seen that Christianity is as hard as nails: i.e. hard and tender at the same time. It’s the blend that does it: neither quality would be any good without the other. You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t—see the scene in Gethsemane. How thankful I am that when God became Man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves: that would not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much. Especially don’t worry (you may of course pray) about being brave over merely possible evils in the future. In the old battles it was usually the reserve, who had to watch the carnage, not the troops who were in it, whose nerve broke first. Similarly I think you in America feel much more anxiety about atomic bombs than we do: because you are further from the danger. If and when a horror turns up, you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. ‘Give us our daily bread’ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too: the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.

  The writer you quote was very good at the stage at wh. you met him: Now, as is plain, you’ve got beyond him. Poor boob—he thought his mind was his own. Never his own until he makes it Christ’s: up till then merely a result of heredity, environment, and the state of his digestion. I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

  ‘Does God seem real to me?’ It varies: just as lots of other things I firmly believe in (my own death, the solar system) feel more or less real at different times. I have dreamed dreams but not seen visions: but don’t think all that matters a hoot. And the saints say that visions are unimportant. If Ou
r Lord did seem to appear to you at your prayer (bodily) what after all could you do but go on with your prayers? How cd you know that it was not an hallucination? . . .

  No, no, I’m not committed to a real belief in Aslan, all that comes in a story. I haven’t the faintest idea whether there was a real Grail or not. Of course I believe that people are still healed by faith: whether that has happened in any particular case one can’t of course say without getting a real doctor who is also a real Christian to go through the whole case-history . . .

  TO MRS EMILY McLAY: from Magdalen College

  3 August 1953

  I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts, and specially we must not use an apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. XXV. 30–46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith—all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter III. 16–17).

  What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—‘It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, which I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical and natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule, ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’.

  But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalisations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted, and lots of other passages, we don’t and can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientist’s book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.