by C. S. Lewis
The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues. But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.
You know what Luther said: ‘Do you doubt if you are chosen? Then say your prayers and you may conclude that you are.’
TO MRS EMILY McLAY: from Magdalen College
8 August 1953
Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point.
Same here. The two things one must not do are (a) To believe, on the strength of Scripture or on any other evidence, that God is in any way evil. (In Him is no darkness at all.) (b) To wipe off the slate any passage which seems to show that He is. Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [it] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. Till then, it must be just left on one side.
But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh because God speaks not only for us little ones but also to great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about and to whom all the words have therefore different, richer contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand be for that v. reason rather suspect? To a child it wd seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true.
TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College
9 January 1954
Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people—the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered . . .
I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it . . . Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’? . . .
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College (Dom Bede was concerning himself with the problems of Christian missionary work in India.)
16 January 1954
I suspect that a great going-to-meet-them is needed not only on the level of thought but in method. A man who had lived all his life in India said ‘That country might be Christian now if there had been no Missions in our sense but many single missionaries walking the roads with their begging-bowls. For that is the sort of Holy Man India believes in and she will never believe in any other.’ Of course we must beware of thinking of ‘the East’ as if it were homogeneous. I suppose the Indian and the Chinese ethos are as alien to each other as either is to us.
The article on Tolerance in that same issue made my flesh creep. What do they mean by ‘Error has no rights’? Of course Error has no rights, because it is not a person: in the same sense Truth has no rights. But if they mean ‘Erroneous persons have no rights’, surely this is as contrary to the plain dictates of Natural Law as any proposition could be?
Quite a different question. Has any one composed prayers for children NOT on the sense of special prayers supposed suitable for their age (which easily leads to wish-wash) BUT simply in the sense of translation of ordinary prayers into the easiest language? And wd it be worth doing?
TO MISS PAULINE BAYNES: from Magdalen College (Miss Baynes had been chosen to illustrate ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.)
21 January 1954
I lunched with Bles yesterday to see the drawings for The Horse [and His Boy] and feel I must write to tell you how very much we both enjoyed them. It is delightful to find (and not only for selfish reasons) that you do each book a little bit better than the last—it is nice to see an artist growing. (If only you cd take six months off and devote them to anatomy, there’s no limit to your possibilities.)
Both the drawings of Lasaraleen in the litter were a rich feast of line & of fantastic-satiric imagination: my only regret was that we couldn’t have both. Shasta among the tombs (in the new technique, wh. is lovely) was exactly what I wanted. The pictures of Rabadash hanging on the hook and just turning into an ass were the best comedy you’ve done yet. The Tisroc was superb: far beyond anything you were doing five years ago. I thought that your human faces—the boys, K. Lune etc.—were, this time, really good. The crowds are beautiful, realistic yet also lovely wavy compositions: but your crowds always were. How did you do Tashbaan? We only got its full wealth by using a magnifying glass! The result is exactly right. Thanks enormously for all the intense work you have put into them all. And more power to your elbow: congratulations . . .
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College
23 January 1954
I have a taste for Dickens but don’t think it a low one. He is the great author on mere affection (στoργη): only he & Tolstoi (another great favourite of mine) really deal with it. Of course his error lies in thinking it will do instead of Agape. Scott, as D. Cecil said, has, not the civilised mind, but the civilised heart. Unforced nobility, generosity, liberality, flow from him. But Thackeray I positively dislike. He is the voice of ‘the World’. And his supposedly ‘good’ women are revolting: jealous pharisiennes. The publicans and sinners will go in before Mrs Pendennis and La. Castlewood . . .
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College
30 January 1954
Yes, I’d certainly rule out Little Emily and Little Nell and all the ‘littles’. The Marchioness is the real thing.
The trouble in Thackeray, is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming, & . . . infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus) leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.
TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College
18 February 1954
Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is ‘charity’. Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storge (family affection) and Philia (friendship). So there are four kinds of love, all good in their proper place, but Agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. There are people I mustn’t feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for: but I can practise Agape to God, Angels, Man and Beast, to the good and the bad, the old and the young, the far and the near.
You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St Paul says about it in First Corinthians Chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Agape in action in St Luke, Chap. 10. vv. 30–35. And then, better still, look
at Matthew Ch. 25. vv. 31–46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time and toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, tho’ it is all giving—you needn’t expect any reward—how you do get rewarded almost at once.
Yes. I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval: but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and the sky) instead . . .
[After a good deal of effort, Cambridge University persuaded Jack to accept the newly-created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature—a position created with him in mind. Although he had to teach at Magdalen during the Michaelmas Term of 1954 (he finished his last tutorial at 12.50 p.m. on 3 December), he gave his Inaugural Lecture in Cambridge on 29 November 1954. It was published under the title De Descriptione Temporum. He did not move to Magdalene College, Cambridge until 7 January 1955.]
TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College
30 July 1954
Yes, I have been made Professor of ‘Medieval & Renaissance English’ at Cambridge: the scope of the chair (a new one) suits me exactly. But it won’t be as big a change as you might think. I shall still live at Oxford in the Vac. and on many week ends in term. My address will be Magdalene, so I remain under the same Patroness. This is nice because it saves ‘Admin’ re-adjustments in Heaven: also I can’t help feeling that the dear lady now understands my constitution better than a stranger would . . .
TO MRS URSULA ROBERTS: from Magdalen College
31 July 1954
I am certainly unfit to advise anyone else on the devotional life. My own rules are (1) To make sure that, wherever else they may be placed, the main prayers should not be put ‘last thing at night’. (2) To avoid introspection in prayer—I mean not to watch one’s own mind to see if it is in the right frame, but always to turn the attention outwards to God. (3) Never, never to try to generate an emotion by will power. (4) To pray without words when I am able, but to fall back on words when tired or otherwise below par. With renewed thanks. Perhaps you will sometimes pray for me?
TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College
1 November 1954
I think it would be dangerous to suppose that Satan had created all the creatures that are disagreeable or dangerous to us for (a) those creatures, if they could think, wd have just the same reason for thinking that we were created by Satan. (b) I don’t think evil, in the strict sense, can create. It can spoil something that Another has created. Satan may have corrupted other creatures as well as us. Part of the corruption in us might be the unreasoning horror and disgust we feel at some creatures quite apart from any harm they can do us. (I can’t abide a spider myself.) We have scriptural authority for Satan originating diseases—see Luke XIII.16.
Do you know, the suffering of the innocent is less of a problem to me v. often than that of the wicked. It sounds absurd: but I’ve met so many innocent sufferers who seem to be gladly offering their pain to God in Christ as part of the Atonement, so patient, so meek, even so at peace, and so unselfish that we can hardly doubt they are being, as St Paul says, ‘made perfect by suffering’. On the other hand I meet selfish egoists in whom suffering seems to produce only resentment, hate, blasphemy, and more egoism. They are the real problem.
Christian Scientists seem to me to be altogether too simple. Granted that all the evils are illusions, still, the existence of that illusion wd be a real evil and presumably a real evil permitted by God. That brings us back to exactly the same point as we began from. We have gained nothing by the theory. We are still faced with the great mystery, not explained, but coloured, transmuted, all through the Cross. Faith, not wild over-simplifications, is what will help, don’t you think? It is so v. difficult to believe that the travail of all creation which God Himself descended to share, at its most intense, may be necessary in the process of turning finite creatures (with free wills) into—well, Gods . . .
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College
1 November 1954
Your book came at a moment of low spiritual temper, external worry, and (mild) physical pain. I had prayed v. hard a couple of nights before that my faith might be strengthened. The response was immediate and your book gave the finishing touch. It did me a great deal of good: apart, of course from its lower gains in the way of interest and enjoyment. That made an objective literary judgement v. difficult, but I think you have probably done it very well. It must have been a job to keep it so short without becoming perfunctory, and so subjective without being (and it is not in the least) mawkish or suffocating. Much that you said about the Sacraments was v. illuminating. One felt how Paganism does not merely survive but first becomes really itself in the v. heart of Christianity. By the way wd you agree that the un-Christening of Europe (much of it) is an even bigger change that its Christening? So that the gap between Professor [Gilbert] Ryle and, say Dante, is wider than that between Dante and Virgil?
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College
5 November 1954
The best Dickens always seems to me to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.
About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria. It is the bright frontispiece [which] whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT (NÉE MATHEWS): from Magdalen College
17 December 1954
Would you believe it: an American school girl has been expelled from her school for having in her possession a copy of my Screwtape. I asked my informant whether it was a Communist school, or a Fundamentalist school, or an RC school, and got the shattering answer, ‘No, it was a select school’. That puts a chap in his place, doesn’t it? . . .
TO JOCELYN GIBB: from Magdalen College (Mr Gibb, who had been the partner of Geoffrey Bles for a few years, took over the publishing firm of Geoffrey Bles Ltd when Mr Bles retired in 1954. He had sent Jack handsomely bound copies of Surprised by Joy and Mere Christianity.)
22 December 1954
I never had a handsomer present (both in a bibliophile’s and in Mr Woodhouse’s sense of the word handsome). Perhaps these two charming volumes will teach me at last to have for the bodies of my own books the same reverence I have for the bodies of all other books. For it is a curious fact that I never can regard them as being really books; the boards and print, in however mint a condition, remain a mere pretence behind which one sees the scratchy, inky old MS. You might do a little research to find out if it is so with all authors. Thank you so much. Who did them?
I am always glad to hear of anyone’s taking up that Cinderella, The Great Divorce.
With renewed thanks and all good wishes for Christmas and the New Year.
TO I. O. EVANS: from Magdalen College
22 December 1954
About the word ‘hiking’ my own objection wd lie only against its abuse for something so simple as taking an ordinary ‘walk’: i.e. to the passion for making specialised & self-conscious stunts out of activities which have hitherto been as ordinary as shaving or playing with the kitten. Kipling’s Janeites, where he makes a sort of secret-society-rit
ual out of (of all things!) reading Jane Austen is a specimen. Or professionals on the BBC playing to an audience the same games we used to play for ourselves at children’s parties. I expect any day to find a book written on how to swing your stick when you walk or a club (with badges) formed for Singers in the Bath.
There was a grain of seriousness in my sally against the Civil Service.175 I don’t think you have worse taste or worse hearts than other men. But I do think that the State is increasingly tyrannical and you, inevitably, are among the instruments of that tyranny . . . This doesn’t matter for you who did most of your service when the subject was still a freeman. For the rising generation it will become a real problem, at what point the policies you are ordered to carry out have become so iniquitous that a decent man must seek some other profession. I expect you really feel at least as strongly as I do about it. All good wishes.
[On 28 December 1954 the Society held ‘A Milton Evening in honour of Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis’. They published for the occasion a pamphlet containing tributes to both men and a facsimile of the following undated letter. William B. Hunter Jr was Secretary of the Society.]
TO THE MILTON SOCIETY OF AMERICA: from Magdalen College