Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  The whole (unconscious) effort of the orthodox scholars is to remove the individual author and individual romance and substitute the picture of something diffusing itself like an infectious disease or a fashion in clothes. Hence the (really senseless) question ‘What is the Grail?’ The Grail is in each romance just what that romance exhibits it to be. There is no ‘Grail’ over and above these ‘Grails’. Hence, again, the assumption that the mystery in each romance could be cleared up if we knew more about the Celtic Caldron of Plenty or the Cathari or what you will. It never occurs to the scholars that this mysteriousness may be a calculated and wholly effective literary technique.

  I am entirely on the side of your Society [of Jesus] for shutting de Chardin up. The enormous boosts he is getting from scientists who are very hostile to you seem to me v. like the immense popularity of Pasternak among anti-Communists. I can’t for the life of me see his merit. The cause of Man against men never needed championing less than now. There seems to me a dangerous (but also commonplace) tendency to Monism or even Pantheism in his thoughts. And what in Heaven’s name is the sense of saying that before there was life there was ‘pre-life’. If you choose to say that before you switched on the light in the cellar there was ‘pre-light’, of course you may. But the ordinary English word for ‘pre-light’ is darkness. What do you gain by such nick-names?

  TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns

  16 October 1960

  I wasn’t at all questioning the life after death you know: only saying that its character is for us unimaginable. The things you tell me about it are all outside my powers of conception. To say, ‘They are now as they were then’ and add next moment, ‘unhampered of course by the body’ is to me like saying, ‘They are exactly the same but of course unimaginably different’. But don’t let us trouble one another about it. We shall know when we are dead ourselves. The Bible seems scrupulously to avoid any description of the other world, or worlds, except in terms of parable or allegory . . .

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalene College

  February 1961

  There are, as you know, two schools of Existentialism, one anti-religious and one religious. I know the anti-religious school only through one work—Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. I learned from it one important thing—that Sartre is an artist in French prose, has a sort of wintry grandeur which partly explains his immense influence. I couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher: but he is a great rhetorician.

  The religious school I know only from having heard a lecture by Gabriel Marcel and reading (in English) Martin Buber’s I and Thou. They both say almost exactly the same thing, though I believe they reached their common position quite independently. (As a man Marcel was a perfect old dear.) And what they are saying is impressive—as a mood, an aperçue, a subject for a poem. But I didn’t feel that it really worked out as a philosophy.

  I had been classifying Tillich more as an interpreter of the Bible than as a philosopher. I dare say you are right in thinking that for some people at some moments what I call semi-Christianity may be useful. After all, the road into the city and the road out of it are usually the same road: it depends on which direction one travels in.

  At the back of religious Existentialism lies Kierkegaard. They all revere him as their pioneer. Have you read him? I haven’t or hardly at all.

  TO DR ALASTAIR FOWLER: from Magdalene College

  4 May 1961

  You talk of Evolution as if it were a substance (like individual organisms) and even a rational substance or person. I had thought it was an abstract noun. So far as I know it is not impossible that in addition to God and the individual organisms there might be a sort of daemon, a created spirit, in the evolutionary process. But that view must surely be argued on its own merits? I mean we mustn’t unconsciously and without evidence, slip into the habit of hypostatising a noun . . .

  TO MRS MARGARET GRAY: from Magdalene College

  9 May 1961

  How right you are when you say ‘Christianity is a terrible thing for a lifelong atheist to have to face’! In people like us—adult converts in the 20th century—I take this feeling to be a good symptom. By the way, you have had in most respects a tougher life than I, but there’s one thing I envy you. I lost my wife last summer after a very late, very short, and intensely happy married life, but I have not been vouchsafed (and why the deuce shd I be?) a visit like yours—or certainly not except for one split second. Now about reading.

  For a good (‘popular’) defence of our position against modern woffle, to fall back on, I know nothing better than G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Harder reading, but very protective, is Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism & Belief. Charles Williams’ He Came Down from Heaven doesn’t suit everyone, but try it.

  For meditative and devotional reading (a little bit at a time, more like sucking a lozenge than eating a slice of bread) I suggest The Imitation of Christ (astringent) and Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (joyous). Also my selection from MacDonald, Geo MacDonald: An Anthology. I can’t read Kierkegaard myself, but some people find him helpful.

  For Christian morals I suggest my wife’s (Joy Davidman) Smoke on the Mountain: Gore’s The Sermon on the Mount and (perhaps) his Philosophy of the Good Life. And possibly (but with a grain of salt, for he is too puritanical) Wm Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. I know the v. title makes one shudder, but we have both got a lot of shuddering to get through before we’re done!

  You’ll want a mouth-wash for the imagination. I’m told that Mauriac’s novels (all excellently translated, if your French is rusty) are good, tho’ very severe. Dorothy Sayers’ Man Born to be King (those broadcast plays) certainly is. So, to me, but not to everyone, are Charles Williams’s fantastic novels. Pilgrim’s Progress, if you ignore some straw-splitting dialogues on Calvinist theology and concentrate on the story, is first class.

  St Augustine’s Confessions will give you the record of an earlier adult convert, with many v. great devotional passages intermixed.

  Do you read poetry? George Herbert at his best is extremely nutritious.

  I don’t mention the Bible because I take that for granted. A modern translation is for most purposes far more useful than [the] Authorized Version.

  As regards my own books, you might (or might not) care for Transposition, The Great Divorce, or The Four Loves.

  Yes—‘being done good to’—grrr! I never asked even to be.

  TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from Magdalene College

  23 May 1961

  I saw nothing rude in your manner, tho’ I thought you were misunderstanding me. I, you see, come to the matter from fighting on another front, against Atheists who say (I have seen it in print) ‘Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with a carpenter’s wife’. You used language which cd have been interpreted as an agreement with them. Naturally there is no disagreement between us on that point. And I wd agree that the supernatural begetting of Our Lord is the archtype, and human marriage the ectype: not the perversion (that wd seem to me Manichaean). All these agreements are perfectly consistent with a disagreement between us on the Immaculate Conception of Mary and your general Marian theology.

  Of course when one has decided that A is the Archtype and B the ectype one has not said A = B: i.e. whichever way you work it, it remains true that Mary was not the Bride of the Holy Ghost in the same sense in which the words are used of ordinary marriages: whereas she was the Mother of Jesus in exactly the same sense in wh. my mother was my mother—as Gervase Mathew said.196

  TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from The Kilns

  6 September 1961

  It’s a bit tricky. I am awaiting an operation on my prostate: but as this trouble upset my kidneys and my heart, these have to be set right before the surgeon can get to work. Meanwhile, I live on a no-protein diet, wear a catheter, sleep in a chair, and have to stay on the ground floor. I’m quite capable of having a guest, but the problem is that the date for the operation remains u
nfixed—it depends on how the weekly blood-tests go. This means that, for all I know, it might come just when you want to be here so I think you’d better make alternative arrangements, wh. cd be abandoned in favour of coming to The Kilns if, when the time comes, I shd be here and not in the Acland. I’d hate to miss the chance of a visit from you if it turns out to be feasible. Is this all too bothersome?

  You needn’t pity me too much. I am in no pain and I quite enjoy the hours of uninterrupted reading which I now get.

  [Jack had neglected his own health for a long time, and now he was seriously ill. He was unable to go to Cambridge during the Michaelmas Term of 1961 and Hilary Term of 1962. However, before he returned to take up his duties at Cambridge in April 1962, he read a good deal and wrote The Discarded Image.]

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns

  28 October 1961

  I’m not well enough to answer your letter properly . . . The nearest I can put up as a Scriptural warrant for prayers for the dead is the place in one of the Epistles about people being ‘baptized for the dead’. If we can be baptised for them, then surely we can pray for them? I’d like to give you the reference, but my Concordance is upstairs and—my heart being one of the things that is wrong with me—I’m not allowed to go upstairs.

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns

  3 December 1961

  Thank you for your letter of the 27 Nov. Your hand, though not yet nearly so bad as mine, deteriorates: but the bits I could read were very interesting. The difficulty about Hinduism, and indeed about all the higher Paganisms, seems to me to be our double task of reconciling and converting. The activities are almost opposites, yet must go hand in hand. We have to hurl down false gods and also elicit the peculiar truth preserved in the worship of each. I had just heard of Vinota: but what is an ashram or astram? Like the man in The Hunting of the Snark you ‘wholly forget that English is what I speak’!

  Try to time your next letter so that it does not arrive near Christmas. Every year the merciless spate of correspondence makes this season more pestilential and less festal for me.

  I forget whether you know that my wife died in July. Pray for us both. I am learning a great deal. Grief is not, as I thought, a state but a process: like a walk in a winding valley which gives you a new landscape every few miles.

  All blessings. I am tired, and slightly ill, at the moment, or I wd answer your letter more as it deserves.

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns

  20 December 1961

  To lose one’s wife after a very short married life may, I suspect, be less miserable than after a long one. You see, I had not grown accustomed to happiness. It was all a ‘treat’. I was like a child at a party. But perhaps earthly happiness, even of the most innocent sort, is I suspect, addictive. The whole being gets geared to it. The withdrawal must be more like lacking bread than lacking cake . . .

  About Nature—you are apparently meeting, at an unusually late hour, the difficulty which I met in adolescence and which was for years my stock argument against Theism. Romantic Pantheism has in this matter led us all up the garden path. It has taught us to regard Nature as divine. But she is a creature, and surely a creature lower than ourselves. And a fallen creature—not an evil creature but a good creature corrupted, retaining many beauties but all tainted . . . The Devil cd make nothing but has infected everything. I have always gone as near Dualism as Christianity allows—and the N.T. allows one to go v. near. The Devil is the (usurping) lord of this age. It was he, not God, who ‘bound this daughter of Abraham’.

  Even more disturbing, as you say, is the ghastly record of Christian persecution. It had begun in Our Lord’s time—‘Ye know not what spirit ye are of’ (John of all people!). I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man v. much better, it makes him v. much worse. It is, paradoxically, dangerous to draw nearer to God. Doesn’t one find in one’s own experience, that every advance (if one ever has advanced) in the spiritual life opens to one the possibility of blacker sins as well as brighter virtues? Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil. Satan was an angel. I wonder have any of us taken seriously enough the prohibition of casting pearls before swine? This is the point of Our Lord’s remarks after the parable of the Unjust Steward. We are denied many graces that we ask for because they would be our ruin. If we can’t be trusted even with the perishable wealth of this world, who will trust us with the real wealth? (The ‘Lord’ in this parable is of course not God but the world.) . . .

  I am rather seriously ill. Prostate trouble, by the time it was diagnosed, had already damaged my kidneys, blood, and heart, so that I’m now in a vicious circle. They can’t operate until my bio-chemistry gets right and it looks as if that can’t get right until they operate. I am in some danger—not sentenced but on trial for my life. I know I shall have your prayers. My temptation is not to impatience. Rather, I am far too inclined to snuggle down in the enforced idleness and other privileges of an invalid.

  Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I’m at present on his No Man Is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’ (further to the letter of 28 October): from The Kilns

  28 December 1961

  I’ve found the passage—I Cor. XV. 29. Also I Pet. III.19–21 bears indirectly on the subject. It implies that something can be done for the dead. If so, why should we not pray for them?

  Beware of the argument, ‘the Church gave the Bible and therefore the Bible can never give us grounds for criticising the Church’. It is perfectly possible to accept B on the authority of A and yet regard B as a higher authority than A. It happens when I recommend a book to a pupil. I first send him to the book, but having gone to it he knows (for I’ve told him) that the author knows more about the subject than I.

  TO THE REVD DR AUSTIN FARRER: from The Kilns

  29 December 1961

  I’ve read your book [Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited] with great enjoyment. You once said that you wrote with difficulty, but no one would guess it: this is full of felicities that sound as unsought as wildflowers . . .

  Of course admiration is not always agreement. I stick at the diagnosis, ‘Emotional reaction rather than rational conviction’ . . . How do people decide what is an emotion and what is a value judgement? Not presumably just by introspection wh. will certainly be hard put to it to find a value judgement chemically pure from emotion . . . I find however that the problem of animal pain is just as tough when I concentrate on creatures I dislike as on ones I cd make pets of. Conversely, if I removed all emotion from, say my view of Hitler’s treatment of Jews, I don’t know how much value judgement would remain. I loathe hens. But my conscience would say the same things if I forgot to feed them as if I forgot to feed the cat . . .

  TO WAYNE SCHUMAKER: from The Kilns

  21 March 1962

  Thanks for the article on Paradise Lost. I think I agree with all you say, especially your distinction between what is common to all the myths and what is peculiar to Paradise Lost. Possibly that kind of distinction should be pressed even further. Thus the child is not like the savage simpliciter but like a savage in close contact with and subject to civilisation: controlled, protected, corrupted and elevated by it at every turn. Again, does not a myth built into a systematic and fully believed theology differ, by that very fact, from a myth told by primitive man (usually in explanation of a ritual)? For I doubt whether primitives stand to their myths in a relation of full credal affirmation such as one finds in Christianity and Islam. All this had happened to the Fall story long before Milton. Indeed M’s great success lies in practising the credal affirmation without losing the quality of myth. M does lose this (for me) in Books XI and XII, I’m afraid.

  [Jack and T. S. Eliot had become good friends after they began meeting in 1959 as members of the ‘Commission to Revise the Psalter’
. The first part of the Psalter was published in 1961 and the complete work, The Revised Psalter, was published in 1963. Jack had also been consulted about points of translation of the New Testament section of The New English Bible.]

  TO T. S. ELIOT: from Magdalene College

  25 May 1962

  You need not sympathise too much: if my condition keeps me from doing some things I like, it also excuses me from doing a good many things I don’t. There are two sides to everything!

  We must have a talk—I wish you’d write an essay on it—about Punishment. The modern view, by excluding the retributive element and concentrating solely on deterrence and cure, is hideously immoral. It is vile tyranny to submit a man to compulsory ‘cure’ or sacrifice him to the deterrence of others, unless he deserves it. On the other view what is there to prevent any of us being handed over to Butler’s ‘Straighteners’ at any moment?

  I’d have to know more about the Greek of that period to make a real criticism of the N.E.B. (N.T. which is the only part I’ve seen). Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.

  TO JAMES E. HIGGINS: from The Kilns

  31 July 1962

  I shall be glad to help if I can. It is however rather a big IF, for my knowledge of children’s literature is really very limited. The real expert is Roger L. Green, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire. My own range is about exhausted by MacDonald, Tolkien, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame. The Alice books are, aren’t they, in a totally different category, the effect being exclusively comic-nonsensical: not, in my experience, fully appreciated by children. Oh by the way, don’t miss the utterly unexpected influence of Rabelais on Kingsley’s Water Babies.