From C. S. Lewis (I)
My own position at the threshold of Xtianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true; I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all that modern stuff about concealed wishes and wishful thinking, however useful it may be for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one’s wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one’s conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides. What I think one can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Xtianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to Him ‘Keep out! Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I v. much doubt whether even you wd. find it simply pleasant. Isn’t the truth this: that it wd. gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and out-rage a great many others? So let’s wash out all the wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.
I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion— Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xtianity. Clear, lucid, trans-parent, simple religion (Tao plus a shadowy, ethical god in the background) is a late development, usually arising among highly educated people in great cities. What you really start with is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death & return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all. The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism & Xtianity: there you get both Metaphysics and Cult (continuous with the primeval cults). That is why my first step was to be sure that one or other of these had the answer. For the reality can’t be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things aren’t like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet—milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics). There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can’t believe, (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough. (c.)The (claimed) fulfilment of these in Hinduism, (d.) The claimed fulfilment of these in Xtianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn’t really join the two strands. Unredeemably savage religion goes on in the village; the Hermit philosophises in the forest: and neither really interferes with the other. It is only Xtianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.
Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man the best popular apologetic I know.
Meanwhile, the attempt to practice the Tao is certainly the right line. Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.’ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans.
I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again, or call, if you think I can be of any help.
To C. S. Lewis (II)
My fundamental dilemma is this: I can’t believe in Christ unless I have faith, but I can’t have faith unless I believe in Christ. This is ‘the leap.’ If to be a Christian is to have faith (and clearly it is), I can put it thus: I must accept Christ to become a Christian, but I must be a Christian to accept Him. I don’t have faith and I don’t as yet believe; but everyone seems to say: ‘You must have faith to believe.’ Where do I get it? Or will you tell me something different? Is there a proof? Can Reason carry one over the gulf. . . without faith ?
Why does God expect so much of us? Why does he require this effort to believe? If He made it clear that He is—as clear as a sunrise or a rock or a baby’s cry—wouldn’t we be right joyous to choose Him and His Law? Why should the right exercise of our free will contain this fear of intellectual dishonesty ?
I must write further on the subject of ‘wishing it were true’— although I do agree that I probably have wishes on both sides, and my wish does not help me to solve any problem. Your point that Hitler and Stalin (and I) would be horrified at discovering a Master from whom nothing could be withheld is very strong. Indeed, there is nothing in Christianity which is so repugnant to me as humility—the bent knee. If I knew beyond hope or despair that Christianity were true, my fight for ever after would have to be against the pride of ‘the spine may break but it never bends’. And yet, Sir, would not I (and even Stalin) accept the humbling of the Master to escape the horror of ceasing to be, of nothingness at death? Moreover, the knowledge that Jesus was in truth Lord would not be merely pleasant news gratifying some of our rare desires. It would mean overwhelmingly: (a) that Materialism was Error as well as ugliness; (b) that the several beastly futures predicted by the Marxists, the Freudians, and the Sociologist manipulators would not be real (even if they came about); (c) that one’s growth towards wisdom—soul-building—was not to be lost; and (d), above all, that the good and the beautiful would survive. And so I wish it were true and would accept any humbling, I think, for it to be true. The bad part of wishing it were true is that any impulse I feel towards belief is regarded with suspicion as stemming from the wish; the good part is that the wish leads on. And I shall go on; I must go on, as far as I can go.
From C. S. Lewis (II)
The contradiction ‘we must have faith to believe and must believe to have faith’ belongs to the same class as those by which the Eleatic philosophers proved that all motion was impossible. And there are many others. You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water & you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim. Or again, in an act of volition (e.g. getting up in the morning) is the very beginning of the act itself voluntary or involuntary? If voluntary then you must have willed it, . you were willing already, .. it was not really the beginning. If involuntary, then the continuation of the act (being determined by the first moment) is involuntary too. But in spite of this we do swim, & we do get out of bed.
I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will & honesty of my best & oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alter-natives. The case for Xtianity in general is well given by Chester-ton; and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks. As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which wd. be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late. ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’ The magnanimity, the generosity wh. will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you wd. have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error
wd. even so be more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how cd. that be? How cd. an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life, and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in the fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What wd. be a bribe if it came first had better come last.
It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food! i.e. if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, weren’t designed to eat, wd. we feel hungry? You say the materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that! If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Dofishcomplain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married! I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
Total Humility is not in the Tao because the Tao (as such) says nothing about the Object to which it wd. be the right response: just as there is no law about railways in the acts of Q_. Elizabeth. But from the degree of respect wh. the Tao demands for ancestors, parents, elders, & teachers, it is quite clear what the Tao wd. prescribe towards an object such as God.
But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
These letters gave us much to think on, then and later. Seldom if ever have I encountered anybody who could say so much in so little. And the letters frightened us, or frightened me anyway— especially that shocking last paragraph. This was getting serious. Alarum bells sounded, but I couldn’t decide where to run.
Intellectually, our positions here on the brink were the same. We had had that second look, and we had found—what had we found? Much more than we expected to find, certainly. Christianity now appeared intellectually stimulating and aesthetically exciting. The personality of Jesus emerged from the Gospels with astonishing consistency. Whenever they were written, they were written in the shadow of a personality so tremendous that Christians who may never have seen him knew him utterly: that strange mixture of unbearable sternness and heartbreaking tenderness. No longer did the Church appear only a disreputable congeries of quarrelling sects: now we saw the Church, splendid and terrible, sweeping down the centuries with anthems and shining crosses and steady-eyed saints. No longer was the Faith something for children: intelligent people held it strongly—and they walked to a secret singing that we could not hear. Or did we hear something: high and clear and unbearably sweet ?
Christianity had come to seem to us probable. It all hinged on this Jesus. Was he, in fact, the Lord Messiah, the Holy One of Israel, the Christ? Was he, indeed, the incarnate God? Very God of very God? This was the heart of the matter. Did he rise from the dead? The Apostles, the Evangelists, Paul believed it with utter conviction. Could we believe on their belief? Believe in a miracle? The fact that we had never seen a miracle did not prove, or even imply, that there might not be miracles at the supreme occasion of history. There was absolutely no proof, no proof possible, that it didn’t happen. No absolute proof that it did. It seemed to us probable. It had a sort offeel of truth. A ring of truth. But was that enough ?
Emotionally, our positions were not the same. I was excited, enthralled even, by the intellectual challenge. I might not have admitted it, but I was coming to love the Jesus that emerged from the New Testament writings. I had impulses to fall on my knees and reach out to him. I suspected that all the yearnings for I knew not what that I had ever felt—when autumn leaves were burning in the twilight, when wild geese flew crying overhead, when I looked up at bare branches against the stars, when spring arrived on an April morning—were in truth yearnings for him. For God. I yearned towards him. But I didn’t think of need. I didn’t need him— not consciously.
But Davy’s emotional position was not the same—there was need. What we talked about, mostly, were the intellectual things that can be put into words so much more easily than feelings, especially feelings that are not, perhaps, altogether known to oneself. But there were for Davy needs growing out of sin and pain. She had not forgotten of course that night when ‘all the world fell away’—the experience she painted in her ‘Sin Picture’ with its prophetic shadow of the crucified Lord. Even then, intuitively, she had known what it all pointed to. That experience and the very different one of the evil man in the park—the frightful evil of the monstrous ego— had, I think, undermined her confidence in herself and even, perhaps, undermined her confidence in the beautiful ‘us-sufficiency’of our love. She didn’t know it, nor did I, but the Shining Barrier was not quite invulnerable. Moreover, we were both a little worried about her health: nothing clearly wrong, but she didn’t feel quite as chipper as she ought to have done. Finally, her mother was dying of cancer. Davy’s sister, who was taking care of their mother, had practically commanded Davy to go on to England, partly because her not doing so would be a grief to her mother. But Davy was deeply aware of her mother’s suffering. And then, two or three months after our arrival in England, her mother died. All of this I knew, sharing her feelings, but all at one remove. But for Davy, with a poignancy that could not be utterly shared, there was not only a shaken confidence but a vivid experiencing of sin, suffering, grief, and death.
Thus, though her mind, too, asked the intellectual questions— questions to which answers were flooding in through our books— Christianity was offering consolation and assurance and, even, absolution. It fell into her soul as the water of life. One evening, after a lively discussion of the faith with Lew and Mary Ann, I asked Davy if she felt that she was near to believing that Christ was God. She said, ‘Well, I think He might be.’ And I said that ‘thinking’ he ‘might’ be was not the same as believing. She put this exchange in the Journal; and then she wrote: ‘Underneath I kept wanting to say “I do, I do believe in Jesus—Jesus the Son of God and divine”.’ She added: ‘I owe this to C. S. Lewis who has impressed me deeply with the necessity of Jesus to any thinking about God.’
She was on the brink, indeed—and then she leaped. Only two days later she wrote:
Today, crossing from one side of the room to the other, I lumped together all I am, all I fear, hate, love, hope; and, well, DID it. I committed my ways to God in Christ.
She was alone when she took that walk across the room, and she told me when I came in an hour later. I was neither shocked nor astonished. It was as though I had known she would do it. I felt a sort of gladness for her, and told her. I also felt a bit forlorn, and perhaps there was an unformulated thought, which would not have borne the light of day, that she shouldn’t have done it without me. I did not think about the implications for our future that day. Did I sense that I should follow her ?
A few nights later, after a rather gentle talk about Christianity, she went to bed, leaving me lying upon the sofa in front of the fire reading Lewis’s Miracles. A half hour passed. I let the book fall and switched off the lamp. Gazing into the glowing coals, I wondered with a strange mixture of hope and fear whether Christ might be in very truth my God. Suddenly I became aware that Davy was praying beside me—she had stolen into the room in her nightgown and knel
t down by the sofa. I looked at the quiet figure for a few moments. I had never seen her pray. Then she spoke.
‘When I was in bed,’ she said very softly, ‘it seemed to me that God was telling me to come to you. I have prayed to God to fulfil your soul.’
She paused a moment, and then she whispered: ‘Oh, my dearest— please believe!’
Moved almost to tears, I whispered back—a broken whisper, she wrote in the Journal—I whispered, ‘Oh, I do believe.’ I was shaken by the affirmation that swept over me. She wrote that in the fire-light I looked ‘gentle and sweet like some medieval saint.’ And she wrote, ‘We held one another tightly.’
‘Hold to this moment,’ she murmured. ‘Hold to it when doubts come. This is the true—I know it is.’
But I did not hold on to it. I wish I had, if only for her sake. But, indeed, it was love for her that made me say it, not belief in God. Or so I told myself next morning. Or perhaps it was the assent of the heart and not the mind. Anyhow, the joy we might have shared that Advent, going together, hand in hand, was—except for that one holy night—denied. And yet I did not forget that sudden sincerity of believing, the affirmation welling up. Maybe it wasn’t just love for her.
Still, I was back in the camp of the non-believers. And now I began to resent her conversion. I did not, I thought, resent her being a Christian; I resented her acting like one. Going to church without me—practically unfaithfulness. Going with all the other Christians, leaving me alone. I even resented her little special goodnesses, even goodness to me. I suspected she was doing it for God. I wanted the old Davy back. I didn’t want her to be where I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—go. I didn’t like my new isolation. The fun of our looking into Christianity was gone. I felt sulky.
A Severe Mercy Page 10