60 Learning In Wartime
60 LEARNING IN WARTIME
A sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, Autumn, 1939
A UNIVERSITY IS a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we - indeed how can we - continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?
Now it seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the side of certain other questions which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peacetime. I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns. But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.
The moment we do so we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues, but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.
This indeed is the case with most of us: certainly with me. For that reason I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature.
But since we are fallen creatures the fact that this is now our nature would not, by itself, prove that it is rational or right. We have to inquire whether there is really any legitimate place for the activities of the scholar in a world such as this. That is, we have always to answer the question: "How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls?" and we have, at the moment, to answer the additional question, "How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war?" Now part of our answer will be the same for both questions. The one implies that our life can, and ought, to become exclusively and explicitly religious: the other, that it can and ought to become exclusively national. I believe that our whole life can, and indeed must, become religious in a sense to be explained later. But if it is meant that all our activities are to be of the kind that can be recognized as "sacred" and opposed to "secular" then I would give a single reply to both my imaginary assailants. I would say, "Whether it ought to happen or not, the thing you are recommending is not going to happen." Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one's life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things. Before I went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war. In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign; and I am pleased to find that Tolstoi, in the greatest war book ever written, records the same thing and so, in its own way, does the Iliad. Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life. Christians and soldiers are still men: the infidel's idea of a religious life, and the civilian's idea of active service, are fantastic. If you attempted, in either case, to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better. You are not, in fact, going to read nothing, either in the Church or in the line: if you don't read good books you will read bad ones. If you don't go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall into sensual satisfactions.
There is therefore this analogy between the claims of our religion and the claims of the war: neither of them, for most of us, will simply cancel or remove from the slate the merely human life which we were leading before we entered them. But they will operate in this way for different reasons. The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object, and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul. In order to avoid misunderstanding I must here make a few distinctions. I believe our cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous, and I therefore believe it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute. Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man, and perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn life-saving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in the sense of giving it his total attention -so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim - he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God himself.
It is for a very different reason that religion cannot occupy the whole of life in the sense of excluding all our natural activities. For, of course, in some sense, it must occupy the whole of life. There is no question of a compromise between the claims of God and the claims of culture, or politics, or anything else. God's claim is infinite and inexorable. You can refuse it: or you can begin to try to grant it. There is no middle way. Yet in spite of this it is clear that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. He even assumes that Christians may go to dinner parties, and, what is more. dinner parties given by pagans. Our Lord attends a wedding and provides miraculous wine. Under the aegis of His Church, and in the most Christian ages, learning and the arts flourish.
The solution of this paradox is, of course, well known to you. "Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."
All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials. No doubt, in a given situation, it demands the surrender of some, or of all, our merely human pursuits: it is better to be saved with one eye, than, having two, to be cast into Gehenna. But it does this, in a sense, per accidens - because, in those special circumstances, it has ceased to be possible to practise this or that activity to the glory of God. There is no essential quarrel between the spiritual life and the human activities as such. Thus the omnipresence of obedience to God in a Christian's life is, in a way, analogous to the omnipresence of God in space. God does not fill space as a body fills it, in the sense that parts of Him are in different parts of space, excluding other objects from them. Yet He is everywhere - totally present at every point of space - according to good theologians.
We are now in a position to answer the view that human culture is an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we. I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious - as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks. I think it was Matthew Arnold who first used the English word spiritual in the sense of the German geistlich, and so inaugurated this most dangerous and most antiChristian error. Let us clear it forever from our minds. The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly "as to the Lord". This does not, of course, mean that it is for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should sweep rooms or compose symphonies. A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man's upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life. By leading that life to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be, as Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie. I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God's sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so. Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not too much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God. That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters - for men who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience to our vocation. This is the teleological argument that the existence of the impulse and the faculty prove that they must have a proper function in God's scheme - the argument by which Thomas Aquinas proves that sexuality would have existed even without the Fall. The soundness of the argument, as regards culture, is proved by experience. The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the Theologia Germanica says, we may come to love knowledge - our knowing - more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.
That is the essential nature of the learned life as I see it. But it has indirect values which are especially important to-day. If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
The learned life then is, for some, a duty. At the moment it looks as if it were your duty. I am well aware that there may seem to be an almost comic discrepancy between the high issues we have been considering and the immediate task you may be set down to, such as Anglo-Saxon sound laws or chemical formulae. But there is a similar shock awaiting us in every vocation - a young priest finds himself involved in choir treats and a young subaltern in accounting for pots of jam. It is well that it should be so. It weeds out the vain, windy people and keeps in those who are both humble and tough. On that kind of difficulty we need waste no sympathy. But the peculiar difficulty imposed on you by the war is another matter: and of it I would again repeat, what I have been saying in one form or another ever since I started - do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is. Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental exercises which may serve as defences against the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar.
The first enemy is excitement - the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our world. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can.
The second enemy is frustration - the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say "No time for that", "Too late now,” and "Not for me". But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his longterm plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord". It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man - and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane - need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things: but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us; only a question of this death or of that - of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier: but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering: and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish unChristian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.
61 LETTERS
[Though I have reprinted only Lewis's own letters here, I have attempted to place them in their proper contexts by citing the sources of the letters from the various correspondents which Lewis was answering, or who were answering him. Thus the sub-divisions (a), (b), (c), and so forth. - Ed.]
61-1 The Conditions for a Just War
(a) E.L. Mascall, “The Christian and the Next War", Theology, Vol. XXXVIII January 1939), pp. 53-8
(b) C. S. Lewis, “The Conditions for a Just War", ibid. (May 1939), pp. 373-74
In your January number Mr Mascall mentions six conditions for a just war which have been laid down by “theologians". I have one question to ask, and a number of problems to raise, about these rules. The question is merely historical. Who are these theologians, and what kind or degree of authority can they claim over members of the Church of England? The problems are more difficult. Condition 4 lays down that “it must be morally certain that the losses, to the belligerents, the world, and religion, will not outweigh the advantages of winning"; and 6, that "there must be a considerable probability of winning". It is plain that equally sincere people can differ to any extent and argue for ever as to whether a proposed war fulfils these conditions or not. The practical question, therefore, which faces us is one of authority. Who bas the duty of deciding when the conditions are fulfilled, and the right of enforcing his decision? Modern discussions tend to assume without argument that the answer is “The private conscience of the individual", and that any other answer is immoral and totalitarian. Now it is certain, in some sense, that “no duty of obedience can justify a sin", as Mr Mascall says. Granted that capital punishment is compatible with Christianity, a Christian may lawfully be a hangman; but he must not hang a man whom he knows to be innocent. But will anyone interpret this to mean that the hangman has the same duty of investigating the prisoner's guilt which the judge has? If so, no executive can work and no Christian state is possible; which is absurd. I conclude that the hangman has done his duty if he has done his share of the general duty, resting upon all citizens alike, to ensure, so far as in him lies, that we have an honest judicial system; if, in spite of this, and unknowingly, he hangs an innocent man, then a sin has been committed, but not by him. This analogy suggests to me that it must be absurd to give to the private citizen the same right and duty of deciding the justice of a given war which rests on governments; and I submit that the rules for determining what wars are just were originally rules for the guidance of princes, not subjects. This does not mean that private persons must obey governments commanding them to do what they know is sin; but perhaps it does mean (I write it with some reluctance) that the ultimate decision as to what the situation at a given moment is in the highly complex field of international affairs is one which must be delegated. No doubt we must make every effort which the constitution allows to ensure a good government and to influence public opinion; but in the long run, the nation, as a nation, must act, and it can act only through its government. (It must be remembered that there are risks in both directions: if war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.} What is the alternative? That individuals ignorant of history and strategy should decide for themselves whether condition 6 (“a considerable probability of winning") is, or is not, fulfilled? - or that every citizen, neglecting his own vocation and not weighing his capacity, is to become an expert on all the relevant, and often technical, problems?
Decisions by the private conscience of each Christian in the light of Mr Mascall's six rules would divide Christians from each other and result in no dear Christian witness to the pagan world around us. But a dear Christian witness might be attained in a different way. If all Christians consented to bear arms at the command of the magistrate, and if all, after that, refused to obey antiChristian orders, should we not get a dear issue? A man is much more certain that he ought not to murder prisoners or bomb civilians than he ever can be about the justice of a war. It is perhaps here that “conscientious objection" ought to begin. I feel certain that one Christian airman shot for refusing to bomb enemy civilians would be a more effective martyr (in the etymological sense of the word) than a hundred Christians in jail for refusing to join the army.
Christendom has made two efforts to deal with the evil of war - chivalry and pacifism. Neither succeeded. But I doubt whether chivalry has such an unbroken record of failure as pacifism.
The question is a very dark one. I should welcome about equally refutation, or development, of what I have said.
61-2 The Conflict in Anglican Theology
(a) Oliver C. Quick, “The Conflict in Anglican Theology", Theology, Vol. LXI (October 1940), pp. 234-7
(b) C. S Lewis, ibid. (November 1940), p. 304
Sir,
In an admirable letter contributed to your October number Canon Quick remarks, “'Moderns' of every kind have one characteristic in common: they hate Liberalism." Would it not be equally true to say, more shortly, “'Moderns' of every kind have one characteristic in common: they hate?" The matter deserves, perhaps, more attention than it has received.
61-3 Miracles
(a) Peter May, “Miracles", The Guardian (9th October 1942), p. 323
(b) C. S. Lewis, ibid. (16th October 1942), p. 331
Sir,
In answer to Mr May's question, I reply that whether the birth of St John Baptist were a miracle or no, it was not the same miracle as the birth of our Lord. (Note: Mr May was criticizing Lewis's essay on “Miracles” in God in the Dock) What was abnormal about St Elizabeth's pregnancy was that she was an elderly (married) woman, hitherto sterile. That Zacharias was the father of St John is implied in the text (“shall bear thee a son", Luke 1:13).
Of the natural conversion of water into wine, what I said was: "God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities." (Note: God in the Dock p. 16) For completeness I should, no doubt, have added “with the aid of the soil", and perhaps other things; but this would not, from my point of view, have materially altered what I was saying. My answer to Mr May's question - where the other raw materials came from -would be the same, whether the list of raw materials be reduced to the mere vegetable and sunlight I mentioned, or extended to bring in all that the skilled botanist might add. I think they came from the same source at Cana whence they come in nature. I agree with Mr May, of course, that on the hypothesis of the story being fiction, we can attach to it, as our ancestors did to the miracles in Ovid, any number of edifying moralitates. What I was doing was to combat that particular argument for its falsity which rests on the idea that, if it occurred, such an event would be arbitrary and meaningless.
61-4 Mr C. S. Lewis on Christianity
I agree with Mr W.R. Childe that it is no use to say «Lord, Lord", if we do not do what Christ tells us: that, indeed, is one of the reasons why I think an aesthetic religion of “flowers and music" insufficient (Note: Mr Childe had taken exception with a passage in Lewis’s BBC broadcast “The Map and the Ocean" in which he said, in speaking of a “vague religion", that “you will not get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music". The Listener, Vol. XXXI (24th February 1944), p. 216. The broadcast was later to become a chapter in Lewis's Mere Christianity (Londen, 1952), Bk. IV, ch. i. p. 122). My reason for thinking that a mere statement of even the highest ethical principles is not enough is precisely that to know these things is not necessarily to do them, and if Christianity brought no healing to the impotent will, Christ's teaching would not help us. I cannot blame Mr Childe for misunderstanding me, because I am naturally no judge of my own lucidity; but I take it very hard that a total stranger whom I have never knowingly injured or offended, on the first discovery of a difference in theological opinion between us, should publicly accuse me of being a potential torturer, murderer and tyrant - for that is what Mr Childe's reference to faggots means if it means anything. How little I approve of compulsion in religion may be gauged from a recent letter of mine to the Spectator protesting against the intolerable tyranny of compulsory church parades for the Home Guard. If Mr Childe can find any passage in my works which favours religious or anti-religious compulsion I will give five pounds to any (not militantly antiChristian) charity he cares to name. If he cannot, I ask him, for justice and charity's sake, to withdraw his charge.
(c) W.R. Childe, ibid. (16th March 1944), p. 301
61-5 A Village Experience
C.S. Lewis, “A Village Experience”, The Guardian (31st August 1945), p. 335
Sir,
I think your readers should, and will, be interested in the following extract from a letter I have just received; the writer is an invalid lady in a village;
“This used to be a God-fearing village with a God-fearing parson who visited and ran the Scouts ('lovely troop he 'ad. And you should have 'eard our choir of a Sunday', says my bricklayer host). The young were polished up and sent to Sunday school, their parents filled the church to the brim. Now they have an octogenarian. No harm in that! My late uncle - at that age - was going as strong as most two-year olds. But this one - I noted for myself, seeing him pass - has been dead for years... He does not visit the sick, even if asked. He does nothing. And - listen - he stuck up a notice in the church: No children admitted without their parents or an adult. The village . . . went instantly Pagan. I must get away from it. Never before but in the vile pagan West Indies have I been without so much as an extorted Holy Sacrament. (Can one forbid the church to a Crissom child? - legally, I mean? Pass me a Bishop.)"
61-6 Correspondence with an Anglican who Dislikes Hymns
(Note: The “correspondence" consists of two letters from Erik Routley to Lewis and two letters from Lewis, all of which were published together in The Presbyter, Vol. VI, No. 2 (1948), pp. 15-20. Lewis's letters were published in The Presbyter over the initials “A. B.")
Dear Mr Routley,
The truth is that I'm not in sufficient sympathy with the project to help you. I know that many of the congregation like singing hymns: but am not yet convinced that their enjoyment is of a spiritual kind. It may be: I don't know. To the minority, of whom I am one, the hymns are mostly the dead wood of the service. Recently in a party of six people I found that all without exception would like fewer hymns. Naturally, one holding this view can't help you.
(c) Erik Routley to Lewis (dated 18th September 1946), pp. 15-20
(d) C. S. Lewis to Erik Routley (dated 21st September 1946), p. 20
l can't quite remember my own last letter; but I was wrong if I said or implied that (a) variables, (b) active participation by the people, or (c). hymns, were bad in principle. I would agree that anything the congregation can do may properly and profitably be offered to God in public worship. If one had a congregation (say, in Africa) who had a high tradition in sacred dancing and could do it really well I would be perfectly in favour of making a dance part of the service. But I wouldn't transfer the practice to a Willesden congregation whose best dance was a ballroom shuffle. In modern England, however, we can't sing - as the Welsh and Germans can. Also (a great pity, but a fact) the art of poetry bas developed for two centuries in a private and subjective direction. That is why I find hymns "dead wood". But I spoke only for myself and a few others. If an improved hymnody - or even the present hymnody - does edify other people, of course it is an elementary duty of charity and humility for me to submit. I have never spoken in public against the use of hymns: on the contrary I have often told "highbrow" converts that a humble acquiescence in anything that may edify their uneducated brethren (however frightful it seems to the educated "natural man") is the first lesson they must learn. The door is low and one must stoop to enter.
61-7 The Church's Liturgy, Invocation, and Invocation of Saints
Sir,
If It is not harking back too far, I would like to make two layman's comments on the liturgical articles in your issue of 6th May. Firstly, I would underline the necessity for uniformity, if in nothing else, yet in the time taken by the rite. We laymen may not be busier than the clergy but we usually have much less choice in our hours of business. The celebrant who lengthens the service by ten minutes may, for us, throw the whole day into hurry and confusion. It is difficult to keep this out of our minds: It may even be difficult to avoid some feeling of resentment. Such temptations may be good for us but it is not the celebrant's business to supply them: God's permission and Satan's diligence will see to that part of our education without his assistance.
Secondly, I would ask the clergy to believe that we are more interested in orthodoxy and less interested in liturgiology as such than they can easily imagine. Dr Mascall rightly says that variations are permissible when they do not alter doctrine. But after that he goes on almost casually to mention "devotions to the Mother of God and to the hosts of heaven" as a possible liturgical variant. That the introduction of such devotions into any parish not accustomed to them would divide the congregation into two camps, Dr Mascall well knows. But if he thinks that the issue between those camps would be a liturgical issue, I submit that he is mistaken. It would be a doctrinal issue. Not one layman would be asking whether these devotions marred or mended the beauty of the rite; everyone would be asking whether they were lawful or damnable. It is no part of my object to discuss that question here, but merely to point out that it is the question.
What we laymen fear is that the deepest doctrinal issues should be tacitly and implicitly settled by what seem to be, or are avowed to be, merely changes in liturgy. A man who is wondering whether the fare set before him is food or poison is not reassured by being told that this course is now restored to its traditional place in the menu or that the tureen is of the Sarum pattern. We laymen are ignorant and timid. Our lives are ever in our hands, the avenger of blood is on our heels, and of each of us his soul may this night be required. Can you blame us if the reduction of grave doctrinal issues to merely liturgical issues fills us with something like terror?
(c) W.D.F. Hughes, ibid. (24th June 1949), p. 409
(d) C. S. Lewis, ibid. (1st July 1949), p. 427
Sir,
I agree with Dean Hughes that the connection of belief and liturgy is close, but doubt if it is “inextricable". I submit that the relation is healthy when liturgy expresses the belief of the Church, morbid when liturgy creates in the people by suggestion beliefs which the Church has not publicly professed, taught, and defended. If the mind of the Church is, for example, that our fathers erred in abandoning the Romish invocations of saints and angels, by all means let our corporate recantation, together with its grounds in scripture, reason and tradition be published, our solemn act of penitence be performed, the laity re-instructed, and the proper changes in liturgy be introduced.
What horrifies me is the proposal that individual priests should be encouraged to behave as if all this had been done when it has not been done. One correspondent compared such changes to the equally stealthy and (as he holds) irresistible changes in a language. But that is just the parallel that terrifies me, for even the shallowest philologist knows that the unconscious linguistic process is continually degrading good words and blunting useful distinctions. Absit omen! Whether an "enrichment" of liturgy which involves a change of doctrine is allowable, surely depends on whether our doctrine is changing from error to truth or from truth to error. Is the individual priest the judge of that?
(e) Edward Every, “Doctrine and Liturgy", ibid. (8th July 1949), pp. 445-6
(f) C. S. Lewis, “Invocation", ibid. (15th July 1949), pp. 463-4
Sir,
Mr Every (quite legitimately) gives the word invocation a wider sense than I. The question then becomes how far we can infer propriety of devotion from propriety of invocation? I accept the authority of the Benedicite (Note: Found in the Prayer Book service of Morning Prayer, the original source of which is The Song of the Three Holy Children (vv . 35-66) in the old Testament Apocrypha.) for the propriety of invoking (in Mr Every's sense) saints. But if I thence infer the propriety of devotions to saints, will not an argument force me to approve devotions to stars, frosts and whales?
I am also quite ready to admit that I overlooked a distinction. Our fathers might disallow a particular mediaeval doctrine and yet not disallow some other doctrine which we laymen easily confuse with it. But if the issue is so much finer than I thought, this merely redoubles my anxiety that it should be openly and authoritatively decided.
If I feared lest the suggestions of liturgy might beguile us laymen on a simple issue, I am not likely to be comforted by finding the issue a subtle one. If there is one kind of devotion to created beings which is pleasing and another which is displeasing to God, when is the Church, as a Church, going to instruct us in the distinction?
Meanwhile, what better opportunity for the stealthy insinuation of the wrong kind than the unauthorized and sporadic practice of devotions to creatures before uninstructed congregations would our ghostly foe desire? Most of us laymen, I think, have no parti pris in the matter. We desire to believe as the Church believes.
(g) Edward Every "Invocation of Saints", ibid. (22nd July 1949), pp. 481-2
(h) C. S. Lewis, ibid. (5th August 1949), p. 513
Sir,
I hope Mr Every has not misunderstood me. There is, I believe, a prima facie case for regarding devotions to saints in the Church of England as a controversial question (see Jewel, Apogia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Pt. II, ch. xxviii, Homilies, Bk. II, Peril of idolatry, Pt. III; Laud, Conference with Fisher, Sect. XXIII; Taylor, Dissuasive from Popery, Pt. 1, ch. ii, sect. 8). I merely claim that the controversy exists. I share Mr Every's wish that it should cease. But there are two ways in which a controversy can cease: by being settled, or by gradual and imperceptible change of custom. I do not want any controversy to cease in the second way.
I implore priests to remember what Aristotle tells us about unconscious revolution (pollakis lanqanei megalh ginomenh metabasis twn nomimwn, Politics 1303 a 22). (Note: The occurrence of an important transition in customs often passes unnoticed) When such unconscious revolution produces a result we like, we are all tempted to welcome it; thus I am tempted to welcome it when it leads to prayers for the dead. But then I see that the very same process can be used, and is used, to introduce modernist dilutions of the faith which, I am sure, Mr Every and I equally abominate. I conclude that a road so dangerous should never be trodden, whether the destination to which it seems to point is in itself good or bad. To write "No Thoroughfare" over that road is my only purpose.
61-8 The Holy Name
(b) C. S. Lewis, ibid. (10th August 1951), p. 541
Sir,
Having read Mr Bradbury's letter on the Holy Name, I have a few comments to make. I do not think we are entitled to assume that all who use this Name without reverential prefixes are making a "careless" use of it; otherwise, we should have to say that the Evangelists were often careless. I do not think we are entitled to assume that the use of the word Blessed when we speak of the Virgin Mary is “necessary"; otherwise, we should have to condemn both the Nicene and the Apostles' Creed for omitting it. Should we not rather recognize that the presence or absence of such prefixes constitute a difference, not in faith or morals, but simply in style? I know that as their absence is "irritating" to some, so their frequent recurrence is irritating to others. Is not each party innocent in its temperamental preference but grossly culpable if it allows anything so subjective, contingent, and (with a little effort) conquerable as a temperamental preference to become a cause of division among brethren? If we cannot lay down our tastes, along with other carnal baggage, at the church door, surely we should at least bring them in to be humbled and, if necessary, modified, not to be indulged?
61-9 Mere Christians
(a) R.D. Daunton-Fear, "Evangelical Churchmanship", Church Times, Vol. CXXXV (1st February 1952), p. 77
(b) C. S. Lewis, "Mere Christians", ibid. (8th February 1952), p. 95
Sir,
I welcome the letter from the Rural Dean of Gravesend, though I am sorry that anyone should have rendered it necessary by describing the Bishop of Birmingham as an Evangelical. To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the "Liberal" or "Modernist" is something very dear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the Four Last Things. This unites them not only with one another, but with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus.
The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions, or than the gulf which separates both from any non-miraculous version of Christianity, is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether "Low" or "High" Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest "Deep Church"; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter's "mere Christians"?
61-10 Canonization
Sir,
I am, like Mr Eric Pitt, a layman, and would like to be instructed on several points before the proposal to set up a “system" of Anglican canonization is even discussed. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, “saints" are dead people whose virtues have made them “worthy" of God's "special" love. Canonization makes dulia “universal and obligatory"; and, whatever else it asserts, it certainly asserts that the person concerned “is in heaven".
Unless, then, the word “canonization" is being used in a sense distinct from the Roman (and, if so, some other word would be much more convenient), the proposal to set up a “system" of canonization means that someone (say, the Archbishops) shall be appointed
(a) To tell us that certain named people are (i) "in heaven", and (ii) are “worthy" of God's “special" love.
(b) To lay upon us (under pain of excommunication?) the duty of dulia towards those they have named.
Now it is very clear that no one ought to tell us what he does not know to be true. Is it, then, held that God has promised (and, if so, when and where?) to the Church Universal a knowledge of the state of certain departed souls? If so, is it clear that this knowledge will discern varying degrees of kinds of salvation such as are, I suppose, implicit in the word "special"? And if it does, will the promulgation of such knowledge help to save souls now in via? For it might well lead to a consideration of “rival claims", such as we read of in the Imitation of Christ (Bk. III, ch. 58), where we are warned, “Ask not which is greater in the Kingdom of Heaven . . . the search into such things brings no profit, but rather offends the saints themselves."
Finally, there is the practical issue: by which I do not mean the Catholic Encyclopaedia's neat little account of "the ordinary actual expenses of canonization" (though that too can be read with profit), but the danger of schism. Thousands of members of the Church of England doubt whether dulia is lawful. Does anyone maintain that it is necessary to salvation? If not, whence comes our obligation to run such frightful risks?
61-11 Pittenger-Lewis and Version Vernacular
(a) W. Norman Pittenger, “Pittenger-Lewis", The Christian Century, Vol. LXXV (24th December 1958), pp. 1485-6
(b) C. S. Lewis, "Version Vernacular", Ibid. (31st December 1958), p. 515
Sir,
Thank you for publishing my "Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger" (26th November). Now would you, please, complete your kindness by publishing the statement that "populam" is either my typist's or your printer's error for "populum"?
An article on “translation" such as Dr Pittenger suggests in his letter in the 24th December issue certainly needs doing, but I could not usefully do it for Americans. The vernacular into which they would have to translate is not quite the same as that into which I have translated. Small differences, in addressing proletarians, may be all-important.
In both countries an essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English - just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this paper should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it.
61-12 Capital Punishment and Death Penalty
(a) C. S. Lewis, "Capital Punishment", Church Times, Vol. CXLIV (1st December 1961), p. 7
Sir,
I do not know whether capital punishment should or should not be abolished, for neither the natural light, nor scripture, nor ecclesiastical authority seems to tell me. But I am concerned about the grounds on which its abolition is being sought.
To say that by hanging a man we presumptuously judge him to be irredeemable is, I submit, simply untrue. My Prayer Book includes an exhortation to those under sentence of death which throughout implies the exact opposite. The real question is whether a murderer is more likely to repent and make a good end three weeks hence in the execution shed or, say, thirty years later in the prison infirmary. No mortal can know. But those who have most right to an opinion are those who know most by experience about the effect of prolonged prison life. I wish some prison chaplains, governors and warders would contribute to the discussion.
The suggestion of compensation for the relatives of the murdered man is in itself reasonable, but it ought not to he even remotely connected with the case for or against capital punishment. If it is, we shall be giving countenance to the archaic, and surely erroneous, view that murder is primarily an offence not against society but against individuals.
Hanging is not a more irrevocable act than any other. You can't bring an innocent man to life: but neither can you give him back the years which wrongful imprisonment has eaten.
Other correspondents have pointed out that a theory of punishment which is purely exemplary or purely reformatory, or both, is shockingly immoral. Only the concept of desert connects punishment with morality at all. If deterrence is all that matters, the execution of an innocent man, provided the public think him guilty, would be fully justified. If reformation alone is in question, then there is nothing against painful and compulsory reform for all our defects, and a Government which believes Christianity to be a neurosis will have a perfectly good right to hand us all over to their straighteners for "cure" tomorrow.
(b) Claude Davis, ibid. (8th December 1961), p. 14
(c) C. S. Lewis, "Death Penalty", ibid. (15th December 1961), p. 12
Sir,
Mr Davis rightly reproves me for using the word society as I did. This hypostatized abstraction has already done harm enough. But I only meant "all of us". The absurdity of the view which treats murder as an offence against a single family is best illustrated in the case in the private speeches of Demosthenes (I can't turn it up at the moment, but your more scholarly readers no doubt can). (Note: The Orations of Demosthenes, “The Oration against Euergus and Mnesibulus,” sections 1155-62) A man, A, set free a female slave, B, his old nurse. B married. Her husband died without issue. Someone then murdered B. But under Athenian law no one could prosecute because there was no injured party. A could not act because B, when murdered, was no longer his property. There was no widower, and there were no orphans.
I am on neither side in the present controversy. But I still think the abolitionists conduct their case very ill. They seem incapable of stating it without imputing vile motives to their opponents. If unbelievers often look at your correspondence column, I am afraid they may carry away a bad impression of our logic, manners and charity.