135 The Novels Of Charles Williams
135 THE NOVELS OF CHARLES WILLIAMS
One of the silliest critical remarks on record was made by Leigh Hunt when he complained that the Lays of Ancient Rome lacked the true poetical aroma of the Faerie Queene. There is this to be said for him, that he made it not only in a letter, but in a begging letter, to Macaulay himself; and, as Macaulay acknowledged to Napier, that was a manly act. (Note: Letter to Macvey Napier of 16th November 1842 in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (1977)) But as criticism it is deplorable. I have sometimes wondered whether certain criticisms on the stories of Charles Williams are not equally wide of the mark.
The complaint often made against them is that they mix what some people call the realistic and the fantastic. I would rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs: on the other hand, we also meet the supernatural - ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. The first thing to grasp is that this is not a mixture of two literary kinds. That is what some readers suspect and resent. They acknowledge on the one hand straight fiction, the classical novel as we know it from Fielding to Galsworthy. They acknowledge, on the other, the pure fantasy which creates a world of its own, cut off in a kind of ring fence, from reality; books like The Wind in the Willows or Vathek or The Princess of Babylon, and they complain that Williams is asking them to skip to and fro from the one to the other in the same work. But Williams is really writing a third kind of book which belongs to neither class and has a different value from either. He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying, 'Let us suppose that this everyday world were, at some one point, invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.'
The formula is of course no novelty. Even in childhood most of us who are now fifty had learned very clearly the difference in kind between a fairy tale by Grimm and a fairy tale by E. Nesbit. The one transported you to a new world with its own laws and its own characteristic inhabitants. But the whole point of the other was that it supposed Tottenham Court Road or a dingy lodging house to be suddenly invaded by a phoenix or an amulet. The ordinary and, in that sense, classical ghost story does the same thing; the realistic and mundane character of the scene and persons is an essential part of the effect. So, in a far subtler way, Mr de la Mare pours his bottomless misgivings over the very world we all know. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde intrudes its strange horror upon surroundings studiously prosaic. F. Anstey for his comic marvels builds realistic nests. Even the Alice books and the Gulliver books owe much to the matter-of-fact and resolutely unimaginative nature of their principal characters. If Alice were a princess, if Gulliver were a romantic voyager or even a philosopher, the effect would be destroyed. Now if this literary kind is permissible at all, it is surely idle to complain that it mixes two literary levels, the realistic and the fantastic. On the contrary, it keeps its own level throughout: that level on which we suppose that a violation of frontier has occurred in the actual world. Now some people doubt whether the kind is permissible. Of what value, it may be asked, are such supposals? And one answer to that question I myself would rule out at once. They are not allegories. I hasten to add that it is almost impossible to make a story of this kind, or of any kind, which the reader cannot turn into an allegory if he chooses. Everything in art and most things in Nature can be allegorised if you are determined to do it: as the history of medieval thought shows. But I do not think that is how such stories were written nor how they ought to be read. The starting point is a supposal. 'Suppose I found a country inhabited by dwarfs. Suppose two men could exchange bodies.' Nothing less, but equally nothing more ,is demanded. And now, what is the point of it?
For some of us, of course, the question hardly arises. Such supposing appears to us the inalienable right and inveterate habit of the human mind. We do it all day long: and therefore do not see why we should not do it, at times, more energetically and consistently, in a story. But for those others who feel that it needs justification, I think a justification can be found.
Every supposal is an ideal experiment: an experiment done with ideas because you can't do it any other way. And the function of an experiment is to teach us more about the things we experiment on. When we suppose the world of daily life to be invaded by something other, we are subjecting either our conception of that other, or both, to a new test. We put them together to see how they will react. If it succeeds, we shall come to think, and feel, and imagine more accurately, more richly, more attentively, either about the world which is invaded or about that which invades it, or about both. And here, of course, we come to the great division between writers of this kind.
Some are experimenting solely on the world of daily life: others are experimenting on the invader as well. It depends partly on their literary choice, but partly on their philosophy. Some people, of course, do not believe that there is a potential invader. For them the sole purpose of supposing an invasion must be to throw light on our daily and normal experience. Others, who believe that there is a possible invader, can (though it is not necessary that they always should) expect light on it also to flow from the supposal. Hence we get two kinds of invasion story. Vice Versa is a perfect example of the first. The only function of the Garuda Stone is to put Mr Bultitude and Dr Grimstone and the rest in an otherwise impossible relation in order that we may watch their reactions. So in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The machinery whereby the two selves are separated is some trumpery about draughts and powders in which Stevenson hardly invites our interest: what matters is thc result. Comic, or strongly ethical, authors usually adopt this method. Mr de la Mare is at the other extreme. His achievement is to awake 'thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls', to bring home to us the precariousness of our commonsense world, and to share with us his own disquieting consciousness of that which, on his view, it conceals. 'Supposing,' he says, 'this concealment, never very efficient, broke down completely for a few hours.'
Now Williams is at the same end of the scale as Mr de la Mare. I do not mean that they are in any other respect alike. In the quality of their imagination they are as different as possible: Mr de la Mare's world is one of halflights and silence and distances, a dusk 'washed with silver', whereas Williams's is one of blazing colours, hard outlines, and bell-like resonance. You would look in vain in Williams for the delicacy, the immense importance of what is not said, which delights us in Mr de la Mare: you would be equally disappointed if you searched Mr de la Mare for the aqualine energy, the pomp, the gaiety, the orgiastic quality, of Williams. But in this one respect they are alike; each, having supposed a violation of frontier, is interested in both sides of the frontier.
No doubt, the first and simplest approach to Williams's stories is to note and enjoy the lights which they cast on this side of the frontier, on our normal experience. His story The Place of the Lion (Note: The Place of the Lion (1931), All Hallows' Eve (1945), Descent i nto Hell (1937)) seems to me to throw a light which I dare not neglect on the world that I myself chiefly inhabit, the academic world. The heroine, Damaris Tighe, is an extreme example of the complacent researcher. She is studying medieval philosophy and it has never once occurred to her that the objects of medieval thought might have any reality. As Williams tells us, she regarded Abelard and St Bernard as the top form in a school of which she was not so much the headmistress as the inspector. Then comes the supposal. How if these objects were, after all, real? How if they began to manifest themselves? How if this research-beetle had to experience what it so glibly catalogued? Even those who do not feel at the end, of the book that we know any more about the Platonic Forms may well feel that we know more about ourselves as researchers - have seen, as if from outside, the fatuous assumption of superiority which will certainly dominate all our thinking about the past if we take no measures to correct it.
So again in All Hallows’ Eve the strange sufferings to which Betty is subjected disengage for us her quite possible, yet now seldom imagined, character of wholly undefended and incorruptible innocence. To put it another way, I find that when I read her history the word victim, after so many years of commonplace usage, is restored in my mind to its ancient, sacred and sacrificial dignity, and my vision of the everyday world proportionately sharpened.
That, indeed, is only one instance of a curious effect which Williams's supposals often have. They render possible the creation of good characters. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible. Notice how cleverly Scott gets under our guard by making Jeanie Deans inferior to us in everything except her virtues. That gives us our sop: we are taken off our guard. In Williams we are similarly off our guard. We see his good people in strange circumstances and do not think much of calling them good. Only on later reflection do we discover what we have been surprised into accepting.
I will go back to that point in a moment. Meantime I must repeat the claim or the confession (whichever you call it) that this illumination of the ordinary world is only one half of a Williams story. The other half is what he tells us about a different world. To the strict Materialist who believes unshakeably that there is no such thing, I suppose this cannot be more than a curiosity or material for psychoanalysis. Frankly, Williams is not addressing such readers. But, of course, neither is he addressing only his co-religionists. Indeed, explicitly or exclusively Christian conceptions are not often put before us. What have we then? At the lowest, one man's guess about unknowable things. But all who do not from the outset rule out the very possibility of those things will perhaps admit that one man may guess better than another. And if we think a man is guessing very well indeed we begin to doubt whether 'guessing' is the right word.
I would hesitate to claim that Williams was a mystic. If a mystic means one who follows the negative way by rejecting images, then he was, consciously and deliberately, the very reverse. The choice between the two ways, the legitimacy, the dignity and the danger, of both, is one of his favourite themes. But I am convinced that both the content and the quality of his experience differed from mine and differed in ways which oblige me to say that he saw further, that he knew what I do not know. His writing, so to speak, brings me where I have never gone on my own sail or steam; and yet that strange place is so attached to realms we do know that I cannot believe it is mere dreamland.
It is a thing impossible to illustrate by short quotations, but I can point to passages where I have felt it in especial force. One comes in the last chapter of All Hallows’ Eve, where Lester, who has been, in the physical sense, dead for many days, looks up and discovers (I cannot explain this without telling the whole story) that a still more final separation is at hand. Then come the words 'All, all was ending; this, after so many preludes, was certainly death. This was the most exquisite and pure joy of death .. Above her the sky every moment grew more high and empty; the rain fell from a source beyond all clouds.'
Another comes in the fourth chapter of the Descent into Hell, where the aged Margaret, on her death bed, feels herself to be at once a mountain and a traveller who climbs that mountain: and 'Now she knew that only the smallest fragility of her being clung somewhere to the great height that was she and others and all the world under her separate kind, as she herself was part of all the other peaks.' You may, of course, ask me how Williams should know. And I am not suggesting that he knows in one sense - that he is giving me factual details about the world beyond death or on the brink of death. What I am quite sure of is that he is describing something he knows which I should not have known unless he had described it; and something that matters.
But I am horribly afraid lest what I said earlier about his good characters should leave anyone under the impression that he was a moralist. The public has a distrust for moral books which is not wholly mistaken. Morality has spoiled literature often enough: we all remember what happened to some nineteenth-century novels. The truth is, it is very bad to reach the stage of thinking deeply and frequently about duty unless you are prepared to go a stage further. The Law, as St Paul first clearly explained, only takes you to the school gates. Morality exists to be transcended. We act from duty in the hope that someday we shall do the same acts freely and delightfully. It is one of the liberating qualities in Williams's books that we are hardly ever on the merely moral level.
One little fact is significant; the unexpected extension he gives to the idea of courtesy. What others would regard as service or unselfishness he regards as good manners. That, taken by itself, might be a mere verbal trick: I mention it here only as a convenient shorthand symbol for the whole attitude. For courtesy can be frolic or ceremonial - or both - where unselfishness is lumpish and portentous. And that sublimation of merely ethical attitudes is at work through all his writing. His world may be fierce and perilous; but the sense of grandeur, of exuberance, even of carnival, the honestade and cavalleria, are never lost. It is a little like Spinoza's hilaritas, if Spinoza could have progressed from his geometrical method to dance his philosophy. Even the chief fault of the earlier books - the perilous approach to flippancy in the dialogue - was a prentice attempt to express his own sense of gay adventure in the spiritual life. No doubt, some pious readers find Williams embarrassingly at ease in Sion: if so, have they forgotten that David danced before the Ark?
136 THE PAINS OF ANIMALS - A PROBLEM IN THEOLOGY
(Note In his book The Problem of Pain one of the questions Lewis addressed himself to was: how to account for the occurrence of pain in a universe which is the creation of an all-good God, and in creatures who are not morally sinful. His chapter on 'Animal Pain' provoked a counter-inquiry from the late C.E.M. Joad, who was Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of London. The result was this controversy.)
THE INQUIRY
by C. E. M. Joad
For many years the problem of pain and evil seemed to me to offer an insuperable objection to Christianity. Either God could abolish them but did not, in which case, since He deliberately tolerated the presence in the universe of a state of affairs which was bad, I did not see how He could be good; or He wanted to abolish them but could not, in which case I did not see how He could be all-powerful. The dilemma is as old as St Augustine, and nobody pretends that there is an easy way of escape.
Moreover, all the attempts to explain pain away, or to mitigate its stark ferocity, or to present it as other than a very great evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, are palpable failures. They are testimonies to the kindness of men's hearts or perhaps to the queasiness of their consciences, rather than to the sharpness of their wits.
And yet, granting pain to be an evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, I have come to accept the Christian view of pain as not incompatible with the Christian concept of the Creator and of the world that He has made. That view I take to be briefly as follows: It was of no interest to God to create a species consisting of virtuous automata, for the 'virtue' of automata who can do no other than they do is a courtesy title only; it is analogous to the 'virtue' of the stone that rolls downhill or of the water that freezes at 32’. To what end, it may be asked, should God create such creatures? That He might be praised by them? But automatic praise is a mere succession of noises. That He might love them? But they are essentially unlovable; you cannot love puppets. And so God gave man free will that he might increase in virtue by his own efforts and become, as a free moral being, a worthy object of God's love. Freedom entails freedom to go wrong: man did, in fact, go wrong, misusing God's gift and doing evil. Pain is a by-product of evil; and so pain came into the world as a result of man's misuse of God's gift of free will.
So much I can understand; so much, indeed, I accept. It is plausible; it is rational; it hangs together.
But now I come to a difficulty, to which I see no solution; indeed, it is in the hope of learning of one that this article is written. This is the difficulty of animal pain, and, more particularly, of the pain of the animal world before man appeared upon the cosmic scene. What account do theologians give of it? The most elaborate and careful account known to me is that of C. S. Lewis.
He begins by making a distinction between sentience and consciousness. When we have the sensations a, b, and c, the fact that we have them and the fact that we know that we have them imply that there is something which stands sufficiently outside them to notice that they occur and that they succeed one another. This is consciousness, the consciousness to which the sensations happen. In other words, the experience of succession, the succession of sensations, demands a self or soul which is other than the sensations which it experiences. (Mr Lewis invokes the helpful metaphor of the bed of a river along which the stream of sensations flows.) Consciousness, therefore, implies a continuing ego which recognizes the succession of sensations; sentience is their mere succession. Now animals have sentience but not consciousness. Mr Lewis illustrates as follows: This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that 'I have had two pains.’ Even in the single pain there is no self to say 'I am in pain' - for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation - the bed from the stream - sufficiently to say I am in pain', it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience.' (Note The Problem of Pain (London, 1940), ch.ix, p.120) (a) I take Mr Lewis's point - or, rather, I take it without perceiving its relevance. The question is how to account for the occurrence of pain (i) in a universe which is the creation of an all-good God; (ii) in creatures who are not morally sinful. To be told that the creatures are not really creatures, since they are not conscious in the sense of consciousness defined, does not really help matters. If it be true, as Mr Lewis says, that the right way to put the matter is not 'This animal is feeling pain' but 'Pain is taking place in this animal' (Note Ibid., pp. 120-21) pain is nevertheless taking place. Pain is felt even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and to future pains. Now it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it, or whether any continuing consciousness feels it, in a universe planned by a good God, that demands explanation.
(b) Secondly, the theory of sentience as mere succession of sensations presupposes that there is no continuing consciousness. No continuing consciousness presupposes no memory. It seems to me to be nonsense to say that animals do not remember. The dog who cringes at the sight of the whip by which he has been constantly beaten behaves as if he remembers, and behaviour is all that we have to go by. In general, we all act upon the assumption that the horse, the cat, and the dog with which we are acquainted remember very well, remember sometimes better than we do. Now I do not see how it is possible to explain the fact of memory without a continuing consciousness.
Mr Lewis recognizes this and concedes that the higher animals - apes, elephants, dogs, cats, and so on - have a self which connects experiences; have, in fact, what he calls a soul (Note Ibid., p.121). But this assumption presents us with a new set of difficulties.
(a) If animals have souls, what is to be done about their immortality? The question, it will be remembered, is elaborately debated in Heaven at the beginning of Anatole France's Penguin Island after the short-sighted St Mael has baptized the penguins, but no satisfactory solution is offered.
(b) Mr Lewis suggests that the higher domestic animals achieve immortality as members of a corporate society of which the head is man. It is, apparently, 'The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead' (Note Ibid., p.127) who survive. 'If you ask', he writes, 'concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer, "Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life - in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body." In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself." (Note Ibid., p.128) Whether this is good theology, I do not know, but to our present inquiry it raises two difficulties.
(i) It does not cover the case of the higher animals who do not know man - for example, apes and elephants - but who are yet considered by Mr Lewis to have souls.
(ii) If one animal may attain good immortal selfhood in and through a good man, he may attain bad immortal selfhood in and through a bad man. One thinks of the overnourished lapdogs of idle overnourished women. It is a little hard that when, through no fault of their own, animals fall to selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel masters, they should through eternity part of selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel superpersonal wholes and perhaps be punished for their participation in them.
(e) If the animals have souls and, presumably, freedom, the same sort of explanation must be adopted for pain in animals as is offered for pain in men. Pain, in other words, is one of the evils consequent upon sin. The higher animals, then, are corrupt. The question arises, who corrupted them? There seem to be two possible answers: (1) The Devil; (2) Man.
(1) Mr Lewis considers this answer. The animals, he says, may originally all have been herbivorous. They became carnivorous - that is to say, they began to prey upon, to tear, and to eat one another because 'some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene... If there is such a power... it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared.' (Note Ibid., pp. 122-23) I have three comments to make: (i) I find the supposition of Satan tempting monkeys frankly incredible. This, I am well aware, is not a logical objection. It is one's imagination - or is it perhaps one's common sense? - that revolts against it.
(ii) Although most animals fall victims to the redness of Nature's 'tooth and claw', many do not. The sheep falls down the ravine, breaks its leg, and starves; hundreds of thousands of migrating birds die every year of hunger; creatures are struck and not killed by lightning, and their seared bodies take long to die. Are these pains due to corruption?
(iii) The case of animals without souls cannot, on Mr Lewis's own showing, be brought under the 'moral corruption' explanation. Yet consider just one instance of nature's arrangements. The wasps, Ichneumonidae, sting their cater pillar prey in such a way as to paralyze its nerve centres. They then lay their eggs on the helpless caterpillar. When the grubs hatch from the eggs, they immediately proceed to feed upon the living but helpless flesh of their incubators, the paralyzed but still sentient caterpillars. It is hard to suppose that the caterpillar feels no pain when slowly consumed; harder still to ascribe the pain to moral corruption; hardest of all to conceive how such an arrangement could have been planned by an all-good and all-wise Creator.
(2) The hypothesis that the animals were corrupted by man does not account for animal pain during the hundreds of million years (probably about 900 million) when the earth contained living creatures but did not contain man.
In sum, either animals have souls or they have no souls. If they have none, pain is felt for which there can be no moral responsibility, and for which no misuse of God's gift of moral freedom can be invoked as an excuse. If they have souls, we can give no plausible account (a) of their immortality - how draw the line between animals with souls and men with souls? -or (b) of their moral corruption, which would enable Christian apologists to place them in respect of their pain under the same heading of explanation as that which is proposed and which I am prepared to accept for man?
It may well be that there is an answer to this problem. I would be grateful to anyone who would tell me what it is.
THE REPLY
by C. S. Lewis
Though there is pleasure as well as danger in encountering so sincere and economical a disputant as Dr Joad, I do so with no little reluctance. Dr Joad writes not merely as a controversialist who demands, but as an inquirer who really desires, an answer. I come into the matter at all only because my answers have already failed to satisfy him. And it is embarrassing to me, and possibly depressing to him, that he should, in a manner, be sent back to the same shop which has once failed to supply the goods. If it were wholly a question of defending the original goods, I think I would let it alone. But it is not exactly that. I think he has perhaps slightly misunderstood what I was offering for sale.
Dr Joad is concerned with the ninth chapter of my Problem of Pain. And the first point I want to make is that no one would gather from his article how confessedly speculative that chapter was. This was acknowledged in my preface and repeatedly emphasized in the chapter itself. This, of course, can bring no ease to Dr Joad's difficulties; unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative. I mention the character of the chapter to underline the fact that it stands on a rather different level from those which preceded it. And that difference suggests the place which my 'guesswork' about Beasts (so I called it at the time and call it still) had in my own thought, and which I would like this whole question to have in Dr Joad's thought too.
The first eight chapters of my book attempted to meet the prima facie case against theism based on human pain. They were the fruit of a slow change of mind not at all unlike that which Dr Joad himself has undergone and to which, when it had been completed, he at once bore honourable and (I expect) costly witness. The process of his thought differed at many points (very likely for the better) from the process of mine. But we came out, more or less, at the same place. The position of which he says in his article 'So much I understand; so much, indeed, I accept' is very close to that which I reached in the first eight chapters of my Problem.
So far, so good. Having 'got over' the problem of human pain, Dr Joad and I both find ourselves faced with the problem of animal pain. We do not at once part company even then. We both (if I read him correctly) turn with distaste from 'the easy speeches that comfort cruel men' (Note G.K. Chesterton, 'A Hymn', line 11. The first line begins 'O God of earth and altar'), from theologians who do not seem to see that there is a real problem, who are content to say that animals are, after all, only animals. To us, pain without guilt or moral fruit, however low and contemptible the sufferer may be, is a very serious matter. I now ask Dr Joad to observe rather closely what I do at this point, for I doubt if it is exactly what he thinks. I do not advance a doctrine of animal sentience as proved and thence conclude 'Therefore beasts are not sacrificed without recompense, and therefore God is just.' If he will look carefully at my ninth chapter he will see that it can be divided into two very unequal parts: Part One consisting of the first paragraph, and Part Two of all the rest. They might be summarized as follows: Part One. The data which God has given us enable us in some degree to understand human pain. We lack such data about beasts. We know neither what they are nor why they are. All that we can say for certain is that if God is good (and I think we have grounds for saying that He is) then the appearance of divine cruelty in the animal world must be a false appearance. What the reality behind the false appearance may be we can only guess.
Part Two. And here are some of my own guesses.
Now it matters far more whether Dr Joad agrees with Part One than whether he approves any of the speculations in Part Two. But I will first deal, so far as I can, with his critique of the speculations.
(1) Conceding (positionis causa) (Note 'for the sake of argument') my distinction between sentience and consciousness, Dr Joad thinks it irrelevant. 'Pain is felt', he writes, 'even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and future pain,' and 'it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it... that demands explanation.' I agree that in one sense it does not (for the present purpose) matter 'who or what' feels it. That is, it does not matter how humble, or helpless, or small, or how removed from our spontaneous sympathies, the sufferer is. But it surely does matter how far the sufferer is capable of what we can recognize as misery, how far the genuinely pitiable is consistent with its mode of existence. It will hardly be denied that the more coherently conscious the subject is, the more pity and indignation its pains deserve. And this seems to me to imply that the less coherently conscious, the less they deserve. I still think it possible for there to be a pain so instantaneous (through the absence of all perception of succession) that its 'unvalue', if I may coin the word, is indistinguishable from zero. A correspondent has instanced shooting pains in our own experience on those occasions when they are unaccompanied by fear. They may be intense: but they are gone as we recognize their intensity. In my own case I do not find anything in them which demands pity; they are, rather, comical. One tends to laugh. A series of such pains is, no doubt, terrible; but then the contention is that the series could not exist for sentience without consciousness.
(2) I do not think that behaviour 'as if from memory' proves memory in the conscious sense. A non-human observer might suppose that if we blink our eyes at the approach of an object we are 'remembering' pains received on previous occasions. But no memories, in the full sense, are involved. (It is, of course, true that the behaviour of the organism is modified by past experiences, and we may thus by metonymy say that the nerves remember what the mind forgets; but that is not what Dr Joad and I are talking of.) If we are to suppose memory in all cases where behaviour adapts itself to a probable recurrence of past events, shall we not have to assume in some insects an inherited memory of their parents breeding habits? And are we prepared to believe this?
(3) Of course my suggested theory of the tame animals' resurrection 'in' its human (and therefore, indirectly, divine) context does not cover wild animals or ill-treated tame ones. I had made the point myself, and added 'it is intended only as an illustration... of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection.' (Note The Problem of Pain, p.128) I went on to make an alternative suggestion, observing, I hope, the same principles. My chief purpose at this stage was at once to liberate imagination and to confirm a due agnosticism about the meaning and destiny of brutes. I had begun by saying that if our previous assertion of divine goodness was sound, we might be sure that in some way or other 'all would be well, and all manner of thing would be well' (Note Lady Julian of Norwich, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, ch. xxvii). I wanted to reinforce this by indicating how little we knew and, therefore, how many things one might keep in mind as possibilities.
(4) If Dr Joad thinks I pictured Satan 'tempting monkeys', I am myself to blame for using the word 'encouraged'. I apologize for the ambiguity. In fact, I had not supposed that 'temptation' (that is, solicitation of the will) was the only mode in which the Devil could corrupt or impair. It is probably not the only mode in which he can impair even human beings; when Our Lord spoke of the deformed woman as one 'bound by Satan' (Note Luke xiii. 16), I presume He did not mean that she had been tempted into deformity. Moral corruption is not the only kind of corruption. But the word corruption was perhaps ill-chosen and invited misunderstanding. Distortion would have been safer.
(5) My correspondent writes 'That even the severest injuries in most invertebrate animals are almost if not quite painless in the view of most biologists. Loeb collected much evidence to show that animals without cerebral hemispheres were indistinguishable from plants in every psychological respect. The instance readily occurs of the caterpillars which serenely go on eating though their interiors are being devoured the larvae of some ichneumon fly. The Vivisection Act does not apply to invertebrates; which indicates the views of those who framed it.'
(6) Though Dr Joad does not raise the point, I cannot forbear adding some most interesting suggestions about animal fear from the same correspondent. He points out that human fear contains two elements: (a) the physical sensations, due to the secretions, etc.; (b) the mental images of what will happen if one loses hold, or if the bomb falls here, or if the train leaves the rails. Now (a), in itself, is so far from being an unmixed grief, that when we can get it without (b), or with unbelieved (b), or even with subdued (b), vast numbers of people like it: hence switchbacks, water-shoots, fast motoring, mountain climbing.
But all this is nothing to a reader who does not accept Part One in my ninth chapter. No man in his senses is going to start building up a theodicy with speculations about the minds of beasts as his foundation. Such speculations are in place only, as I said, to open the imagination to possibilities and to deepen and confirm our inevitable agnosticism about the reality, and only after the ways of God to Man have ceased to seem unjustifiable. We do not know the answer: these speculations were guesses at what it might possibly be. What really matters is the argument that there must be an answer: the argument that if, in our own lives, where alone (if at all) we know Him, we come to recognize the pulchritudo tam antiqua (Note 13 St Augustine, Confessiones, bk. X, ch.27. 'Beauty so ancient and so new ) then, in other realms where we cannot know Him (connaitre), though we may know (savoir) some few things about Him - then, despite appearances to the contrary, He cannot be a power of darkness. For there were appearances to the contrary in our own realm too; yet, for Dr Joad as for me, they have somehow been got over. I know that there are moments when the incessant continuity and desperate helplessness of what at least seems to be animal suffering make every argument for theism sound hollow, and when (in particular) the insect world appears to be Hell itself visibly in operation around us. Then the old indignation, the old pity arises. But how strangely ambivalent this experience is: I need not expound the ambivalence at much length, for I think I have done so elsewhere and I am sure that Dr Joad had long discerned it for himself. If I regard this pity and indignation simply as subjective experiences of my own with no validity beyond heir strength at the moment (which next moment will change), I can hardly use them as standards whereby to arraign the creation. On the contrary, they become strong as arguments against God just in so far as I take them to be transcendent illumination to which creation must conform or be condemned. They are arguments against God only if they are themselves the voice of God. The more Shelleyan, the more Promethean my revolt, the more surely it claims a divine sanction. That the mere contingent Joad or Lewis, born in an era of secure and liberal civilization and imbibing from it certain humanitarian sentiments, should happen to be offended by suffering - what is that to the purpose? How will one base an argument for or against God on such an historical accident!
No. Not in so far as we feel these things, but in so far as we claim to be right in feeling them, in so far as we are sure that these standards have an empire de jure over all possible worlds, so far, and so far only, do they become a ground for disbelief - and at the same moment, for belief. God within us steals back at the moment of our condemning the apparent God without. Thus in Tennyson's poem the man who had become convinced that the God of his inherited creed was evil exclaimed: 'If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought.' (Note 'Despair', xix, 106) For if there is no 'Great God' behind the curse, who curses? Only a puppet of the little apparent 'God'. His very curse is poisoned at the root: it is just the same sort of event as the very cruelties he is condemning, part of the meaningless tragedy.
From this I see only two exits: either that there is a Great God, and also a 'God of this world', (Note 15 II Corinthians iv.4), a prince of the powers of the air, whom the Great God does curse, and sometimes curses through us; or else that the operations of the Great God are not what they seem to me to be.