On Christian Formation

Should all Christians seek mystical experiences?

To Dom Bede Griffiths July 28, 1936

I have not made up my mind about Mysticism [seeking direct experiences of the presence of God]. . . . It may be a given man’s vocation to approach God mystically because he has the mystical faculty, but only in the same way as it is another man’s duty to serve God by driving a plow because he is a good plowman. And if anyone tried to impose mysticism as the norm of Christian life I suspect he would be making the same mistake as one who said we ought all to be fishermen because some of the apostles were.

(CL 2, 201)

Good and evil are retrospective

To Dom Bede Griffiths May 25, 1944

About the past, and nothing being lost, the point is that “He who loses his life shall save it” is totally true, true on every level. Everything we crucify will rise again: nothing we try to hold onto will be left us.

I wrote the other day “Good and evil when they attain their full stature are retrospective. That is why, at the end of all things, the damned will say we were always in Hell, and the blessed we have never lived anywhere but in heaven.” Do you agree?

(CL 2, 617)

Defining body, soul, and spirit

To Mr. Lyell December 6, 1944

By handing over the natural self to Christ I mean placing it under His orders and trying to will with His will. If a man does that he will usually find that one of the things Christ wills is for him to eat, drink, sleep etc. Not always, but usually. You can’t tell in advance what He will tell any man to do about the natural appetites. He may tell one man to be very austere, another to be kinder to the flesh than he has been hitherto. . . .

The natural self since the Fall consists of body, soul, and spirit all perverted and self-centered and at odds with one another. Animalness (the body and what arises from it) is not in itself bad: what is bad is the rebellious relation in which it now stands to the other parts. But its rebellion against spirit is less terrible than spirit’s rebellion against God.

By central self or spirit I mean chiefly the Will—the ultimate choosing part. It changes itself by its own actions. By soul I mean chiefly the imagination and emotions. The New Testament does not use a consistent technical vocabulary. For instance in “Soul take thine ease etc.”* the passage simply means “Says I to myself.” I hope this is a bit clearer: but a systematic exposition would have to go far beyond the limits of a letter.

*Luke 12:19

(CL 2, 631–632)

You can keep forever only what you give up

To Phyllis Elinor Sandeman June 31, 1947

I think that about Houses the answer is this. Nothing rises again which has not died. The natural and possessive love for a house if it has been crucified, if it has become disinterested, if it has submitted to sacrifice, will rise again: i.e. the love for a house you were willing to give up will rise again. The willful, grasping love will not—or only rise as a horror. . . .

But the whole point is that you can keep forever only what you give up: beginning with the thing it is hardest to give up—one’s self. What you grab you lose: what you offer freely and patiently to God or your neighbor, you will have. (Your heavenly library will contain only the books you have given or lent! And the dirty thumb marks on the latter will have turned into beautiful marginal decorations—I’m joking of course, but to illustrate a serious principle).

Loving dogs more than children is a misfortune not a sin. Acting on that superior love for dogs—i.e. sacrificing the interests of the humans in your household to the animals—is a sin. I think myself that animals which have acquired a personality from living with us will probably be restored: but I can only repeat what I said on this point in The Problem of Pain (chapter on Animal Pain).

Remember, all this is only my guess. I’m not inspired, very far from it. All good wishes.

(CL 2, 788–789)

Don’t try to create a syllabus or schedule for sanctification

To Edward T. Dell February 4, 1949

Everyone who accepts the teaching of St. Paul must have a belief in “sanctification.” But I should, myself, be very chary of describing such operations of the Holy Ghost as “experiences” if by experiences we mean things necessarily discoverable by introspection. And I should be still more chary of mapping out a series of such experiences as an indispensable norm (or syllabus!) for all Christians. I think the ways in which God saves us are probably infinitely various and admit varying degrees of consciousness in the patient. Anything which sets him saying “Now . . . Stage II ought to be coming along . . . is this it?” I think bad and likely to lead some to presumption and others to despair. We must leave God to dress the wound and not keep on taking peeps under the bandage for ourselves.

(CL 2, 914)

The Imitation of Christ as the formula for the Christian life

To Edward T. Dell May 26, 1949

I take it that what St. Paul means by Sanctification is the process of “Christ being formed in us,” the process of becoming like Christ—so that the title of the medieval book (which I hope you read) The Imitation of Christ* is a formula for the Christian life. And no doubt sanctification would be the correction both of our congenital or original sinfulness and of our actual particular sins. I haven’t seen that the distinction is very important, since the latter are the expression of the former.

As you know, theologians have disagreed about the extent of our depravity. Need we know that as long as we know that it needs to be set right and are ready to submit to the cure? (The Doctor will know whether my broken leg is a simple or a compound fracture: all I’ve got to do is to turn up at the surgery and set my teeth).

I’m not a good enough theologian to give any note that would be safe on Rom. 8.16. You are trying to use a rough knife as a razor: I’m not qualified to give the guidance you need. These things I need to learn, not teach.

*Christian book of spiritual exercises by Ignatius of Loyola early in the fifteenth century

(CL 2, 940–941)

Mystics seek a direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or color

To Miss Breckenridge April 19, 1951

Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the “prickles” in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or color. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object . . .

(CL 3, 109)

On spiritual dryness amid trials

To Mrs. D. Jessup November 13, 1952

I am very sorry to hear that your (temporal) news is so grim. Your spiritual news is perhaps better than you think. You seem to have been dealing with the dryness (or “the wall” as you well name it) in the right way. Everyone has experienced it or will. . . .

It is very important to remember that Our Lord experienced it to the full, twice—in Gethsemane when He sweated blood, and next day when he said “Why hast thou forsaken me?” We are not asked to go anywhere where he has not gone before us. The shining quality may come back when we least expect it, and in circumstances which would seem to an outside observer (or to ourselves) to make it most impossible. (We must not reject it, as there is an impulse to do, on the ground that we ought, in the conditions, to be miserable).

What is most reassuring to me, and most moving, is your sane and charitable recognition that others have as great, or worse, trials: one of those things which no one else can decently say to the sufferer but which are invaluable when he says them to himself. And of course there was no “conceit” or “selfishness” in your writing to me: are we not all “members of one another. . . .”

You are quite right (tho’ not in the way you meant) when you say I needn’t “work up” sympathy with you! No, I needn’t. I have had enough experiences of the crises of family life, the terrors, despondencies, hopes deferred, and wearinesses. The trouble is that things go on so long, isn’t it? and one gets so tired of trying! No doubt it will all seem short when looked at from eternity. But I needn’t preach to you. You’re doing well: scoring pretty good marks! Keep on. Take it hour by hour, don’t add the past and the future to the present load more than you can help. God bless you all.

(CL 3, 250–251)

How Christianity is hard and tender

To Mrs. Johnson July 17, 1953

I’m very glad you’ve seen that Christianity is as hard as nails: i.e. hard and tender at the same time. It’s the blend that does it: neither quality would be any good without the other. You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t—see the scene in Gethsemane.

How thankful I am that when God became Man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves: that would not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much. Especially don’t worry (you may of course pray) about being brave over merely possible evils in the future. In the old battles it was usually the reserve, who had to watch the carnage, not the troops who were in it, whose nerve broke first. Similarly I think you in America feel much more anxiety about atomic bombs than we do: because you are further from the danger. If and when a horror turns up, you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. “Give us our daily bread” (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too: the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.

(CL 3, 347–348)

True holiness is not dull but irresistible

To Mary Willis Shelburne August 1, 1953

I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible.* If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?

*Lewis is thinking of his spiritual director, Father Walter Adams.

(CL 3, 351)

The difference between intellect assent and realization

To Mrs. D. Jessup February 5, 1954

I fully agree with you about the difference between a doctrine merely accepted by the intellect and one (as Keats says) “proved in the pulses” so that [it] is solid and palpable. . . . About two years ago I made a similar progress from mere intellectual acceptance of, to realization of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven. That is perhaps the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. How little they know of Christianity who think that the story ends with conversion: novelties we never dreamed of may await us at every turn of the road.

(CL 3, 425)

Detachment from worldly things for the sake of attachment to spiritual things

To Mary Van Deusen May 20, 1954

When we speak of Detachment (from worldly interests) we meant it of course only as a preliminary for Attachment to spiritual things: as St. Paul wishes to be rid of the earthly body only in order to put on the heavenly (2 Corinthians 5:1–4). All the Christian demands are in the end positive—to receive, take, embrace something (“Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it”)—and negative (“Love not the World”) only as means to that. As one might say to a slum-child “Stop making that mud pie and come for a holiday to the sea.”

(CL 3, 477)

No shadows at noon

To Walter Hooper November 30, 1954

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!

(CL 3, 535)

The presence of God vs. the sense of the presence of God

To Mary Willis Shelburne February 20, 1955

And of course the presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God. The latter may be due to imagination; the former may be attended with no “sensible consolation.” The Father was not really absent from the Son when He said “Why hast thou forsaken me?” You see God Himself, as man, submitted to man’s sense of being abandoned. The real parallel on the natural level is one which seems odd for a bachelor to write to a lady, but too illuminating not to be used. The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility: where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes.

(CL 3, 567)

When duty becomes pleasure

To Mary Van Deusen December 16, 1955

Isn’t duty only a second-best to keep one going until one learns to like the thing, and then it is a duty no more? When love fulfills the Law, Law (as such) flies out of the window.

(CL 3, 685)

On guilt feelings

To Mary Willis Shelburne July 21, 1958

*I John 3:20

(CL 3, 962)

How the self is like a telescope

To Edward Lofstrom September 20, 1959

I think your comparison between the self and the telescope is singularly accurate. The instrument vanishes from consciousness just in so far as it is perfected. But until then we must attend to it; otherwise we shall be like the man who mistakes a smudge on the glass for a gigantic animal on the Moon.

(CL 3, 1089)

Don’t become fixated on one’s own failings

To Edward Lofstrom June 10, 1962

You are of course perfectly right in defining your problem (which is also mine and everyone’s) as “excessive selfness.” But perhaps you don’t fully realize how far you have got by so defining it. All have this disease: fortunate are the minority who know they have it. To know that one is dreaming is to be already nearly awake, even if, for the present, one can’t wake up fully. And you have actually got further than that. You have got beyond the illusion (very common) that to recognize a chasm is the same thing as building a bridge over it.

Your danger now is that of being hypnotized by the mere sight of the chasm, of constantly looking at this excessive selfness. The important thing now is to go steadily on acting, so far as you can—and you certainly can to some extent, however small—as if it wasn’t there. You can, and I expect you daily do—behave with some degree of unselfishness. You can and do make some attempt at prayer. The continual voice which tells you that your best actions are secretly filled with subtle self-regard, and your best prayers still wholly egocentric—must for the most part be simply disregarded—as one disregards the impulse to keep on looking under the bandage to see whether the cut is healing. If you are always fidgeting with the bandage, it never will.

A text you should keep much in mind is 1 John 3:20: “If our heart condemns us God is greater than our heart.” I sometimes pray “Lord give me no more and no less self-knowledge than I can at this moment make a good use of.” Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e. keep on fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.

(CL 3, 1349–1350)

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