Questions About Christian Theology and Morality

How can an all-good God produce a world with evil?

To Arthur Greeves September 12, 1933

I have been thinking all morning over your question about God and evil which is very far from being “elementary” to me—or for that matter, I suppose, to the angels. If I understand you rightly you are not primarily concerned with the sort of logical problem as how the All-Good can produce evil, or produce a world in which there is evil, but with a more personal, practical, and intimate problem as to how far God can sympathize with our evil will as well as with our good—or, to draw it milder, whether he does.

I should begin, I think, by objecting to an expression you use: “God must have a potentiality of His opposite—evil.” For this I would substitute the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as “That which has no opposite” i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc., but God is not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all—just as in our constitution the King is neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition, but the thing behind them which alone enables these to be a lawful government and an opposition—or just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big and small arise. This then is my first point. That Evil is not something outside and “over against” God, but in some way included under Him.

My second point seems to be in direct contradiction to this first one, and is (in scriptural language) as follows: that God “is the Father of Lights and in Him is no darkness at all.”* In some way there is no evil whatever in God. He is pure Light. All the heat that in us is lust or anger in Him is cool light—eternal morning, eternal freshness, eternal springtime: never disturbed, never strained. Go out on any perfect morning in early summer before the world is awake and see, not the thing itself, but the material symbol of it.

Well, these are our two starting points. In one way . . . God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to do next? My beginning of the “next” will be to deny another remark of yours—where you say “no good without evil.” This on my view is absolutely untrue: but the opposite “no evil without good” is absolutely true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy.

Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead [leash] through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go to the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: though in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.

Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and “contained” his evil. If he did you could only reply “My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use—why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don’t understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathize with your real wish—that is, the wish to get on—the less can I sympathize (in the sense of “share” or “agree with”) your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.”

I don’t know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption that you do. Let us go back to the original question—whether and, if so, in what sense God contains, say, my evil will—or “understands” it. The answer is God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil: the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathize or “agree”: His sympathy with my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two.

Only because he has laid up real goods for us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy, misdirected ways. The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.

Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations—understands them a great deal more than we do. But don’t forget MacDonald again—“Only God understands evil and hates it.” Only the dog’s master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the lead knotted round the lamppost. This is why we must be prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and trivial. How small some of the things that doctors forbid would seem to an ignoramus.

*I John 1:5

(CL 2, 121–125)

On the origins of evil: “The black fire of self-imprisonment”

To Joyce Pearce July 20, 1943

Go to the top of the class! You seem to have evolved the answer of the best theologians on your own: and I agree with it. You will find what I have to say about it in my little book The Problem of Pain. It is to me inconceivable that Nature as we see it is either what God intended or merely evil: it looks like a good thing spoiled.

The doctrine of the Fall (both of man and of some “gods,” “eldils,”* or “angels”) is the only satisfactory explanation. Evil begins, in a universe where all was good, from free will, which was permitted because it makes possible the greatest good of all. The corruption of the first sinner consists not in choosing some evil thing (there are no evil things for him to choose) but in preferring a lesser good (himself) before a great (God). The Fall is, in fact, Pride. The possibility of this wrong preference is inherent in the very fact of having, or being, a self at all. But though freedom is real it is not infinite. Every choice reduces a little one’s freedom to choose the next time. There therefore comes a time when the creature is fully built, irrevocably attached either to God or to itself. This irrevocableness is what we call Heaven or Hell. Every conscious agent is finally committed in the long run: i.e. it rises above freedom into willed, but henceforth unalterable, union with God, or else sinks below freedom into the black fire of self-imprisonment.

*Angel-like creatures in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy

(CL 2, 584–585)

Seeing the natural through the lens of the supernatural

To Dom Bede Griffiths May 10, 1945

I too have been very much occupied by the idea of the New Creation. I’m absolutely with you. New heavens and earth—the resurrection of the body—how we have neglected these doctrines and indeed left the romantics and even the Marxists to step into the gap.

I’m working at a book on Miracles at present in which this theme will play a large part. And here’s a funny thing. To write a book on miracles, which are in a sense invasions of Nature, has made me realize Nature herself as I’ve never done before. You don’t see Nature till you believe in the Supernatural: don’t get the full, hot, salty tang of her except by contrast with the pure water from beyond the world. Those who mistake Nature for the All are just those who can never realize her as a particular creature with her own flawed, terrible, beautiful individuality. No time to develop this now—but I thought you’d like to know the thoughts I am drunk with.

(CL 2, 648)

On the need to stamp out “religion”

To Sister Penelope May 28, 1945

The truth is we shall never get on till we have stamped out “religion.” “Religion” as it is called—the vague slush of humanitarian idealism, Emersonian Pantheism, democratic politics and material progressiveness with a few Christian names and formulae added to taste like pepper and salt—is almost the great enemy. If one can’t talk to a Christian then give me a real believing member of some other religion or an honest clearheaded skeptic like J.[ohn] S.[tuart] Mill. One can at least get sense out of them.

(CSL 2, 657)

Calvinism

To Mr. N. Fridama February 15, 1946

On Calvinism. Both the statement that our final destination is already settled and the view that it still may be either Heaven or Hell, seem to me to imply the ultimate reality of Time, which I don’t believe in. The controversy is one I can’t join on either side for I think that in the real (Timeless) world it is meaningless.

(CL 2, 703)

Hell as a state of mind

To Arthur Greeves May 13, 1946

About Hell. All I have ever said is that the N[ew] T[estament] plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in “the outer darkness.”* Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one’s own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness and self-conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you could call a world or a reality, I would never pretend to know. But I wouldn’t put the question in the form “do I believe in an actual Hell.” One’s own mind is actual enough. If it doesn’t seem fully actual now that is because you can always escape from it a bit into the physical world—look out of the window, smoke a cigarette, go to sleep. But when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, no sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as—as—well, as a coffin is actual to a man buried alive.

*Matthew 8:12; 22:13; 25:30

(CL 2, 710)

On Jesus Christ as All-God and All-Man

To Mrs. Frank L. Jones February 23, 1947

(CL 2, 764–765)

Sin-as-it-is vs. one’s experience of sin

To Edward T. Dell March 28, 1949

By experience I mean “That part or result of any event which is presented to consciousness.” Thus in a Toothache the total event is a complex physiological, bio-chemical, and (in the long run) atomic event: what is presented to consciousness, i.e. the Pain, I call an experience.

Thus to your question (1.) I reply Sin is the turning away of the will from God. But the experience of sin will differ in different people: e.g. to an uninstructed person it may appear in consciousness merely as disobeying human authority, or taking a legitimate indulgence. That sin-as-it-really-is is ever fully present to human (as opposed to diabolical) consciousness at the moment of commission, I doubt. The rebellion of the will is nearly always accompanied with some fogging of the intelligence. . . .

I hope some day to write an autobiography* which will tell what I know (= the experience) of my own conversion. But the real event, as known to God, will differ from this as much as the total event “decaying tooth” differs from the pain.

*Surprised by Joy was published in 1955.

(CL 2, 928–929)

Time is a defect of reality

To Edward T. Dell February 4, 1949

I firmly believe that God’s life is non temporal. Time is a defect of reality since by its very nature any temporal being loses each moment of its life to get the next—the moments run through us as if we were sieves! God forbid that we should think God to be like that. On the eternal Now read Boethius, von Hügel’s Eternal Life etc. Also St. Peter who adds to the old maxim “1000 years in His sight are but as a day” the very important opposite “and a day as 1000 years.”

(CL 2, 915)

Why does a good God allow evil into the world?

To Arthur Greeves July 6, 1949

I do not hold that God “sends” sickness or war in the sense in which He sends us all good things. Hence in Luke 13:16 Our Lord clearly attributes a disease not to the action of His Father but to that of Satan. I think you are quite right. All suffering arises from sin.

The sense in which it is also God’s will seems to me twofold (a) The one you mention: that God willed the free will of men and angels in spite of His knowledge that it could lead in some cases to sin and thence to suffering: i.e. He thought Freedom worth creating even at that price. It is like when a mother allows a small child to walk on its own instead of holding it by her hand. She knows it may fall, but learning to walk on one’s own is worth a few falls. When it does fall this is in one sense contrary to the mother’s will: but the general situation in which falls are possible is the mother’s will. (In fact, as you and I have so often said before “in one way it is, in another way it isn’t!”)

(b) The world is so made that the sins of one inflict suffering on another. Now I don’t think God allows this to happen at random. I think that if He knew that the suffering entailed on innocent A by the sins of B would be (in the deep sense & the long run) bad for A, He would shield A from it. And in that sense I think it is sometimes God’s will that A should go through this suffering. The supreme case is the suffering that our sins entailed on Christ. When Christ saw that suffering drawing near He prayed (Luke 22:42) “If thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will but thine.” This seems to me to make it quite clear that the crucifixion was (in the very qualified sense which I’ve tried to define) God’s will.

(CL 2, 956–957)

Two letters to Edward T. Dell

(Dell wrote to ask if we call something evil because we apply the wrong criteria, such as calling an untimely death evil on the assumption that it would be better to live forever.)

Is Evil an Illusion?

December 19, 1949

I don’t think the idea that evil is an illusion helps. Because surely it is a (real) evil that the illusion of evil should exist. When I am pursued in a nightmare by a crocodile the pursuit and the crocodile are illusions: but it is a real nightmare, and that seems a real evil. (Whenever one says “This isn’t a real so-and-so,” is it not a real something else? e.g. if this is not a real pink rat it is real delirium, if this pupil is not a real sufferer from headache he is a real liar—and so on).

(CL 2, 1010)

January 30, 1950

I think we mean very nearly the same. Evil is certainly not a “Thing.” But many states of affairs, or relations between things, are regrettable, ought not to have occurred, and ought to be removed. And “Evil” is an elliptical symbol for this fact.

(CL 3, 8)

On physical healing by spiritual means

To Mary Van Deusen December 7, 1950

I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture. Whether any instance of it is a real instance, or chance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. Very often, I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, would be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole, my attitude would be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide whether it is.

(CL 3, 69)

To a critic of the Christian doctrine of Atonement

To Wendell W. Watters October 25, 1951

I am not surprised that a man who agreed with me in Screwtape (ethics served with an imaginative seasoning) might disagree with me when I wrote about religion. We can hardly discuss the whole matter by post, can we?

I’ll only make one shot. When people object, as you do, that if Jesus was God as well as Man, then He had an unfair advantage which deprives Him for them of all value, it seems to me as if a man struggling in the water should refuse a rope thrown to him by another who had one foot on the bank, saying “Oh but you have an unfair advantage”; it is because of that advantage that He can help.

But all good wishes: we must just differ: in charity I hope. You must not be angry with me for believing you know: I’m not angry with you!

(CL 3, 143)

Pain as punishment vs. pain as palliative

To Mary Van Deusen January 31, 1952

That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John 9:1–4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It would certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is “absolutely” contrary to my will: i.e. if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e. granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother smacking a child would be in the same position: she would rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she would like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.

(CL 3, 163)

Can unbelievers find salvation?

To Mary Van Deusen January 31, 1952

On the heathen, see I Tim. 4:10. Also in Matt. 25:31–46 the people don’t sound as if they were believers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell* and preaching to the dead: that would be outside time, and include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a.) All justice and mercy will be done, (b.) But that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers.

[Lewis’s note] i.e. Hades, the land of the dead: not Gehenna, the land of the lost

(CL 3, 163)

High Church, Low Church, and “Deep Church”

To the Editor of the Church Times

To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the “Liberal” or “Modernist” is something very clear 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”?**

*Reference to the Latin phrase which means “believed everywhere, by all, at all times”

**Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century English Puritan church leader

(CL 3, 164)

The “indiscussable” question of free will and predestination

To Mary Van Deusen October 20, 1952

All that Calvinist question—Free will and Predestination, is to my mind indiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes (say they), but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arises as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter and just finding them chattering with the cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk about human love (leaving out the erotic kind). “Do I like him because I choose or because I must?”—there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction become perhaps nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not voluntary, and if “voluntary” does not mean “free,” what are we talking about? I’d leave it alone. Blessings.

(CL 3, 237)

Providence vs. coincidence

To Vera Gerbert March 23, 1953

Now as to your other story, about Isaiah 66? It doesn’t really matter whether the Bible was open at that page thru’ a miracle or through some (unobserved) natural cause. We think it matters because we tend to call the second alternative “chance.” But when you come to think of [it] there can be no such thing as chance from God’s point of view. Since He is omniscient His acts have no consequences which He has not foreseen and taken into account and intended. Suppose it was the draft from the window that blew your Bible open at Isaiah 66. Well, that current of air was linked up with the whole history of weather from the beginning of the world and you may be quite sure that the result it had for you at that moment (like all its other results) was intended and allowed for in the act of creation. “Not one sparrow,”* you know the rest. So of course the message was addressed to you. To suggest that your eye fell on it without this intention, is to suggest that you could take Him by surprise. Fiddle-de-dee! This is not Predestination: your will is perfectly free: but all physical events are adapted to fit in as God sees best with the free actions He knows we are going to do. There’s something about this in Screwtape.

Meanwhile, courage! Your moments of nervousness are not your real self, only medical phenomena. All blessings.

*Matthew 10:29

(CL 3, 311–312)

Sin is a matter of bad choices, not bad reasoning

To Elsie Snickers May 18, 1953

No. I don’t think sin is completely accounted for by faulty reasoning nor that it can be completely cured by re-education. That view has, indeed, been put forward: by Socrates and, in the early 19th Century, by Godwin. But I think it overlooked the (to me) obviously central fact that our will is not necessarily determined by our reason. If it were, then, as you say, what are called “sins” would not be sins at all but only mistakes, and would require not repentances but merely correction.

But surely daily experience shows that it is just not so. A man’s reason sees perfectly clearly that the resulting discomfort and inconvenience will far outweigh the pleasure of the ten minutes in bed. Yet he stays in bed: not at all because his reason is deceived but because desire is stronger than reason. A woman knows that the sharp “last word” in an argument will produce a serious quarrel which was the very thing she had intended to avoid when that argument began and which may permanently destroy her happiness. Yet she says it: not at all because her reason is deceived but because the desire to score a point is at the moment stronger than her reason. People—you and I among them—constantly choose between two courses of action the one which we know to be the worse: because, at the moment, we prefer the gratification of our anger, lust, sloth, greed, vanity, curiosity or cowardice, not only to the known will of God but even to what we know will make for our own real comfort and security. If you don’t recognize this, then I must solemnly assure that either [you] are an angel, or else are still living in “a fool’s paradise”: a world of illusion.

Of course, it is true that many people are so mis-educated or so psychopathic that their freedom of action is very much curtailed and their responsibility therefore very small. We cannot remember that too much when we are tempted to judge harshly the acts of other people whose difficulties we don’t know. But we know that some of our own acts have sprung from evil will (proud, resentful, cowardly, envious, lascivious or spiteful will) although we knew better, and that what we need is not—or not only—re-education but repentance, God’s forgiveness, and His Grace to help us to do better next time. Until one has faced this fact one is a child.

And it is not the function of psychotherapy to make us face this. Its work is the non-moral aspects of conduct. You must not go to the psychologists for spiritual guidance. (One goes to the dentist to cure one’s toothache, not to teach one in what spirit to bear it if it cannot be cured: for that you must go to God and God’s spokesmen).

(CL 3, 329–330)

Does God choose us or do we choose God?

To Mrs. Emily McLay August 3, 1953

I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts, and specially we must not use an apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St. Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:30–46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith—all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St. Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St. Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter 3:16–17).

What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—“It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, which I have done nothing to earn.” That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical and natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule, “All conversions depend on God’s choice.”

But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalizations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted and lots of other passages, we don’t and can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientist’s book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.

The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues. But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about, there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.

You know what [Martin] Luther said: “Do you doubt if you are chosen? Then say your prayers and you may conclude that you are.”

(CL 3, 354–355)

God’s absolute will vs. relative will

To Mary Van Deusen November 28, 1953

As to whether God ever wills suffering, I think he [Van Deusen’s rector] is confused. We must distinguish in God, and even in ourselves, absolute will from relative will. No one absolutely wills to have a tooth out, but many will to have a tooth out rather than to go on with a toothache. Surely in the same way God never absolutely wills the least suffering for any creature, but may will it rather than some alternative: e.g. He willed the crucifixion rather than that Man should go unredeemed (and so it was not, in all senses, His will that the cup should pass from His Son).

(CL 3, 379)

Can Satan create evil?

To Belle Allen November 1, 1954

I think it would be dangerous to suppose that Satan had created all the creatures that are disagreeable or dangerous to us for (a) those creatures, if they could think, would have just the same reason for thinking that we were created by Satan. (b) I don’t think evil, in the strict sense, can create. It can spoil something that Another has created. Satan may have corrupted other creatures as well as us. Part of the corruption in us might be the unreasoning horror and disgust we feel at some creatures quite apart from any harm they can do us. (I can’t abide a spider myself.) We have scriptural authority for Satan’s originating diseases—see Luke 13:16.

(CL 3, 520)

The suffering of the innocent and the suffering of the wicked

To Belle Allen November 1, 1954

Do you know, the suffering of the innocent is less of a problem to me very often than that of the wicked. It sounds absurd: but I’ve met so many innocent sufferers who seem to be gladly offering their pain to God in Christ as part of the Atonement, so patient, so meek, even so at peace, and so unselfish that we can hardly doubt they are being, as St. Paul says, “made perfect by suffering.”* On the other hand I meet selfish egoists in whom suffering seems to produce only resentment, hate, blasphemy, and more egoism. They are the real problem.

*Hebrew 2:10

(CL 3, 520)

For Christians, nothing happens by chance

To Mrs. D. Jessup March 2, 1955

Oh what a rare blessing to have a Christian psychotherapist! I don’t think your question whether these ones were brought into your life by “a whimsical fate” or by God, need detain you long. Once one believes in God at all, surely the question is meaningless? Suppose that in a novel a character gets killed in a railway accident. Is his death due to change (e.g. the signals being wrong) or to the novelist? Well of course, both. The chance is the way the novelist removes the character at the exact moment his story requires. There’s a good line in Spenser to quote to oneself: “It chanced (almighty God that chance did guide).”

(CL 3, 574–575)

How much larger is reality than our outlines of faith?

To Dom Bede Griffiths February 8, 1956

One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge would leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river—and the continent through which that river flowed turned out to be itself an island—off the shores of a still greater continent—and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.

(CL 3, 703–704)

“Culture” too shall pass away

To Mary Van Deusen April 2, 1956

I’m a little, not unamusedly, surprised that my S. by J. [Surprised by Joy] causes you envy. I doubt if you would really have enjoyed my life much more than your own. And the whole modern world ludicrously over-values books and learning and what (I loathe the word) they call “culture.” And of course “culture” itself is the greatest sufferer by this error: for second things are always corrupted when they are put first. Never forget this: souls are immortal, and your children and grandchildren will still be alive when my books have, like the Galaxy and Nature herself, passed away.

(CL 3, 733)

A heaven beyond imagining

To Mrs. Johnson August 7, 1956

No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.

(CL 3, 778)

What does it mean to be “new creatures in Christ”?

To Stuart Robertson May 6, 1962

On this point as on others the N[ew] T[estament] is highly paradoxical. St. Paul at the outset of an epistle sometimes talks as if the converts whom he is addressing were already wholly new creatures, already in the world of light, their old nature completely crucified. Yet by the end of the same epistle he will be warning the same people to avoid the very grossest vices.

Of himself he speaks sometimes as if his reward was perfectly sure: elsewhere he fears lest, having preached to others, he should be himself a castaway.

Our Lord Himself sometimes speaks as if all depended on faith, yet in the parable of the sheep and the goats all seems to depend on works: even works done or undone by those who had no idea what they were doing or undoing.

The best I can do about these mysteries is to think that the N.T. gives us a sort of double vision. A. Into our salvation as eternal fact, as it (and all else) is in the timeless vision of God. B. Into the same thing as a process worked out in time. Both must be true in some sense but it is beyond our capacity to envisage both together. Can one get a faint idea of it by thinking of A. A musical score as it is written down with all the notes there at once. B. The same thing played as a process in time? For practical purposes, however, it seems to me we must usually live by the second vision “working out our salvation in fear and trembling” (but it adds “for”—not “though”—but “for”—“it is God who worketh in us”).

And in this temporal process surely God saves different souls in different ways? To preach instantaneous conversion and eternal security as if they must be the experiences of all who are saved, seems to me very dangerous: the very way to drive some into presumption and others into despair. How very different were the callings of the disciples.

I don’t agree that if anyone were completely a new creature, you and I would necessarily recognize him as such. It takes holiness to detect holiness.

(CL 3, 1336–1337)

On the unforgivable sin

To Mr. Green May 11, 1962

I also once ceased to believe and told others there is no God. In fact you and I both lost our faith and then returned to it. But surely we did not return on our own steam? Surely we were recalled by God? For no man can come, nor come back, to God unless God sends for him. The grace He has thus shown us for a second time is the proof that He has forgiven us. He has not cast us aside even though we, for a time, cast Him aside.

Don’t forget that [John] Bunyan, as he himself tells us, thought that he had at one time committed the unforgivable sin. Yet he lived to write the Pilgrim’s Progress and to be a great Christian champion.

It has always puzzled me very much that Our Lord should have told us there is an unforgivable sin and yet not told us what it is. [Matthew 12:31–32]. If it is a particular act which could be done at a particular time, the warning does not seem to be any use—like being told that there is a poisonous vegetable but not told which it is. But it may mean persistence in ordinary sin, a final refusal to repent or even to try to reform. If so, the warning would then be useful, a reminder that there is a point beyond which return becomes impossible. His purpose would be to fix the danger in our minds, but certainly not to set us looking through all our particular sins and trying to guess if some one of them was It.

As far as you (and I) are concerned I have no doubt that the fear you mention is simply a temptation of the devil, an effort to keep us away from God by despair. It is often the devil working through some defect in our health, and in extreme cases it needs a medical as well as a spiritual cure. So don’t listen to these fears and doubts* any more than you would to any obviously impure or uncharitable thoughts.

[Lewis’s note] Of course, like other evil temptations, they will not be silenced at once. You will think you have got rid of them and then they will come back again—and again. But, with all our temptations of all sorts, we must just endure this. Keep on, do your duty, say your prayers, make your communions, and take no notice of the tempter. He goes away in the end. Remember I John 3:20 “If (= though) our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” Let us sometimes pray for one another.

(CL 3, 1340–1341)

A follow-up note to the same correspondent on the subject of the unforgivable sin

To Mr. Green May 16, 1962

I was not only baptized in infancy, but, what seems to me far worse, I was already an apostate when I hypocritically allowed myself to be confirmed and made my first communion—in a state of total unbelief.

You’ll find Bunyan’s story (about how he thought he had committed the unforgivable sin) in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. I find also that our chaplain—a very good young man—once thought that he had done the same thing. He, by the way, took the view that those who had really done it would be the very last people to be bothered about it (in this life), for they would be hardened, which you—and, I dare to add, I—obviously are not.

There is a lovely passage in Pascal where he represents Our Lord as saying to the timorous soul “Be comforted. Unless you had found me, you would not be seeking me.” God bless us both.

(CL 3, 1344)

On the resurrection of the body

To Mary Willis Shelburne November 26, 1962

My stuff about animals came long ago in The Problem of Pain. I ventured the supposal—it could be nothing more—that as we are raised in Christ, so at least some animals are raised in us. Who knows, indeed, but that a great deal even of the inanimate creation is raised in the redeemed souls who have, during this life, taken its beauty into themselves? That may be the way in which the “new heaven and the new earth” are formed. Of course we can only guess and wonder.

But these particular guesses arise in me, I trust, from taking seriously the resurrection of the body: a doctrine which nowadays is very soft pedaled by nearly all the faithful—to our great impoverishment. Not that you and I have now much reason to rejoice in having bodies! Like old automobiles, aren’t they? where all sorts of apparently different things keep going wrong, but what they add up to is the plain fact that the machine is wearing out. Well, it was not meant to last forever. Still, I have a kindly feeling for the old rattle-trap. Through it God showed me that whole side of His beauty which is embodied in color, sound, smell and size. No doubt it has often led me astray: but not half so often, I suspect, as my soul has led it astray. For the spiritual evils which we share with the devils (pride, spite) are far worse than what we share with the beasts: and sensuality really arises more from the imagination than from the appetites; which, if left merely to their own animal strength, and not elaborated by our imagination, would be fairly easily managed. But this is turning into a sermon!

(CL 3, 1383–1384)

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