1932
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Lewis’s emerging principles of biblical interpretation; and on the importance of sacrifice.
10 JANUARY 1932
About Lucius’ argument that the evangelists would have put the doctrine of the atonement into the Gospel if they had had the slightest excuse, and, since they didn’t, therefore Our Lord didn’t teach it: surely, since we know from the Epistles that the Apostles (who had actually known him) did teach this doctrine in his name immediately after his death, it is clear that he did teach it: or else, that they allowed themselves a very free hand. But if people shortly after his death were so very free in interpreting his doctrine, why should people who wrote much later (when such free would be more excusable from lapse of memory in an honest writer, and more likely to escape detection in a dishonest one) become so very much more accurate? The accounts of a thing don’t usually get more and more accurate as time goes on. Anyway, if you take the sacrificial idea out of Christianity you deprive both Judaism and Paganism of all significance. Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder and Dionysus and Adonis and the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ—even if we can’t at present fully understand that something.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On love of one’s students; on a source of parental disappointment and family tension; and on receiving every good thing as a gift. Tom was Greeves’s brother and first employer in Greeves’s adolescence; Bookham was the village in which Lewis was tutored as an adolescent.
27 MARCH 1932
Talking of the past, I had a really delightful experience some weeks ago. An old pupil of mine, one [Arthur] Wood, came to spend a night with me. When I was his tutor he had been a curiously naïf, almost neurotic youth, who was always in love and other troubles, and so childish that he once asked me (as if I were his father!) whether one fell in love less often as one grew older, because he hoped so. Altogether an appealing, but somewhat ridiculous young man. When he went down he was compelled against his will to go into his father’s business: and for a year [or] so I got letters from him, and accounts of him from common friends, which seemed to show that he was settling down into a permanent state of self-pity.
You can imagine how pleased I was to find that he had got over this: but above all—that is why I am telling the story—to find that his whole support is romantic reading in those precious evening hours ‘after business’ which you remember so well. He quoted bits of Middle English poems which he had read with me for the exam. They were mere drudgery to him at the time, but now, in memory, they delight him. He has just re-read the whole of Malory with more delight than ever, and has bought, but not yet begun, The High History of the Holy Graal. He also writes a bit—in those same precious evenings, and Saturday afternoons.
In fact as I sat talking to him, hearing his not very articulate, but unmistakable, attempts to express his pleasure, I really felt as if I were meeting our former selves. He is just in the stage that we were in when you worked with Tom and I was at Bookham. Of course there was an element of vanity on my side—one liked to feel that one had been the means of starting him on things that now are standing him in such good stead. There was also a less contemptible, and, so to speak, professional, pleasure in thus seeing a proof that the English School here does really do some good. But in the main the pleasure was a spiritual one—a kind of love. It is difficult, without being sentimental, to say how extraordinarily beautiful—ravishing—I found the sight of some one just at that point which you and I remember so well. I suppose it is this pleasure which fathers always are hoping to get, and very seldom do get, from their sons.
Do you think a good deal of parental cruelty results from the disappointment of this hope? I mean, it takes a man of some tolerance to resign himself to the fact that his sons are not going to follow the paths that he followed and not going to give him this pleasure. What it all comes to, anyway, is that this pleasure, like everything else worth having, must not be reckoned on, or demanded as a right. If I had thought of it for a moment in the old days when I was teaching Wood, this pleasant evening would probably never have happened.