1940
TO HIS BROTHER, at the end of a long description of a delight-filled winter walk: On thanksgiving as the necessary completion of a pleasure.
9 JANUARY 1940
It seems almost brutal to describe a January walk taken without you in a letter to you, but I suppose ‘concealment is in vain’….
…I dined at the Harwoods that night and came away—on Tuesday morning—as you said in your last letter ‘thanking the Giver’ which, by the way, is the completion of a pleasure. One of the things about being an unbeliever is that the steam or ‘ spirit’ (in the chemical sense) given off by experiences has nowhere to go to.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On Lewis’s morning practice of rejoicing.
17 JANUARY 1940
I agree with you very strongly about the necessity of trying as hard as we can to obey the apostolic ‘Rejoice always’: and I think we sin by needless neglect of this as often as by anything else. The attempt to obey it is at present one of my three morning resolutions each day. I had not realised its importance till recently.
TO HIS BROTHER: On patience with the talkative elderly as Lewis’s way of making up for the way he treated his father. F.K. is the eighty-year-old Anglican priest Edward Foord-Kelcey, and “old Taylor” is their Headington Quarry neighbor William Taylor.
3 FEBRUARY 1940
That afternoon I had the coldest dawdle round the estate with old Taylor that I have yet had. In spite of the bitter wind we had to stop to examine every track and speculate what kind of animal it was—but indeed I am rather ashamed that a man of over 70 should have so much more gust for natural philosophy and so much less shrinking from the wind than I. (Between ourselves, too, I have a sort of faint hope that what I can put in with such as F.K. and old Taylor may be accepted as a kind of penance for my many sins against [ our father]: the blackest chapter in my life.)
TO HIS BROTHER: On the pivotal spiritual event of Charles Williams’s lecture on chastity in the poem by Milton.
11 FEBRUARY 1940
On Monday Charles Williams lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb—because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spellbound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on un chastity might have evoked in their grandparents—the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion—I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins? After all, the Nazis largely got into power by simply talking the old straight stuff about heroism in a country full of cynics and buggers.
TO HIS BROTHER: On the human inability to scatter one’s sympathies globally; and on the changing theological and evangelical climate. Sir Roger de Coverley is a fictional character described in various issues of the oldest British periodical still in print, The Spectator. Mr. Arabin is a clergyman in Trollope’s Barchester novels.
18 FEBRUARY 1940
Barfield has been up to spend an evening with me….
He is very much depressed having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general—which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it’s like on the [front] line at this moment.
I took the line that the present rapidity of communication et cetera imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones’s in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be met in the same way. Of course I know the more obvious reply, that you can’t do them any good by being miserable, but that is hardly the point, for in the case of the Jones’s next door we should think ill of the man who felt nothing whether his feeling did them good or not. I am afraid the truth is in this, as in nearly everything else I think about at present, that the world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam’ thing about it.
Even its theology—for that is a most distressing discovery I have been making these last two terms as I have been getting to know more and more of the Christian element in Oxford. Did you fondly believe—I did—that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my ‘sternness’ was their ‘slush’. They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. ‘Under judgement’ is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face.
Sometimes the results are refreshing: as when Canon Raven (whom you and Dyson and I sat under at Ely) is sharply told in a review in Theology that ‘it is high time persons of this sort learned that the enjoyment of a chair of theology at Cambridge does not carry with it a right to criticise the Word of God’—that’s the kind of rap on the knuckles which has not been delivered for a hundred years!
But the total effect is withering. Of two things I am now persuaded. (1) That a real red-hot Christian revival, with iron dogma, stern discipline, and ruthless asceticism, is very much more possible than I had supposed. (2) That if it comes, people like us will not find it nearly so agreeable as we had expected. ‘Why have they desired the Day of the Lord? It is darkness not light.’ I have no doubt the young gentlemen are substantially right: this is the goods. We ought to have expected that if the real thing came it would make one sit up (you remember Chesterton ‘Never invoke gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much’).
But, in a private letter, one may, for a moment, bewail happier days—the old world when Politics meant Tariff Reform, and war, war with Zulus, and even religion meant (beautiful word) Piety. ‘The decent church that crowns the neighbouring hill’—Sir Roger at Church—‘Mr Arabin sent the farmers home to their baked mutton very well satisfied’.
TO HIS BROTHER: On Lewis’s chief problem with the attitude one ought to bring to petitionary prayer—the contrast between “Thy will be done” and “believing that we shall receive” ( Matthew 21:22).
3 MARCH 1940
By the bye, ‘tell me’ as your poor father used to say: how does one in practice (I don’t say, intellectually)—in the actual practice of prayer—combine the attitude ‘Thy will be done’ with obedience to the exhortation that we should ask ‘ believing that we shall receive’? It seems to me almost impossible. One can choose the first: but surely in the very act of doing so one ipso facto abandons all confidence that one’s prayer is likely to have any causal efficacy in bringing about the event prayed for? I have never seen the question discussed anywhere nor got an answer from anyone whom I asked.
TO HIS BROTHER: On reading The Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich; and on Lewis’s deepest conviction that “all shall be well.”
21 MARCH 1940
I have been reading this week the ‘Revelations’ of Mother Julian of Norwich (14th century); not always so profitable as I had expected, but well worth reading. This is a curious vision ‘Also He showed me a little thing, the bigness of a hazel-nut, in my hand. I thought, What may this be? And it was answered, it is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness.’ Now that is a good turn given to the monkish (or indeed Christian) view of the whole created universe: for to say that it is bad, as some are inclined to do, is blasphemous and Manichean—but to say that it is small (with the very odd dream twist ‘so small it might fall to bits’), that seems just right. Very odd too is her doctrine of ‘the Grand Deed’. Christ tells her again and again ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ She asks how it can be well, since some are damned. He replied that all that is true, but the secret grand deed will make even that ‘very well’. ‘With you this is impossible, but not with Me.’
My mood changes about this. Sometimes it seems mere drivel—to invent a necessarily inconceivable grand deed which makes everything quite different while leaving it exactly the same. But then at other times it has the unanswerable, illogical convincingness of things heard in a dream and appeals to what is one of my deepest convictions, viz. that reality always escapes prediction by taking a line which was simply not in your thought at all. Imagine oneself as a flat earther questioning whether the Earth was endless or not. If you were told ‘It is finite but never comes to an end’, one would seem to be up against nonsense. Yet the escape (by being a sphere) is so easy—once you know it. At any rate, this book excites me.
TO MARY NEYLAN, who had married in 1934 and about whose first daughter, Sarah, two years old, she seems to have consulted Lewis: On obedience; on psychoanalysis as a science and as a philosophy; on living with and/or treating a psychological illness; and on the character and attractiveness of Jesus, with recommendations of many books and authors (some recommendations made again and again throughout Lewis’s writings).
26 MARCH 1940
(1) About obedience. Nearly everyone will find himself in the course of his life in positions where he ought to command and in positions where he ought to obey. Which he ought to be doing in any given situation, or whether he ought to be doing either, of course will always admit of dispute, but that doesn’t invalidate the principle—any more than the general rule ‘I oughtn’t to overeat’ is invalidated by the difficulty of saying whether one bun here and now constitutes over-eating. Still less is it invalidated by the fact that some people are too fond of ruling and others too fond of obeying: sooner or later each of them may be a duty for everyone.
Now each of them requires a certain training or habituation if it is to be done well: and indeed the habit of command, or of obedience, may often be more necessary than the most enlightened view as to the ultimate moral grounds for doing either; and certainly, where there is no training, the enlightened views will either be ineffective, or effective at the cost of great nervous tension. You can’t begin training a child to command until it has reason and age enough to command someone or something without absurdity. You can at once begin training it to obey: that is, teaching it the act of obedience as such—without prejudice to the views it will later hold as to who should obey whom, or when, or how much. Just as you try to train it in courage, without in the least prejudging the question as to which changes in adult life ought to be faced and which ought to be declined.
Of course I personally think (a) That there is in existence a Being so intrinsically authoritative that obedience is the essential business of a human being in a way in which command (though unfortunately humans must sometimes assume it) is not. (b) That humility is in itself good. But you would not have to agree with these two purely theological views if you agreed that children ought to learn obedience as such, since it is perfectly obvious that every human being is going to have to spend a great deal of his life in obeying parents, schoolmasters, employers, magistrates et cetera. Nor of course am I making any political statement. The question whether persons to be obeyed should be democratically elected or otherwise (I personally am a democrat) leaves where it was the truth that in any human society there will have to be a lot of obeying.
(2) Psychoanalysis. In talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable, of which I think I could give the causes if it were necessary. I may therefore have been betrayed into statements (or, at least, what is perhaps more insidious, a tone) on this subject which I am not prepared to defend. No doubt, like every young science, it is full of errors, but so long as it remains a science and doesn’t set up to be a philosophy I have no quarrel with it—i.e., as long as people judge whatever it reveals by the best human logic and scheme of values they’ve got and don’t try to derive logic and values from it. In practice, no doubt, as you say, the patient is always influenced by the analyst’s own values.
Further, in so far as it attempts to heal, i.e., to make better, every treatment involves a value judgement. This could be avoided if the analyst said ‘Tell me what kind of chap you want to be and I’ll see how near that I can make you’: but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived not from his science (it couldn’t be) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patient’s. In fact if you suspect your values come from the nursemaid, you may console yourself by reflecting that so do his! For no amount of knowledge about how states of mind are produced could of itself teach you which states to prefer: for that, he must be falling back on whatever general philosophy of life he has.
In reality, of course, neither his values nor yours are invalidated by the fact that they have a history in which nursemaids play a part—any more than reason collapses when you realise that you learned most of it from your elders.
Another way in which any therapeutic art may have bad philosophical results is this. It must, for the sake of method, take perfection as the Norm and treat every departure from it as disease: hence there is always a danger that those who practise it may come to treat a perfectly ideal perfection as ‘normal’ in the popular sense and consequently waste their lives in crying for the moon.
When Dr. Sprenger says Sarah is ‘nervous’ he probably is right in the sense that she is not, and never will be, perfectly wise, good, and happy. God-a-mercy! Fancy equating ‘ happiness’ and ‘ normality’! Worm’s meat, neighbour: Adam’s sons, Eve’s daughters: ‘life will not bear refining on’—‘think not the doom of man reversed for thee’.
I see no reason why a Christian should not be an analyst. Psychoanalysis after all merely defines what was always admitted, that the moral choices of the human soul operate inside a complex non-moral situation. Even Hamlet knew that ‘ the devil’ was ‘very potent’ with men of the melancholy complexion—i.e., men with certain complexes, which really gives the whole thing in a nutshell.
The Christian view would be that every psychological situation, just like every degree of wealth or poverty, talent or stupidity et cetera, had its own peculiar temptations and peculiar advantages, that the worst could always be turned to a good use and the best could always be abused to one’s spiritual ruin. In fact ‘all fortune is good’ as Boethius said.
This doesn’t mean that it would be wrong to try to cure a complex any more than a stiff leg: but it does mean that if you can’t, then, so far from the game being up, life with a complex, or with a stiff leg, is precisely the game you have been set. To the person whom you imagine who says ‘I’m a neurotic and can’t afford to be analysed and so can’t do anything about it’, I suppose a Christian would give just the same advice as to a person who needed a holiday and couldn’t get it—advice you doubtless heard long ago from that obviously excellent nursemaid. Even a Stoic would not listen to the plea you imagine. We must play the parts we find ourselves given. The despair at not being able to be analysed is really a revolt against the conditions of existence. Once make the medical Norm our ideal of the ‘ normal’ and we shall never lack an excuse for throwing up the sponge. But these are all illegitimate abuses of analysis. The real thing has obviously done you nearly pure good—you’ve learned from it some of the most valuable lessons, and they needn’t be un- learned.
(3) Christianity. My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that I should find there a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could! They told me I would find moral perfection—but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.
Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much of Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you really find is that we are simply not invited, so to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity, but always de haut en bas [from the top down]. (Have you noticed that you can hardly free your imagination to picture Him as shorter than yourself?) The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, ‘Who—or What—is This?’ For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is—is not lovable nor even tolerable. If He is, then of course it’s another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible.
On this whole aspect of the subject I should go on (since you’ve read his Orthodoxy) to Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. You might also find Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus useful…. By the way, if childish associations are too intrusive in reading the New Testament, it’s a good idea to try it in some other language, or in Moffatt’s modern translation.
As for theology proper: a good many misunderstandings are cleared away by Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief. A book of composite authorship and of varying merits, but on the whole good is Essays Catholic and Critical ed. E. G. Selwyn S.P.C.K. Gore’s The Philosophy of the Good Life (Everyman) is rather wordy but taught me a lot. If you can stand serious faults of style (and if you can get them, they are long out of print) Geo. MacDonald’s 3 vols. of Unspoken Sermons go to the very heart of the matter. I think you would also find it most illuminating to re-read now many things you once read in ‘Eng. Lit’ without knowing their real importance—Herbert, Traherne, Religio Medici.
As for a person ‘with whom to discuss’, choice is more ticklish. L. W. Grensted is very interested in Psychoanalysis and wrote a book on its relations to Christianity: would that be an advantage or the reverse? O. C. Quick is a man whom I know and like. Milford, the present rector of St. Mary’s, some like and some don’t. Let me know what, or what sort, you want and I’ll see what can be done.
I like very much what you say about ‘not having it both ways’ and something that can’t be ‘indefinitely avoided’. If it was really psychoanalysis that taught you that, more power to its elbow: but I suspect it is your own. Propaganda, my books? Tut! Only the two that almost profess to be (Regress and Silent Planet).
TO HIS BROTHER: On Mrs. Neylan’s impeding conversion (the two “Papists” are Bede Griffiths and George Sayer); and on Denis de Rougemont’s book, Love in the Western World.
29 MARCH 1940
This week I received a letter from my former pupil Mrs. Neylan…who is trembling on the verge of Christianity—admits that the issue ‘can no longer be avoided’—and asks what to read and (more difficult still) who to see. I felt almost overwhelmed by the responsibility of my reply, and naturally the more because the two other people whose conversion had something to do with me became Papists!
After writing at great length I fortunately re-read her letter and discovered that, owing to her omission of inverted commas, I had wholly misunderstood one of her points (will anyone teach women to punctuate) so I had to do nearly the whole job over again. The letter’s gone now. I suppose if God intends to have Mrs. Neylan it won’t make much difference what I’ve written!—yet that is a dangerous argument which would lead to its not mattering what you did in any circumstances.
The other thing I’ve been busy on this week is a book called L’Amour el l’Occident by one Denis de Rougemont, apparently a French Protestant, which I have to review. It contains a thoroughly bad historical thesis about medieval love, and an absolutely first class moral thesis about the utter incompatibility of l’amour passion with Christian marriage, happiness, or even enjoyable physical sexuality. He’s a corker of a man, though with some bogus elements in him: I’ve written to him to-day. If, as I suspect, he is now a poilu [soldier], my letter may give a moment’s happiness.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, who had just been ordained and who had sent Lewis the traditional prayer-card/bookmark which had the figure of the priest-king Melchizedek of Genesis 14: On healthy and unhealthy attitudes to art, literature, sensual love, any created thing, and the world; on the meaning of the word spiritual, on thinking about and praying for one’s enemies; and on the providence of books.
16 APRIL 1940
Congratulations (if that is the right word) on becoming a Priest, and thanks for the pleasing woodcut. Yes: Melchisedech is a figure who might have been intended (nay, was intended, since God provides not for an abstraction called Man but for individual souls) for people who were being led to the truth by the peculiar route that you and I know.
I do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they are only healthy when they are either (a) Definitely the handmaids of religious, or at least moral, truth—or (b) Admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or entertainment. Dante’s alright, and Pickwick is alright. But the great serious irreligious art—art for art’s sake—is all balderdash; and, incidentally, never exists when art is really flourishing. In fact one can say of Art as an author [De Rougemont] I recently read says of Love ( sensual love, I mean) ‘It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god’. Isn’t that well put? So many things—nay, every real thing—is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.
One thing we want to do is to kill the word ‘ spiritual’ in the sense in which it is used by writers like [ Matthew] Arnold and [Benedetto] Croce. Last term I had to make the following remark to a room full of Christian undergraduates ‘A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep, in humility, thankfulness, and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride’—obvious to you, but I could see it was quite a new light to them.
I don’t know what to think about the present state of the world. The sins on the side of the democracies are very great. I suppose they differ from those on the other side by being less deliberately blasphemous, fulfilling less the condition of a perfectly mortal sin. Anyway, the question ‘Who is in the right’ (in a given quarrel) is quite distinct from the question ‘Who is righteous?’—for the worse of two disputants may always be in the right on one particular issue. It is therefore not self righteous to claim that we are in the right now. But I am chary of doing what my emotions prompt me to do every hour; i.e., identifying the enemy with the forces of evil. Surely one of the things we learn from history is that God never allows a human conflict to become unambiguously one between simple good and simple evil?
The practical problem about charity (in our prayers) is very hard work, isn’t it? When you pray for Hitler and Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ, who died for those very men (b) A recollection, as firm as one can make it, of all one’s own cruelty which might have blossomed, under different conditions, into something terrible. You and I are not, at bottom, so different from these ghastly creatures.
I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich. What do you make of her? A dangerous book, clearly, and I’m glad I didn’t read it much earlier. (Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time?) One thing in her pleased me immensely. Contemptus mundi [ hatred of the world] is dangerous and may lead to Manicheeism. Love of the creature is also dangerous. How the good of each is won, and the danger rejected, in her vision of ‘all that is made’ as a little thing like a hazel nut ‘so small I thought it could hardly endure’. Not bad, you see: just very, very small….
A woman, an ex-pupil of mine called Mary Neylan, seems in her last letter to be hovering on the brink of conversion to Christianity—a proper subject for your prayers.
TO MARY NEYLAN, who has raised objections to becoming a Christian because of what she perceives as its outdated teachings about women and men, especially in marriage and in the Church’s wedding service: On “being in love” and on feelings in general; on the real differences between men and women; on the purposes of sex; on male headship only in marriage and not elsewhere; and on the meaning of the wedding service.
18 APRIL 1940
(1) On the marriage service [in the Book of Common Prayer]. The three ‘reasons’ for marrying, in modern English are (a) To have children. (b) Because you are very unlikely to succeed in leading a life of total sexual abstinence, and marriage is the only innocent outlet, (c) To be in a partnership. What is there to object to in the order in which they are put?
The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is the state described as ‘being in love’. Now I have nothing to say against ‘being in love’: but the idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine.
In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it—and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, it often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on ‘ love’ lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a ‘failure’, though in fact they have just reached the point at which real marriage begins. Fourthly, it would be undesirable, even if it were possible, for people to be ‘ in love’ all their lives. What a world it would be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance!
The Prayer Book therefore begins with something universal and solid—the biological aspect. No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard marriages are the fountains of History. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism. Then the second reason. Forgive me: but it is simply no good trying to explain this to a woman. The emotional temptations may be worse for women than for men: but the pressure of mere appetite on the male, they simply don’t understand. In this second reason, the Prayer Book is saying ‘If you can’t be chaste (and most of you can’t) the alternative is marriage.’ This may be brutal sense, but, to a man, it is sense, and that’s that. The third reason gives the thing that matters far more than ‘being in love’ and will last and increase, between good people, long after ‘ love’ in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood—the partnership, the loyalty to ‘the firm’, the composite creature. (Remember it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr. Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman could have been equally happy with any one of ‘tens of thousands’ of other women. I.e., the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis which may have brought the people together that matters.)
Now the second reason involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be ‘one flesh’. He says nothing about two ‘who married for love’: the mere fact of marriage at all—however it came about—sets up the ‘one flesh’. There is a terrible comment on this in I Cor VI 16 ‘he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh’. You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation which has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions—some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not.
This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up—but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told (cf.—what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?).
From this all the rest flows. (1) The seriousness of sexual sin and the importance of marriage as ‘a remedy against sin’ (I don’t mean, of course, that sins of that sort will not, like others, be forgiven if they are repented, nor that the ‘eternal relations’ which they have set up will not be redeemed. We believe that God will use all repented evil as fuel for fresh good in the end.) (2) The permanence of marriage which means that the intention of fidelity matters more than ‘being in love’. (3) The Headship of the Man.
I’m sorry about this—and I feel that my defence of it would be more convincing if I were a woman. You see, of course, that if marriage is a permanent relation, intended to produce a kind of new organism (‘the one flesh’) there must be a Head. It’s only so long as you make it a temporary arrangement dependent on ‘being in love’ and changeable by frequent divorce, that it can be strictly democratic—for, on that view, when they really differ, they part. But if they are not to part, if the thing is like a nation not a club, like an organism not a heap of stones, then, in the long run, one party or other must have the casting vote.
That being so, do you really want the Head to be the woman? In a particular instance, no doubt you may. But do you really want a matriarchal world? Do you really like women in authority? When you seek authority yourself, do you naturally seek it in a woman?
Your phrase about the ‘slave-wife’ is mere rhetoric, because it assumes servile subordination to be the only kind of subordination. Aristotle could have taught you better. ‘The householder governs his slaves despotically. He governs his wife and children as being both free—but he governs the children as a constitutional monarch, and the wife politically’ (i.e., as a democratic magistrate governs a democratic citizen).
My own feeling is that the Headship of the husband is necessary to protect the outer world against the family. The female has a strong instinct to fight for its cubs. What do nine women out of ten care about justice to the outer world when the health, or career, or happiness of their own children is at stake? That is why I want a ‘foreign policy’ of the family, so to speak, to be determined by the man: I expect more mercy from him!
Yet this fierce maternal instinct must be preserved, otherwise the enormous sacrifices involved in motherhood would never be borne. The Christian scheme, therefore, does not suppress it but protects us defenceless bachelors from its worst ravages! This, however, is only my own idea.
The Headship doctrine is that of Christianity. I take it to be chiefly about man as man and woman as woman, and therefore about husbands and wives, since it is only in marriage that they meet as epitomes of their sex. Notice that in I Cor XI just after the bit about the man being the Head, St. Paul goes on to add the baffling reservation (verse 11) that the sexes ‘in the Lord’ don’t have any separate existence. I have no idea what this means: but I take it it must imply that the existence of a man or woman is not exhausted by the fact of being male or female, but that they exist in many other modes. I mean, you may be a citizen, a musician, a teacher et cetera as well as a woman, and you needn’t transfer to all these personalities everything that is said about you as wife quâ wife.
I think that is the answer to your view that the Headship doctrine would prevent women going in for education. St. Paul is not a system maker, you know. As a Jew, he must, for instance, have believed that a man ought to honour and obey his Mother: but he doesn’t stop and put that in when talking about the man being Head in marriage.
As for Martha and Mary, either Christ and St. Paul are inconsistent here, or they are not. If they’re not, then, whether you can see how or not, St. Paul’s doctrine can’t have the sense you give it. If they are inconsistent, then the authority of Christ of course completely over-rides that of St. Paul. In either event, you needn’t bother.
I very strongly agree that it’s no use trying to create a ‘ feeling’. But what feeling do you want to have? Isn’t your problem one of thought, not feeling? The question is ‘Is Christianity true—or even, is there some truth mixed up in it?’ The thing in reading MacDonald is not to try to have the feelings he has, but to notice whether the whole thing does or does not agree with such perceptions (I mean, about good and evil et cetera) as you already have—and, where it doesn’t, whether it or you are right.
…Thank you for taking my mind off the war for an hour or so! P.S. I don’t think the Marriage Service is ascetic, and I think your real objection to it may be that it’s not prudish enough! The service is not a place for celebrating the flesh, but for making a solemn agreement in the presence of God and of society—an agreement which involves a good many other things besides the flesh.
Distinguish the Church from the bedroom and don’t be silly! Would you really think it suitable for erotic excitement to be expressed by the young couple while visiting the family solicitor, while asking their parents’ blessing, while bidding good-bye to the old home? If not, then why when asking God’s blessing? Do you think a grace before meals should be so written as actually to make the mouth water? If we began holidays with a religious service, would you take your bathing suit to Church, and practice a few gold strokes in the choir?
‘Sober and godly matrons’ [a phrase from the marriage service] may be a stickler, if you haven’t read the English School: but you ought to know that all the associations you are putting into it are modern and accidental. It means ‘Married women (matrons) who are religious (godly) and have something better and happier to think about than jazz and lipstick (sober).’ But you must know that as well as I do!
TO HIS BROTHER: On forgiving and loving one’s enemies (Lewis’s nemeses among his colleagues at Magdalen College were William Mackenzie, a political scientist, John Austin, a Leftist philosopher, and Redvers Opie, the obese bursar); and on his and his brother’s guilt over the way they treated their father.
4 MAY 1940
Your other question about loving our enemies has been very much in my mind lately, and it must be faced, every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. No exemption seems to be allowed—of Johnson’s Rambler 185 (for Xmas Eve 1751) which ends thus: ‘Of him that hopes to be forgiven, it is indispensably required that he forgive. On this great duty eternity is suspended: and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain.’ It sounds impossible. I pray every night for the people I am most tempted to hate or despise (the present list is Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mackenzie, Austin and Opie)* and in the effort to make this real I have had to do a good deal of thinking.
(1) There were three words in Gk. which covered most kinds of love ( Eros = sexual love, Storge = family affection, Philia = friendship) but the New Testament word for ‘ love’ or ‘ charity’ is Agape, which has hardly any use in classical Gk—i.e., it is a new word for a new thing. It is obvious that it cannot mean ‘an involuntary sentiment’. We all say that God is wise, and habitually argue as if He were a fool! How could He be commanding the involuntary? Agape is best seen, I think, in the words ‘ love your neighbour as yourself’, i.e., by an act of will, aim at your neighbour’s good in the same way as you aim at your own.
Now you don’t ‘ love’ yourself because of your own ‘lovable qualities’. You may, in moments of vanity, attribute lovable qualities to yourself, but that is not the cause of your self-love but one of the results of it. At other moments, when you dislike yourself, you still wish for your own happiness. This attitude to one’s own self is dictated by nature: towards other selves it has to be acquired.
I take it, it has nothing in the world to do with trying to pretend that the enemy is ‘not so bad after all’ or that his sins ‘don’t matter’, or that he is really lovable. Not a bit. It’s the old business about ‘loving the sinner and hating the sin’ which becomes alive to me when I realise that this is what I do to myself all the time. In fact I provisionally define Agape as ‘steadily remembering that inside the Gestapo-man there is a thing which says I and Me just as you do, which has just the same grounds (neither more nor less) as your “Me” for being distinguished from all its sins however numerous, which, like you, was made by God for eternal happiness—remembering, and always acting for the real interests of that thing as far as you can.’
(2) If one takes seriously your suggestion that they are literally possessed, really it only makes this point of view easier? Suppose your eyes were opened and you could see the Gestapo man visibly fiend-ridden—a twisted and stunted human form, covered with blood and filth, with a sort of cross between a mandrill and a giant centipede fastened onto it? Surely you, and the human remains, become almost allies against the horror which is tormenting you both, him directly and you through him?
(3) Of course there is a further stage. We are not asked to love the damned. When the fiend’s victim has wholly ceased to be human, when his will is no longer merely dominated by but unrecoverably identified with his rider, charity is no longer commanded. But we are not allowed to assume that this has taken place in any man still alive, and obviously we don’t know enough. But I think the possibility is a positive help to charity. These ‘swine’, as you rightly call them, are to be regarded as people in whom the human self (made for happiness, like you) is still alive, and steadily moving towards that final identification with its fiend—but still capable (we must assume) of being rescued. From this point of view I do not find it impossible to desire, and pray, that that rescue may occur. (Remember, you are not asked to wish that, remaining what they now are, they should be happy: far from it.)
(4) Of course the parable of the servant who wouldn’t forgive his fellow servant comes in. You and I take a high line about Nazi cruelties. You and I, of all people. Think it over.
(5) We are told that God desires the salvation of all men. One is to picture Christ perpetually interceding for these swine; when we pray for them we are merely joining our infantile prayer to His. One can put it almost comically ‘I don’t fancy that man myself, Sir, but of course, if you make a point of it…’ Of course His intercession for them is not because of any value they have; but so is His intercession for us. My own tendency to give a free rein to hatred and to regard it as virtuous or natural is much cooled by noticing that hatred comes as often from wind-up as from anything else.
*N.B. I don’t mean that I’m tempted to hate them equally, of course!
TO OWEN BARFIELD, whose mother had just died: On Mrs. Barfield’s possible “luck” in escaping the war by her death and on fear of war and death; on the great comfort in the writings of Julian of Norwich; on dealing with tribulations one at a time; and on the meaning of their friendship.
2 JUNE 1940
Mrs. Moore told me yesterday about your loss of your mother. I cannot imagine myself, in similar circumstances, not feeling very strongly felix opportunitate mortis, but I daresay, when it comes to the point, that is very far from being the predominant emotion….
I am very sorry you should have this particular desolation added to the general one in which we all are. It is like the first act of Prometheus [Unbound]: ‘ Peace is in the grave, the grave hides all things beautiful and good.’ [ Shelley] was near, however, to his release when he said that, and I accept the omen—that you and I and our friends will soon be past the worst, if not in one way, then in the other. For I am very thankful to say that while my digestion often plays tricks I am ashamed of, I retain my faith, as I have no doubt you do yours.
‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’—This is from Lady Julian of Norwich whom I have been reading lately and who seems, in the Fifteenth century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’ reconciliation of Aristotle and Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity with Kant. The real difficulty is, isn’t it, to adapt one’s steady beliefs about tribulation to this particular tribulation; for the particular, when it arrives, always seems so peculiarly intolerable. I find it helpful to keep it very particular—to stop thinking about the ruin of the world et cetera, for no one is going to experience that, and to see it as each individual’s personal sufferings, which never can be more than those of one man, or more than one man, if he were very unlucky, might have suffered in peacetime. Do you get sudden lucid intervals? islands of profound peace? I do: and though they don’t last, I think one brings something away from them.
I wish we could meet more, but I can hardly reckon on any one evening at present…. All is well still—except one’s stomach. And oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed. MacDonald observes somewhere that ‘the approach of any fate is usually also the preparation for it’. I begin to hope he is right. Even at this present moment I don’t feel nearly so bad as I should have done if anyone had prophesied it to me eighteen months ago.