1941
TO MARY NEYLAN, who had told Lewis she was going to resume the practice of her faith after years of alienation and theological struggle: On acting on the light one has; on the unreliability of religious emotion; on confession of sins to a spiritual director; and on daily spiritual and Bible reading.
4 JANUARY 1941
Congratulations…on your own decision. I don’t think this decision comes either too late or too soon. One can’t go on thinking it over for ever; and one can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light. Don’t be worried about feeling that, or about feeling at all. As to what to do, I suppose the normal next step, after self-examination repentance and restitution, is to make your Communion; and then to continue as well as you can, praying as well as you can…and fulfilling your daily duties as well as you can. And remember always that religious emotion is only a servant…. This, I say, would be the obvious course. If you want anything more e.g. Confession and Absolution which our church enjoins on no-one but leaves free to all—let me know and I’ll find you a directeur. If you choose this way, remember it’s not the psychoanalyst over again: the confessor is the representative of Our Lord and declares His forgiveness—his advice or ‘understanding’ though of real, is of secondary importance.
For daily reading I suggest (in small doses) Thomas à Kempis’ ‘ Imitation of Christ’ and the ‘ Theologia Germanica’…and of course the Psalms and New Testament. Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond: do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you—yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.
This has been great news for me I need hardly say. You have all my prayers (not that mine are worth much).
TO MARY NEYLAN: On the need to give and receive encouragement; and on not relying on feelings but rejoicing when good feelings come.
29 JANUARY 1941
Thanks very much for your kind letter. My own progress is so very slow (indeed sometimes I seem to be going backwards) that the encouragement of having in any degree helped someone else is just what I wanted.
Of course the idea of not relying on emotion carries no implication of not rejoicing in it when it comes. You may remember Donne’s Litanie ‘That our affections kill us not—nor die’. One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out!
TO MARY NEYLAN: On the meaning of the emotional crisis and spiritual awakening her difficulties with her now three-year-old daughter occasioned; on the essential goodness of the need for approval; on the right and wrong times to read a book; and on the advisability of confessing one’s sins to a fellow layperson. The moral of the Aesop fable about the dog in the manger is “People frequently begrudge something to others that they themselves cannot enjoy. Even though it does them no good, they won’t let others have it.” ( Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs [Oxford: Oxford University Press-World Classics, 2002], number 163.)
26 APRIL 1941
(1) I think I understand what you say about Sarah. Since the total experience (which we have inadequately labelled ‘ maternal jealousy’) led you to Him, I agree that some element in it came from Him. It wouldn’t follow that the Jealousy considered in the abstract, was good. Cf. a resentment as a rebuke which is the beginning of a process that leads to real contrition. The resentment in itself is bad, but only the bad concomitant (at that stage perhaps inevitable) of a good thing, self-knowledge. In your experience, I take it, the good thing was the painful realisation of how far you had abdicated your maternal position—a complex privation, of joys missed and duties neglected. The bad element was the ‘ dog in the manger’ indignation at seeing that someone else had picked up what you had dropped. Conjugal jealousy would similarly contain good and bad elements, I suppose.
(2) On being ‘patted on the head’…I have just made some new discoveries. Something like a ‘pat on the head’ is promised (‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’). Link that up with ‘entering the Kingdom as a child’—then reflect that being praised by those we ought to please, as far from being the vainest, is the humblest and most creaturely of all pleasures. It is our Pride (as usual) that has excluded from our idea of Heaven the old picture of the divine accolade.
(3)…The important thing for each of us about any book is not whether it is wicked in itself but whether it can be safely read by me at this particular moment.
(4) You may say you want to confess your sins to God only. The trouble is that in fact you have confessed a good many of them to me! On the medical level, the amateur practitioner gets prosecuted for treating a patient if he is unsuccessful and found out. On the spiritual level, I don’t know. I feel pretty sure, however, that if I now give you any wrong advice and the matter comes before any objective spiritual tribunal hereafter, both parties would be asked ‘Were there no priest in your country?’ And quite frankly I am not sure that it is fitting for a man who is not protected and supported by the special status of a priest or a doctor to be told too many of his neighbour’s secrets—unless, of course, there is some desperate need. It’s not a question of being bored at all—more a desire to walk in well established ways which have the approval of Christendom as a whole. I leave the decision to you. But one of the things on which a confessor could give you advice would be precisely the proper use to be made of a lay adviser, and the limitations of that use—specially when the lay adviser has no natural locus standi [“recognised position, acknowledged right or claim”] as a father, brother or even an old family friend might have.
TO MARY NEYLAN: More on the advisability of confessing one’s sins to a fellow layperson and on choosing a priest confessor; in praise of her husband’s patience with her religious changes, a remarkably rare gift in an intimate relationship.
30 APRIL 1941
I see from your letter that you have really acted with great circumspection and made every effort to seek advice in more professional quarters! I hope that my last letter, written in ignorance of this, did not sound dictatorial. You may put out of your head any idea of ‘not having a claim’ on any help I can give. Every human being, still more every Christian, has an absolute claim on me for any service I can render them without neglecting other duties.
When I spoke of some one with more locus standi I didn’t mean someone ‘on whom you had a claim’ in the least. I only meant that certain things were most properly discussed either where a professional status makes them impersonal or where some natural, objective relation between the speakers renders the personal confidence what our forefathers called ‘convenient’. Conversations about principles (as opposed to particular facts) are another matter. But I think we both agree on the point.
Now, as to a confessor. The two alternatives that occur to me are (a) Milford, (b) A Cowley Father, preferably my own confessor, Father Adams.
The points for Milford are that he is a modern intellectual brought up like yourself, a married man conversant with domestic problems, besides being accustomed to hear confessions. The point against him is that he seems (from what we saw of him last term) to hold the traditional faith with rather too many concessions to the modern scientific outlook.
The point against Fr Adams is that he is much too close to Rome. I had to tell him that I couldn’t follow him in certain directions, and since then he has not pressed me. He would also, in my opinion, be inferior to Milford as an intellectual guide. On the other hand (a) He certainly understands the human soul for practical purposes very well indeed. (b) If I have ever met a holy man, he is one.
I write this without knowing whether he can take on more penitents than he has at present, for he is very old (an advantage in my opinion) and has had an illness. He knows some psychoanalysis.
I should be free at 12 on Tuesday if you cared to call in and give me your views.
If it is not impertinent to say so, I think your husband must have behaved like an angel. I have had the experience myself of remaining an unbeliever when some of my most intimate friends began to believe, and I’ve experienced the same situation the other way round when I began to change myself. It is an extraordinarily disagreeable one to the unbelieving party and if he is not good may provoke resentment. I’m afraid for a few years I just took the line of being as nasty as I could and saying everything that could hurt. God forgive me.
TO MARY NEYLAN: With praise for her gracious acceptance of his diagnosis of jealousy in her relationship with her daughter; and a request for prayer.
9 MAY 1941
I have a reply from Fr Adams. He would like you to write to him as soon as you please and suggest a time for going to see him. The first interview will not be the Confession itself but to settle preliminaries. The address is The Rev. Fr. Adams, ssje, The Mission House, Marston St., Oxford.
I’m sure you’re doing right and that God is leading you and bringing you in pretty fast too. I shall never forget your reply ‘It looks like it’ when I suggested jealousy as one of the troubles—I never hope to see the human ship take a big wave in better style!
Continue to pray for me. I need it all: and may say in general that if I were to tell you as much about myself as you have told me (which I shan’t!) the record would be much blacker than your own.
TO ARTHUR HAZARD DAKIN, who was writing a biography of Paul Elmer More: On the qualities Lewis sought (and found) in an ideal spiritual director.
3 AUGUST 1941
I have sent under a separate cover copies of the three letters I had from Paul E. More. Please forgive me the delay. I have been so busy for many months now that I hardly know whether I am on my head or my heels. Now for such recollections as I can furnish.
I once told Paul Elmer More that while it would be an exaggeration to call him my spiritual father, I might call him my spiritual uncle. By this I meant, in the first place, that one had in his presence that sense of comfort and security and well-being which a child has in the presence of grown up relatives whom it likes. I began to feel it almost at once. It was something I am not sure we would gather from his books—a real homeliness, almost an affectionateness, the very reverse of that rarefied quality which some people may associate with American ‘ Humanism’.
In the second place, I meant that quality which a good uncle often has of giving, without the slightest offence, advice and even correction which the child would resent if it came from the father. In our very first conversation he corrected a false Greek accent, and the misuse of a scientific term, which I had perpetrated in print, in a way which ought to be common among old men but is actually rather rare. On the other hand it was so done that even the vainest young author could not have objected to it: on the other, there was no nonsense about all being in the same boat, or ‘you don’t mind my mentioning it’ or anything of that kind. It was quite definitely and undisguisedly the ripe speaking to the unripe—authority without egoism.
At this distance of time I cannot remember much of our conversation. He found that I agreed with him about the futility of much academic ‘research’, and this led him to tell with great humour, and also great tenderness, the story of a young woman he knew who had refused to marry a man she loved because her ‘ work’ (a thesis on some unspeakably obscure poet) ‘must come first’. Apparently More had saved the situation and got the little fool to the altar alright…. He had a good deal of…shrewd humour and avuncular playfulness….
But most of our time together was spent in close argument. You saw at once he was the sort of man who welcomed attacks on his own favourite beliefs and who was ready to give his whole attention to what you said without any irrelevant consideration of who you were. He was very fair and patient in discussion and talked for truth not victory. And all the time, however abstract the theme, the homely and human quality—sometimes manifested in the choice of an illustration, sometimes in the mere twinkle of his eye—was always in evidence, making one quite sure that his philosophy had roots in the earth. It is not, I think, what I should have expected. My impression is that the man was bigger than his books—there was more of him. Anything less like the popular idea of a ‘don’ or a ‘philosopher’ would be hard to find. Perhaps the extremely rich and flexible voice (he spoke from the chest) had something to do with it.
With renewed apologies for the inconvenience I must have caused you by my delay.
TO SISTER PENELOPE, who had sent Lewis a photo of the head of the image of the Shroud of Turin: More on what being “in Christ” means; on the provident arrival of theologian Eric Mascall’s Man: His Origin and Destiny and God-Man and the delights they and her letter touched off in him (an emotional peak, to be followed by a trough mentioned in the next letter).
9 OCTOBER 1941
I am ashamed of having grumbled. And your act was not that of a brute—in operation it was more like that of an angel, for (as I said) you started me on a quite new realisation of what is meant by being ‘in Christ’, and immediately after that ‘the power which erring men call chance’ put into my hands Mascall’s two books in the Signpost series which continued the process.
So I lived for a week end (at Aberystwyth) in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines that have hitherto been only buried seeds begin actually to come up—like snowdrops or crocuses. I won’t deny they’ve met a touch of frost since (if only things would last, or rather if only we would!) but I’m still very much, and gladly, in your debt. The only real evil of having read your scripts when I was tired is that it was hardly fair to them and not very useful to you.
I have had to refuse a request from Sister Janet. Will you tell her that the ‘ wives and oxen’ are quite real ones?
I enclose the MS. of Screwtape. If it is not a trouble I should like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed)—after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.
Thank you very much for the photo of the Shroud. It raises a whole question on which I shall have to straighten out my thought one of these days.
TO SISTER PENELOPE: More on her essay “Consider the Dog,” mentioned above (24 August 1939); and on the spiritual trough he is in.
9 NOVEMBER 1941
Thank you so much for the head of Our Lord from the shroud. It has grown upon me wonderfully. I don’t commit myself to the genuineness. One can never be quite certain. But the great value is to make one realise that He was a man, and once even a dead man. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realisation.
I am writing, really, for company, for I’m a sad Ass at the moment. I’ve been going through one of those periods when one can no longer disguise the fact that movement has been backward not forward. All the sins one thought one had escaped have been back again as strong as ever,
And all our former pain
And all our Surgeon’s care
Are lost: and all the unbearable, in vain
Borne once, is still to bear.
I re-read your essay on the dog Noonie the other night when very tired with great enjoyment. Dogs don’t relapse. Cats do, and go wild. I’m a cat.
I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘ Eve’ of that world: a difficult chapter. I hadn’t realised till I came to write it all the Ave-Eva business. I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart—she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But if one can get even a fraction of it into words it is worth doing.
Have you room for an extra prayer? Pray for Jane if you have. She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.
TO SISTER PENELOPE: On the inability to advise oneself; on the daily grind of becoming one’s true self; on disappointment with oneself; and on spiritual pride. This may be the first reference to what Lewis will later call the “Deeper Magic,” articulated again in his letter below to Arthur Greeves, 2 July 1949).
19 NOVEMBER 1941
Thanks for your kind letters. It was silly to grumble: except that Johnson says ‘He that complains acts like a man, like a social being,’ and it is a curious fact that the advice we can give to others we cannot give to ourselves and truth is more effective through any life rather than our own. Chas. Williams in Taliessin is good on this ‘No one can live in his own house. My house for my neighbour, his for me.’
I think what really worries me is the feeling (often on waking in the morning) that there’s really nothing I so much dislike as religion—that it’s all against the grain and I wonder if I can really stand it! Have you ever had this? Does one outgrow it? Of course there’s no intellectual difficulty. If our faith is true then that is just what it ought to feel like, until the new man is full-grown. But it’s a considerable bore.
What you say about ‘ disappointed with oneself’ is very true—and a tendency to mistake mere disappointment (in which there is much wounded pride and much of a mere sportsman’s irritation at breaking a record) for true repentance. I ought to have devoted a Screwtape letter to this.
TO PATRICIA THOMSON, an undergraduate at St. Hugh College, Oxford, who heard Lewis give a sermon on 7 December 1941 (otherwise unknown) that contained an idea which he later developed in “The Shocking Alternative” in Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 3: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people say about [ Jesus]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the thing we must not say.” On the destiny of the virtuous unbeliever.
8 DECEMBER 1941
When I said it was ‘no good’ trying to regard Jesus as a human teacher I only meant that it was logically untenable—as you might say ‘It’s no good trying to maintain that the earth is flat.’
I was saying nothing in that sermon about the destiny of the ‘ virtuous unbeliever’. The parable of the sheep and the goats suggests that they have a very pleasant surprise coming to them. But in the main, we are not told God’s plans about them in any detail. If the Church is Christ’s body,—the thing he works through—then the more worried one is about the people outside, the more reason to get inside oneself where one can help—you are giving Him, as it were, a new finger. (I assumed last night that I was talking to those who already believed.) If I’d been speaking to those who didn’t, of course everything I’d said would be different.
Fear isn’t repentance—but it’s alright as a beginning—much better at that stage than not being afraid.
How interested are you? If you care to come and talk about it I expect we could arrange a date. Let me know.
TO PATRICIA THOMSON, whose fall school term (Michaelmas term) was about to end: On trying to be Christian.
11 DECEMBER 1941
If you go down to-morrow I am afraid it will be impossible to meet this term. Ring me up or write to me when you come up again and we’ll fix a time.
In the meantime, don’t let yourself be worried in two incompatible ways. You are wondering whether Christianity is true or false. Remember, if you think it false you needn’t bother about all the things in it that seem terrible. If you decide it is true, you needn’t worry about not having faith, for apparently you have!
I quite agree any idea of counting up one’s good deeds, as if one was in for an exam, is fatal. It was Christianity which first pointed this out. We are not saved ‘by merit’. But of all this, when we meet. I suggest George MacDonald’s Phantastes (Everyman) and Lilith and Coventry Patmore’s Poems and Rod, Root and Flower as books that might interest you.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On Charles Williams; and on the Inklings.
21 DECEMBER 1941
I’m extremely glad you’ve got onto my friend Chas. Williams though onto one of his worst books. He is living in Oxford during the war and we made him lecture on Milton to the faculty, so that (would you believe it, remembering the English lectures of your own period) we actually heard a lecture on Comus which put the importance where Milton had put it. In fact the lecture was a panegyric of chastity! Just fancy the incredulity with which (at first) an audience of undergraduates listened to something so unheard of. But he beat them in the end.
He is an ugly man with rather a cockney voice. But no one ever thinks of this for five minutes after he has begun speaking. His face becomes almost angelic. Both in public and private he is of nearly all the men I have met the one whose address most overflows with love. It is simply irresistible. Those young men and women were lapping up what he said about Chastity before the end of the hour. It’s a big thing to have done.
I have seen his impress on the work in the Milton papers when I examined. Fancy an Oxford student, and a girl, writing about Mammon’s speech in Book II ‘Mammon proposes an ordered state of sin with such majesty of pride that but for the words live to ourselves which startle our conscience, we should hardly recognise it as sin, so natural is it to man’ (Compare that with the sort of bilge you and I were proud to write in Schools!).
Williams, Dyson of Reading, and my brother (Anglicans) and Tolkien and my doctor, Havard (your Church) are the ‘ Inklings’ to whom my Problem of Pain was dedicated. We meet on Friday evenings in my rooms: theoretically to talk about literature, but in fact nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them all is incalculable. Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
His stories (I mean Williams) are his best work—Descent into Hell and The Place of the Lion are the best. I quite agree about what you call his ‘affectations’—not that they are affectations, but honest defects of taste. He is largely a self-educated man, labouring under an almost oriental richness of imagination (‘clotted glory from Charles’ as Dyson called it) which could be saved from turning silly and even vulgar in print only by a severe early discipline which he has never had. But he is a lovely creature. I’m proud of being among his friends.