1944
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On what Bible commentary to read; and on Charles Williams.
30 JANUARY 1944
(1.) I’m afraid I don’t know anything about theatrical agencies, nor indeed agencies of any kind. Nor do I know any theatrical people.
(2.) Probably the best single book of modern comment on the Bible is A New Commentary on Holy Scripture edited by Gore, Goudge and Guillaume, and published by the spck…—a very fat, ugly volume in double columns, but quite readable print. Of course for separate commentaries on particular books of the Bible, their name is legion. The Clarendon Bible (Clarendon Press) is not bad.
(3.) The starting point for interpreting Chas. Williams is He Came Down from Heaven (Methuen) where Florence will find some of his main ideas explained directly—i.e., not in imaginative form. If either Florence or you would like a copy of his book on Dante ( The Figure of Beatrice) I have a spare copy which I would gladly give. It might help.
As for the man, he is about 52, of humble origin (there are still traces of cockney in his voice), ugly as a chimpanzee but so radiant (he emanates more love than any man I have ever known) that as soon as he begins talking whether in private or in a lecture he is transfigured and looks like an angel. He sweeps some people quite off their feet and has many disciples. Women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan. He works in the Oxford University Press. In spite of his ‘ angelic’ quality he is also quite an earthly person and when Warnie, Tolkien, he and I meet for our pint in a pub in Broad Street, the fun is often so fast and furious that the company probably thinks we’re talking bawdy when in fact we’re very likely talking Theology. He is married and, I think, youthfully in love with his wife still. That’s about all I can think of.
You needn’t ask me to pray for you, Arthur—I have done so daily ever since I began to pray, and am sure you do for me.
TO MRS. PERCIVAL WISEMAN, who had asked Lewis for the text of one of his radio talks and to whom Lewis is sending a copy of his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”: On the “purpose” of the death of loved ones; and on the exchange of intercessions across the barrier of death.
20 MARCH 1944
I’m afraid the manuscripts of the talks are going straight to the publisher as soon as the series is over.
Instead I send you a little tract on my views of the future life. You are quite right to keep clear of the Spiritualists. All that is an effort to cancel death, to go on getting a pale phantom of the same sort of intercourse with our dear ones which we had when they and we were members of the same world. But we must submit to death, embrace the cross.
I think the purpose of the separation is to help us to turn what is merely natural and instinctive affection into real spiritual love of them in Christ. Not that natural affection isn’t good and innocent, but it is merely natural—and therefore must first be crucified before it can rise again. Those who try to escape the crucifixion fall in either with charlatans or with delusions from hell: spiritualism often drives people mad. Of course we should pray for our dead as I’m sure they do for us.
TO MR. OFFER: On the human experience of Jesus on the cross; and on the essential meaning of the two natures of Christ.
9 MAY 1944
I think I should answer thus.
The words from the Cross ‘Why hast thou forsaken me’ suggest that Our Lord entered into the human experience to the degree of complete dereliction and at one point no longer realised His own Deity nor foresaw His own Resurrection.
The gift was never withdrawn. Christ is still Man. Human nature has been taken up into the Divine Nature (see Athanasian Creed) and remains there. Our bridgehead is secure.
What do these people want? Do they actually visualise Him for 3 hours nailed to a stake—flayed back glued to unplaned wood—Palestinian sun—cloud of insects round head, hands, and feet—the face a mask of bruises, pus, spittle, blood, tears and sweat—the lungs gradually tearing owing to the position—and then complain ‘This doesn’t hurt enough?’ If so…!
TO EDITH GATES: On the love of God as the way to love of neighbor; on how to love God without having the feelings of love; and on how to deal with pride.
23 MAY 1944
Certainly I cannot love my neighbour properly till I love God. As George MacDonald says in his Unspoken Sermons (long out of print but if you can get a 2nd hand copy by any means short of stealing, do! It is beyond price)
And beginning to try to love his neighbour he finds that this is no more to be reached in itself than the Law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the Law without first rising into the love of his neighbour, so he cannot love his neighbour without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this principle—the driving of things upward toward the centre.
On the other hand we have no power to make ourselves love God. The only way is absolute obedience to Him, total surrender. He will give us the ‘ feeling’ if He pleases. But both when He does and when He does not, we shall gradually learn that feeling is not the important thing. There is something in us deeper than feeling, deeper even than conscious will. It is rather being. When we are quite empty of self we shall be filled with Him, for nature abhors a vacuum. Of course it is good, as you say, to ‘realise’ that the source of all our good feelings is God. (That is the right way to deal with pride: not to depreciate the good thing we are tempted to be proud of but to remember where it comes from). But ‘ realisation’ depends on faculties that fail us when we are tired or when we try to use them too often, so we can’t depend on it. It is the self you really are and not its reflection in consciousness that matters most.
May I take what is really the closest parallel? No child is begotten without pleasure. But the pleasure is not the cause of life—it is a symptom, something that happens when life is in fact being transmitted. In the same way ‘ feeling love’ is only the echo in consciousness of the real thing which lies deeper.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, with whom Lewis shares an insight from The Great Divorce (Chapter 9), which he is writing at the time: On the utter truth of losing one’s life to save it (with another word about Charles Williams).
25 MAY 1944
Thanks for your letter. I too was delighted with our meeting. About the past, and nothing being lost, the point is that ‘He who loses his life shall save it’ is totally true, true on every level. Everything we crucify will rise again: nothing we try to hold onto will be left us.
I wrote the other day ‘ Good and evil when they attain their full stature are retrospective. That is why, at the end of all things, the damned will say we were always in Hell, and the blessed we have never lived anywhere but in heaven.’ Do you agree?
You’re right about C.W. He has an undisciplined mind and sometimes admits into his theology ideas whose proper place is in his romances. What keeps him right is his love of which (and I have now known him long) he radiates more than any man I know…. Continue to pray for me as I do for you.
TO SISTER PENELOPE, after Lewis had finished writing That Hideous Strength and during the time of the allied armies’ successes in the liberation of Europe: A request for prayers for Mrs. Moore; and an insight about persevering in our quest for perfect obedience.
6 SEPTEMBER 1944
It is on my conscience that I owe you a letter this long time. All sorts of things have happened to me during it. I’ve finished another book which concludes the Ransom trilogy [That Hideous Strength]: the scene is on Earth this time.
I’ve had an operation for the removal of a piece of shell I got into me in the last war, which, after lying snug and silent like an unrepented sin for 20 years or so, began giving me trouble. How nice modern anaesthetics are compared with the sort I remember from boyhood.
Last of all, and only a few days ago, Jane (you remember my Jane?) has had a slight stroke and lost the power of her left arm. She is in bed and I think will make a full recovery—this time. And as usual we are looking, and looking in vain, for domestic help. So have us all in your prayers….
The world has changed since you and I last met: one finds it difficult to keep pace with the almost miraculous mercies we are receiving as a nation. I never in my most sanguine moments dreamed that the invasion of Europe would go quite so well. Query—when Christ tells us to be perfect is it because only He knows how very small an addition to our present efforts would break the enemy’s line completely?—that perfection would cost very little more than our actual dithering does? But we’re all like the boy who takes nearly, but never quite, enough trouble over his prep. and always just spoils it. Remember me to Mother Maribell and Annie Louise.
TO MARGARET DENEKE: On the death of her husband, Paul Benecke, Lewis’s old history tutor and a Fellow at Magdalen College.
3 OCTOBER 1944
It will give me great pleasure to come to lunch at one o’clock on Oct. 30th. I will not try to express my sympathy to Miss Benecke when we meet—such things are often merely embarrassing. You, I am sure, will not doubt that she has it.
The gap in College is terrible. Already (and yet it is only a few days) I have twice found myself setting aside a problem ‘to ask Benecke about it’ and then realised with a pang that there is no more of that. His image haunts every room in Magdalen. I hear his imagined voice again and again: so vividly, when crossing Magdalen bridge this morning, that I almost wondered if there were not some objective reality in the experience. I can hardly explain how his funeral affected me. I have heard that service read in that chapel so often for those who have not believed a word of it and who (had they been alive) would have mocked, that my feeling was almost one of relief. Here at last was a dead man not unworthy of the service. In some queer way it enormously strengthened my faith, and before we filed out of chapel I really felt (do not misunderstand me) a kind of joy—a feeling that all was well, just as well as it could be.
I count it among my great good fortunes to have known him. As far as human eyes can judge he was—is—a saint: but oh!, we still needed him here so very badly.
TO SISTER PENELOPE: On a former household servant with severe mental and emotional difficulties.
21 OCTOBER 1944
Poor ‘Muriel’, she got odder and odder and the doctors would have put her into an asylum if Jane and I hadn’t refused to sign a form. She has now left, and had an operation, and got a job elsewhere. I hope the crisis is tided over. I am almost sorrier for her than anyone I have known, because, even if insanity is avoided, the temperament seems one that almost precludes any happiness in this world. And the more one tried to be nice the more complications one seemed to introduce. So we must pray for her always.
TO MR. LYELL: On the meaning of handing one’s natural self and appetites over to Christ; on normal self-care, austerity, and lenience; on the kinds of progress; on the parts of the self and the consequences of Adam’s sin; and on the goodness of being a body.
6 DECEMBER 1944
(1) By handing over the natural self to Christ I mean placing it under His orders and trying to will with His will. If a man does that He will usually find that one of the things Christ wills is for him to eat, drink, sleep, et cetera. Not always, but usually. You can’t tell in advance what He will tell any man to do about the natural appetites. He may tell one man to be very austere, another to be kinder to the flesh than he has been hitherto.
(2) You are quite right. There would be no ‘ progress’ if everyone were living in the Spirit: at least in some senses of the word ‘progress’. There might continue to be progress in arts and sciences—why not? But social and economic progress would cease, I expect, because all those problems would solve themselves in the first year or so. Progress means getting nearer to a desired goal and therefore means not being there already. You don’t want the London train to go on progressing after it reached London!
(3) The natural self since the Fall consists of body, soul, and spirit all perverted and self centred and at odds with one another. Animalness (the body and what arises from it) is not in itself bad: what is bad is the rebellious relation in which it now stands to the other parts. But its rebellion against spirit is less terrible than the spirit’s rebellion against God.
(4) By central self or spirit I mean chiefly the Will—the ultimate choosing part. It changes itself by its own actions. By soul I mean chiefly the imagination and emotions. New Testament does not use a consistent technical vocabulary. For instance in ‘ Soul take thine ease et cetera’ the passage simply means ‘Says I to myself’. I hope this is a bit clearer: but a systematic exposition would have to go far beyond the limits of a letter.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES, who had disagreed with Lewis on his doctrine of the two natures of Christ.
11 DECEMBER 1944
I was delighted to hear from you. The statement you read in the papers about the Cambridge professorship was untrue; so far from having accepted it, I haven’t even been offered it! Which just shows what newspapers are.
Your view of the divinity of Christ was an old bone of contention between us, wasn’t it? But I thought when we last met you had come down on the same side as me. I don’t think I can agree that the Churches are empty because they teach that Jesus is God. If so, the ones that teach the opposite, i.e., the Unitarians, would be full, wouldn’t they? Are they? It seems to me that the ones which teach the fullest and most dogmatic theory are precisely the ones that retain their people and make converts. While the liberalising and modernising ones lose ground every day. Thus the Roman Catholics are flourishing and growing, and in the C. of E. the ‘ high’ churches are fuller than the ‘ low’. Not of course that I would accept popularity as a test of truth: only since you introduced it, I must say that as far as it is evidence at all it points the other way.
And in history too. Your doctrine, under its old name of Arianism, was given a chance: in fact a very full run for its money for it officially dominated the Roman Empire at one time. But it didn’t last.
I think the great difficulty is this: if He was not God, who or what was He? In Mat 28.19 you already get the baptismal formula ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ Who is this ‘ Son’? Is the Holy Ghost a man? If not does a man ‘send’ Him (see John 15.26)? In Col. 1.12 Christ is ‘before all things and by Him all things consist’. What sort of man is this? I leave out the obvious place at the beginning of St. John’s Gospel. Take something much less obvious. When He weeps over Jerusalem ( Mat. 23) why does He suddenly say (v. 34) ‘I send unto you prophets and wise men’? Who could say this except either God or a lunatic? Who is this man who goes about forgiving sins? Or what about Mark 2.18–19. What man can announce that simply because he is present acts of penitence, such as fasting, are ‘off’? Who can give the school a half holiday except the Headmaster?
The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it. Of course you may reject some of these passages as un-authentic, but then I could do the same to yours if I cared to play that game! When it says God can’t be tempted I take this to be an obvious truth. God, as God, can’t, any more than He can die. He became man precisely to do and suffer what as God he could not do and suffer. And if you take away the Godhead of Christ, what is Christianity all about? How can the death of one man have this effect for all men which is proclaimed throughout the New Testament?
And don’t you think we should allow any weight to the fruits of these doctrines? Where are the shining examples of human holiness which ought to come from Unitarianism if it is true? Where are the Unitarian ‘opposite numbers’ to St. Francis, George Herbert, Bunyan, Geo. MacDonald, and even burly old Dr. Johnson? Where are the great Unitarian books of devotion? Where among them shall I find ‘the words of life’? Where have they helped, comforted, and strengthened us?
I’m glad our prayers have been answered and things are a bit better with you. They’re pretty bad with us. Minto had a very slight stroke some months ago. Maureen (her husband teaches at Worksop) is going to have a baby and is staying with us. I long to see you again. Remember me to all our friends.