1949
TO RHONA BODLE: A letter of encouragement on the verge of her conversion.
10 FEBRUARY 1949
I doubt whether I, or anyone else, needs to interfere. The route you are following at present seems to be the right one. Adding to Pascal’s ‘if you had not found me you would not seek me’ (a sentence I have long loved), the very obvious further step ‘And if I had not drawn you, you would not have found me,’ and seeing both in the light of Our Lord’s words ‘No man cometh to me unless the Father have drawn him’—well, it is pretty clear that you are being conducted. ‘Follow-my-leader’ is a good enough guide now. Thinking as you now do of Christ you will not be able for long to set aside the sayings which proclaim Him to be more than man (‘Before Abraham was I AM’ —‘i am and hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man et cetera’—‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’—‘I am the Vine’).
I didn’t listen in (I never do) to the discussion you mention: but I quite agree that people are far too concerned about the ‘modern’ man and this-that-and-the-other man. Why not, as you say, just man? You are always in my prayers.
TO RHONA BODLE, to whom Lewis sent his sermon “Transposition” with this letter—found in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses.
15 MARCH 1949
(1) I wonder if the first one in this volume would help at all. (2) Have you ever thought what a rum thing your own incarnation is?
TO MARY NEYLAN, whose daughter Sarah, Lewis’s goddaughter, was being confirmed and receiving her first holy communion: On Lewis’s respect for a parent’s right to read something an adult writes to an under-age child.
3 APRIL 1949
The enclosed is a desperate attempt to do what I am very ill qualified for. After writing it it occurred to me that I might have said all the things that you (knowing Sarah) might know to be particularly disastrous. So I thought you’d better vet it before passing it on. I’m so clumsy.
Blessings on all three—and I’m sorry I can’t come. But I’d only have behaved like an ass if I had!
TO SARAH NEYLAN: On why old people may appear to be awkward around young people; on not expecting, counting on, or demanding good feelings connected with holy activities; and on doing only the things we ought to do, the things we’ve got to do, and the things we like doing.
3 APRIL 1949
I am sorry to say that I don’t think I shall be able to be at your confirmation on Saturday. For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid lady to look after and the weekend is the time when I have no freedom at all, and have to try to be Nurse, Kennel-Maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, House-maid and Secretary all in one. I had hoped that if the old lady were a little better than usual and if all the other people in the house were in good tempers I might be able to get away next Saturday. But the old lady is a good deal worse than usual and most of the people in the house are in bad tempers. So I must ‘stick to the ship’.
If I had come and we had met, I am afraid you might have found me very shy and dull. (By the way, always remember that old people can be quite as shy with young people as young people can be with old. This explains what must seem to you the idiotic way in which so many grown-ups talk to you.) But I will try to do what I can by a letter.
I think of myself as having to be two people for you. (1) The real, serious, Christian godfather (2) The fairy godfather. As regards (2) I enclose a bit of the only magic (a very dull kind) which I can work. Your mother will know how to deal with the spell. I think it will mean one or two, or even five, pounds for you now, to get things you want, and the rest in the Bank for future use. As I say, it is a dull kind of magic and a really good godfather (of type 2) would do something much more interesting: but it is the best an old bachelor can think of, and it is with my love.
As for No 1, the serious Christian godfather, I feel very unfit for the work—just as you, I dare say, may feel very unfit for being confirmed and for receiving the Holy Communion. But then an angel would not be really fit and we must all do the best we can. So I suppose I must try to give you advice. And the bit of advice that comes into my head is this: don’t expect (I mean, don’t count on and don’t demand) that when you are confirmed, or when you make your first Communion, you will have all the feelings you would like to have. You may, of course: but also you may not. But don’t worry if you don’t get them. They aren’t what matter. The things that are happening to you are quite real things whether you feel as you would wish or not, just as a meal will do a hungry person good even if he has a cold in the head which will rather spoil the taste. Our Lord will give us right feelings if He wishes—and then we must say Thank you. If He doesn’t, then we must say to ourselves (and Him) that He knows best. This, by the way, is one of the very few subjects on which I feel I do know something. For years after I had become a regular communicant I can’t tell you how dull my feelings were and how my attention wandered at the most important moments. It is only in the last year or two that things have begun to come right—which just shows how important it is to keep on doing what you are told.
Oh—I’d nearly forgotten—I have one other piece of advice.
Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has got to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing—but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.
Of course I always mention you in my prayers and will most especially on Saturday. Do the same for me.
TO RHONA BODLE, who had written to him about a Jewish student who wanted to learn about Jesus: On modern translations of the New Testament; on real Christianity and real Judaism; and on respecting the secularity of public schools.
28 MAY 1949
Knox is better literature than Moffatt but he has to translate the Vulgate not the Greek. This really makes very little difference but the Rabbi will make play with it so she’d better have Moffatt.
I also suggest G. K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. And can’t she counter-attack if the Rabbi doesn’t believe in miracles? If he doesn’t believe in the signs and wonders in Egypt, or the passage of the Red Sea, or the miracles of Elijah, then quite clearly he is not holding the real Jewish faith. She is quite entitled to say ‘If you want me to remain a Jewess send me a real Jew not a Jewish Modernist.’ And as I don’t think they’ll be able to find her one, she can then ask how it is that there are still real Christians and no real Jews.
I quite agree with you about not using one’s job for propaganda: but once the pupil raises the question I think one has a free hand….
If they do find her a real Jew then the battle moves onto a different front: but, I think, half their weapons would be gone.
TO RHONA BODLE, who had written Lewis about the wordless resolution of her doubts about the divinity of Christ: On the nature of religious language and of poetry.
24 JUNE 1949
Welcome home! And thank you for writing to tell me: this has been a wonderful week, for I have just heard that my oldest friend is to be baptised on Saturday.
No, one can’t put these experiences into words: though all writing is a continual attempt to do so. Indeed, in a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can’t be expressed in language. I labour the point lest the devil should hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and the most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is. What goes easily into words is precisely the abstract—thought about ‘ matter’ (not apples or snuff), about ‘population’ (not actual babies), and so on. Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.
God bless you: mention me sometimes in your prayers.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, after Lewis’s hospitalization: On the necessity for the purification of faith and of the motives for faith; on the good news about so many of Lewis’s friends, especially Owen Barfield, becoming Christians; on the fate of the virtuous unbelievers and the possibility of vicarious faith; and a window into Lewis’s own practice of intercessory prayer.
27 JUNE 1949
I have just emerged from the Acland (streptococcus) and my future plans are uncertain—I mean, for the Vacation. I might possibly be able to look you up but doubt if it is possible.
I think the fact that you and I both at the time of our conversions had the feeling that we might be taking part in a Christian Renaissance is a disadvantage to us. It may even imply a drop of mere, what class shall I call it?, Vogue, Movementism, Historicism, Worldliness, in our then state of mind which has to be brought to a painful crisis before it can be cured. In so far as our Faith to any degree at all (even .0001%) leaned on hopes of some speedy triumph for Christendom (for which we have no Promise) it was not real Faith. It is not for us to know the times and the seasons. My own feelings move up and down.
I think a glance at my correspondence would cheer you up: letter after letter from recent converts, by ones and by twos, often (which is most helpful) married couples with children. Of [course] it amounts to nothing by the standards of world statistics. But are they the right standards? I sometimes have a feeling that the big mass-conversions of the Dark Ages, often carried out by force, were all a false dawn, and the whole work has to be done over again. As for the virtuous heathen, we are told that Our Lord is the saviour ‘of all men’ though ‘specially of those that believe’. As there is certainly vicarious suffering is there not also vicarious faith?
Oh, by the way, Barfield was baptised last Saturday: have him in your prayers.
I have two lists of names in my prayers, those for whose conversion I pray, and those for whose conversion I give thanks. The little trickle of transferences from List A to List B is a great comfort. At any rate ‘ Fear not, little flock.’
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the meaning of innocent human suffering; on the relationship between human free will and God’s will; and on his brother’s alcoholism.
6 JULY 1949
I think the view you express in your letter is the same I hold, and indeed I fancy I have stated it in print. I do not hold that God ‘sends’ sickness or war in the sense in which He sends us all good things. Hence in Luke xiii.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 then 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 and 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 xxii.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. I do not regard myself as disagreeing with you, but as holding the same view with a few necessary complications which you have omitted.
Warnie is now definitely better as far as this bout is concerned: but we dare not assume that it is the last. As long as there was no one but him to leave in charge at the Kilns and as long as he is a dipsomaniac it seems impossible for me to get away for more than a very few days: but I don’t doubt at all that if it is good for us both (I mean, you and me) to meet and have some happiness together it will all be arranged in ways we can’t now foresee.
I’ve just finished re-reading War and Peace. The great beauty of long books is that however often you read them there are still large tracts you have forgotten.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On his brother’s admission to an Oxford hospital, for treatment of alcoholism; and on the meaning of vicarious suffering, or what Lewis will call, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the “Deeper Magic,” mentioned above in his letter to Sister Penelope, 19 November 1941.
2 JULY: 1949
Thanks for your most kind and comforting letter—like a touch of a friend’s hand in a dark place. For it is much darker than I feared. W’s trouble is to be called ‘nervous insomnia’ in speaking to Janie and others; but in reality (this for your private ear) it is Drink. This bout started about ten days ago. Last Sunday the doctor and I begged him to go into a nursing home (that has always effectively ended previous bouts) and he refused. Yesterday we succeeded in getting him in; but alas, too late. The nursing home has announced this morning that he is out of control and they refuse to keep him. Today a mental specialist is to see him and he will be transferred, I hope for a short stay, to what is called a hospital but is really an asylum. Naturally there is no question of a later Irish jaunt for me this year. A few odd days here and there in England is the best I can hope for.
Don’t imagine I doubt for a moment that what God sends us must be sent in love and will all be for the best if we have grace to use it so. My mind doesn’t waver on this point; my feelings sometimes do. That’s why it does me good to hear what I believe repeated in your voice—it being the rule of the universe that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own. That is why Christ’s suffering for us is not a mere theological dodge but the supreme case of the law that governs the whole world; and when they mocked him by saying, ‘He saved others, himself he connot save,’ they were really uttering, little as they knew it, the ultimate law of the spiritual world.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On praying “thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”; on not being able to come to Ireland for a vacation with Arthur; and on the problem of alcoholism.
27 JULY 1949
Good, I’m glad we are really agreed. The one thing I forgot to say in my other letter (and I think you will agree with it too) is that we make a great mistake by quoting ‘thy will be done’ without the rest of the sentence ‘on earth as it is in Heaven’. That is the real point, isn’t it? Not merely submission but a prayer that we may be enabled to do God’s will as (in the same way as) angels and blessed human spirits do it, with alacrity and delight like players in an orchestra responding spontaneously to the conductor.
I don’t think I can make a second attempt to get to County Down. Warnie himself is going away (without me) soon and of course I must be on duty then. I’m taking a few short trips (long week ends) instead: there’s a difference between that and any Irish holiday long enough to be worth taking. But I have (faint) hopes of another year. He has been completely tee-total now since he came out of hospital. If only he could keep it up! Perhaps he will. I had thought, like you, that ‘others depending on us’ might be an incentive, but you see this broke down as soon as it was tried. I think it would work with an ordinary temptation, but not with what is really a recurrent obsession—i.e., almost as much a medical as a moral problem. If we could get a 12 months’ clean bill of health from him I should feel much freer.
The whole affair has done at least this good that it has made us write to one another again! If you call this scrawl writing—my hand has gone all to pot. God bless you.
TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE: On the problem in prayer of God’s foreknowledge; and on the Fall and evolution.
1 AUGUST 1949
Don’t bother about the idea that God ‘has known for millions of years exactly what you are about to pray’. That isn’t what it’s like. God is hearing you now, just as simply as a mother hears a child. The difference His timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite. If you must think of His timelessness at all, don’t think of Him having looked forward to this moment for millions of years: think that to Him you are always praying this prayer. But there’s really no need to bring it in. You have gone into the Temple (‘one day in Thy court is better than a thousand’) and found Him, as always, there. That is all you need to bother about.
There is no relation of any importance between the Fall and Evolution. The doctrine of Evolution is that organisms have changed, sometimes for what we call (biologically) the better…quite often for what we call (biologically) the worse…. The doctrine of the Fall is that at one particular point one species, Man, tumbled down a moral cliff. There is neither opposition nor support between the two doctrines…. Evolution is not only not a doctrine of moral improvements, but of biological changes, some improvements, some deteriorations.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, an American who had asked Lewis to write a book on prayer, a request that made more sense as more and more correspondents needed direction in prayer. This is the first of thirty-four letters from Lewis to her in this collection.
9 AUGUST 1949
Thanks for your very interesting letter of the 3rd.
I don’t feel I could write a book on Prayer: I think it would be rather ‘cheek’ of my part.
All good wishes.
TO “MRS. LOCKLEY,” a woman whose husband had taken a mistress (“Lockley” is the pseudonym Lewis’s brother gave her in his edition of his brother’s correspondence; he later forgot her actual name): Lewis tells her that he has confided her situation to his spiritual director; he affirms the graces she has received—charity, submission to God’s will, and the avoidance of indulged jealousy—and cautions her to keep remembering that these graces are gifts; and he draws a salutary moral about being patient with God even when God appears not to be answering our prayers. This is the first of his five letters to her in this collection.
2 SEPTEMBER 1949
Apparently I was mistaken in thinking that to condone the infidelity and submit to the arrangement your husband suggests would be wrong. My adviser of course says that it is impossible to him to ‘give a fair ruling without knowing more of the parties’. But with that reservation he suggests (1) Mrs. A should refuse to have intercourse with her husband, otherwise carry on, completely ignoring the mistress. (2) Mr. A must never mention the mistress in his house nor when he has seen her, nor should he let Mrs. A or anyone else have any suspicion when or where he meets the mistress. I can’t myself quite see the point of No. 2, and I take it that anyway it is impracticable….
On the actual practical arrangements I don’t feel that I—an elderly bachelor and the most amateurish of theologians—can be useful. Where I might help, on the internal and spiritual problems for yourself, you obviously do not need my help. All the things I would have said to most women in your position (about charity, submission to God’s will, and the poisonous nature of indulged jealousy, however just the case) you clearly know already. I don’t think it can do you any harm to know that you have these graces, provided you know that they are Graces, gifts from the Holy Spirit, and not your own merits. God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without strain; not a case of ‘tempering the wind to the shorn lamb’ but of giving the lamb a coat proportional to the wind. On all that side you have only to go on as you are doing. And you certainly needn’t worry at all about there being any material for psychotherapy in you….
One point in your story looms large in my mind—the fatal consequences of your husband’s lack of faith in you when he did not get those letters. For this is just how we also might desert God. If nothing, or nothing we recognise comes through, we imagine He has let us down and reject Him, perhaps at the very moment when help was on its way. No doubt your husband may have been readier to desert you because a quite different temptation had already begun. But then that applies to the God-Man situation also.
TO “mrs. LOCKLEY”: On the appropriateness of sharing her marital crisis with him and of her refusing her husband’s request for sexual intercourse.
6 SEPTEMBER 1949
Telling these things to someone you approach as a consultant is no more disloyalty than revealing one’s body to a doctor is indecent exposure. With a trained confessor this, as it were, disinfectant situation would be even more so.
I don’t think the arrangement the old man suggested is ‘dishonest’. I think his advice turns on the fine but important distinction between enduring a situation which is some one else’s fault and sanctioning it in a way which makes one an accessory. After all, your husband has no right to have it both ways and you have no duty (or right) to make him feel as if he had. It would do him no harm to realise that this affair is just as much adultery as if it were ‘furtive visits to a prostitute’.
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA: On Lewis’s own vice of acedia ( indolence); on his fright at having been delirious; and on refraining from worry about matters beyond our ability to change.
10 SEPTEMBER 1949
I have just found in my desk the letter which you so kindly wrote at Easter this year. I think I have sent no reply: nothing could be less civil than this silence of mine, nothing less human. I acknowledge my fault, I ask pardon. But I do not wish you to believe either that your memory has fallen from my mind or that your name has fallen from my daily prayers. For nothing else was responsible for it except the perpetual labour of writing and (lest I should seem to exonerate myself too much) a certain Accidia, an evil disease and, I believe, of the Seven Deadly Sins that one which in me is the strongest—though few believe this of me.
From a brief illness, God be thanked, I am recovered. I had what the doctors once used to call in English ‘tonsillitis’: but now by a more splendid name, ‘streptococcus’. Fever laid on me a heavy hand and for some hours I was delirious…oh how well has your poet written of the lost souls who ‘have lost the good of the intellect’: for what torture is more dreadful than that? For while the mind is alienated from us, to ourselves we seem to toil away with much effort of thought, to knit together syllogisms, to treat of the most subtle questions—not knowing, however, what it is we are thinking about. The working of the mind is there, but not its work.
In this island we are troubled by a severe drought. About other nations I say nothing. For what is required of me unless more and more to hold fixed in my heart our Lord’s words: ‘Ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled’?
Farewell, my Father; and of your fatherly charity cease not to make mention of me before our common Lord (true God and the only true Man—for all we others, since the Fall of Adam, are but half men).
TO “mrs. LOCKLEY”: On infidelity as breaking a promise; on the Christian concept of marriage as sacrament and as mystical union with Christ; reliance and dependence on God, a daily spiritual exercise; and on the danger of being too curious about people’s private lives.
12 SEPTEMBER 1949
I don’t think your objection to ‘setting yourself up as a judge’ is cowardly. It may spring from the fact that you are the injured party and have a very proper conviction that the plaintiff cannot also be on the Bench. I also quite realise that he didn’t feel the sin as a Christian would: but he must, as a man, feel the dishonour of breaking a promise. After all constancy in love thunders at him from every love-song in the world, quite apart from our mystical conception of marriage….
As you say, the thing is to rely only on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to the dependence. Meanwhile (don’t I know) the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done….
The reason why I am saddled with many people’s troubles is, I think, that I have no natural curiosity about private lives and am therefore a good subject. To anyone who (in that sense) enjoyed it, it would be a dangerous poison.
TO “mrs. LOCKLEY”: On the problems of pains and the problems of pleasures.
22 SEPTEMBER 1949
The intellectual problem (why children lose one or both parents in this way and other ways) is no harder than the problem why some women lose their husbands. In each case, no doubt, what we regard as a mere hideous interruption and curtailment of life is really the data, the concrete situation on which life is to be built…. When the data are of the kind we naturally like ( wealth, health, good fathers or husbands) of course we tend not to notice that they are data or limitations at all. But we’re told that they are: and what seem to us the easiest conditions may really be the hardest (‘How hardly shall they that have riches’ et cetera).
TO “MRS. LOCKLEY”: On the unreliability of introspection.
27 SEPTEMBER 1949
Yes, yes, I know. The moment one asks oneself ‘Do I believe?’ all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only very robust pleasures will stand the question, ‘Am I really enjoying this?’ Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto ceased attending. St. Paul speaks of ‘ Faith actualised in Love’. And ‘the heart is deceitful’: you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I should be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.
TO RHONA BODLE, who seems to have suggested that Lewis is proud to have been successful in his prayers for her: On how all our prayers of intercession are really Christ’s own prayers; and on Williams’s doctrine of co-inherence—we are truly members of one another.
24 OCTOBER 1949
Pish! There’s nothing to be proud about. The whole situation is that of being lent a dignity that doesn’t belong to me—the child being allowed to give the penny to the bus conductor, the dog being given the newspaper to carry home.
Or, looked at another way, the really efficacious intercession is Christ’s, and yours is in His, as you are in Him, since you became part of His ‘ body’, the Church. Read Charles Williams on Co-inherence in almost any of his later books or plays ( Descent of the Dove, Descent into Hell, The House of the Octopus).
TO RHONA BODLE: On praying for the dead; and on how God uses our prayers.
26 OCTOBER 1949
I have never seen any more difficulty about praying for the dead than for the living, and it is quite clear that God wishes us to do that. How He uses, or why He should use, our prayers, I do not pretend to say, but I am attracted by Pascal’s saying that ‘God has instituted prayer to lend to his creatures the dignity of Causality.’
I wonder whether this sonnet which I wrote years ago, though not a very good poem, makes clear what I think. It is the fact that II Kings xix.32 and Herodotus give these different accounts of the mysterious fading away of a great army!—
The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was foiled
By an angel: but Herodotus declares, by mice—
Innumerably nibbling all one night they toiled
To eat away his bow-strings as warm wind eats ice.
But muscular archangels, I suggest, employed
Six little jaws to labour at each slender string
And by their aid (weak masters though they be) destroyed
The smiling-lipped Assyrian, cruel-bearded king.
No stranger that Omnipotence should choose to need
Small helps than great! Not strange, then, if His action lingers
Till men have prayed, and suffers our weak prayers indeed
To move as very muscles His delaying fingers,
Who, in His longanimity and love for our
Small dignities, holds back awhile His eager power.
TO RHONA BODLE: A list of spiritual books.
3 NOVEMBER 1949
I’m very ill qualified to give you a list. What about Kirk’s Vision of God, E. L. Mascall’s The God-Man, and Charles Williams’ The Descent of the Dove? But I really just don’t know the literature. Old books I expect I’ve mentioned before: The Imitation, Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Anon, Theologica Germanica, Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, Lady Julian, Revelations of Divine Love.
TO RHONA BODLE, who had written Lewis of her upcoming confirmation: On not expecting remarkable sensations connected to holy activities.
9 NOVEMBER 1949
Congratulations. You are daily in my prayers.
Caveat [let her beware!]—don’t count on any remarkable sensations, either at this or your first (or fifty first) Communion. God gives these or not as He pleases. Their presence does not prove that things are especially well, nor their absence that things are wrong. The intention, the obedience, is what matters.
TO WARFIELD M. FIROR, an American surgeon and a benefactor of the Lewis household during the time of postwar austerities: On aging; on the need for continual vigilance about the regrowth of old vices and the need to welcome the renewal of old joys; on the peace of God as something more real than sensible realities; and on the entanglements of worldly attachments and the severity with which God has to deal with them.
5 DECEMBER 1949
I knew I should provoke (and deserve) a smile by my references to old age. But what counts is not the age so much as the prospect; not the mileage travelled or ahead, but the view from this bend in the road. I grudged the passing years in childhood because they were bringing me nearer to School and I thought that to be a schoolboy would be much less pleasant than to be a child. And as it turned out, I was quite right. I did not grudge them as a young man because I thought having a job and acquiring a reputation would be nicer than wishing and hoping for them. I was right again. But don’t let me pursue a useless and querulous line of thought.
Yes, I have thought (though with no background of biology like yours) about rhythm and recuperation: perhaps, in my thought, more strictly renewal—the way things come back, changed, yet the same. We are all only too familiar with this in the case of sins or diseases which we hoped we had left behind. How terribly like a malignant tumour a vice is—the big, drastic operation which one screws oneself to face, the apparent cure, and then, remorselessly, gradually, the return—
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.
(This is at least as true of mental vices as of those we loosely call bodily.) But it does work with the good things as well. At any moment something may sink an artesian well right down into one’s pent self and old joy, even old power, may come rushing up. That is why I think that Resurrection (what ever it exactly means) is so much profounder an idea than mere immortality. I am sure we don’t just ‘go on’. We really die and are really built up again.
Now this—though I didn’t foresee the fact till this minute—links up with what you were saying about the Peace of God. (By the way, I don’t think ‘incomprehensible’ in the [Athanasian] Creed or ‘passing comprehension’ mean what is usually thought. It doesn’t mean, I am told, simply unintelligible, like a book in an unknown tongue. It means not thinkable-out, not capable of being fully summed up or intellectually mastered). I am sure you are right, that is power. Our idea of peace expresses only the negative results of it: the exclusion of care, haste, fear et cetera but not the positive thing that excludes them. So someone who had never bathed might think of a swim only as absence of clothes, absence of solidity in touch with one, et cetera: but not what really counts, the cool, yielding embrace of the water. But (here comes the connection with what I was saying, and also the rub) does it not come exactly in proportion as we have, in some sense, died.
I am concerned about that at present, chiefly as a result of reading William Law. It’s all there in the New Testament, though. ‘ Dying to the world’—‘the world is crucified to me and I to the world’. And I find I haven’t begun: at least not if it means (and can it mean less) than a steady and progressive disentangling of all one’s motives from the merely natural or this-worldly objects: like training a creeper to grow up one wall instead of another. I don’t mean disentangling from things wrong in themselves, but, say, from the very pleasant evening which we hope to have over one of your hams to-morrow night, or from gratification at my literary success. It is not the things, nor even the pleasure in them, but the fact that in such pleasures my heart, or so much of my heart, lies. Or to put it in a fantastic form—if a voice said to me (and one I couldn’t disbelieve) ‘you shall never see the face of God, never help to save a neighbour’s soul, never be free from sin, but you shall live in perfect health till the age of 100, very rich, and die the most famous man in the world, and pass into a twilight consciousness of a vaguely pleasant sort forever’—how much would it worry me? How much compared with another war? Or even with an announcement that I should have to have all my teeth out? You see? And what right have I to expect the Peace of God while I thus put my whole heart, at least all my strongest wishes, in the world which he has warned me against?
Well, thank God (for there is still part of me, a tiny little infantine voice somewhere amidst all the strong, confident natural voices, which can just thank Him, or perhaps only thank Him for being able to wish to thank Him) we shall not be left to the world. All His terrible resources (but it is we who force him to use them) will be brought against us to detach us from it—insecurity, war, poverty, pain, unpopularity, loneliness. We must be taught that this tent is not home. And, by Jove, how terrible it would be if all suffering, including death itself, were optional, so that only a very few voluntary ascetics ever even attempted to achieve the end for which we are created. A propos—dare we gloss the text ‘Strait is the way and few there be that find it’ by adding ‘And that’s why most of you have to be bustled and badgered into it like sheep—and the sheep-dogs have to have pretty sharp teeth too’! I hope so.