1950
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had asked Lewis about what was required and what was optional as far as sacraments, church attendance, and the like were concerned: On the necessity of both private and public prayer; on God’s rejoicing in our differences; on the meaning of membership, our common life in the Body of Christ—“complementing and helping and receiving one another”; on the reality of spiritual and physical healings; and on relying on obedience rather than feeling.
7 DECEMBER 1950
(1.) To the best of my knowledge the Episcopalian Church in America is exactly the same as the Anglican Church.
(2.) The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (‘ Do this in remembrance of me’—‘If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you’). This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.
Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. Others find it easier to approach Him through the services: but they must practice private prayer and reading as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences. (Re-read 1st Corinthians 12 and meditate on it. The word translated members would perhaps be better translated organs).
If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face, and life, of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them, teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.
(3.) I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture. Whether any instance of it is a real instance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. Very often, I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, would be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole, my attitude would be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide whether it is.
‘Regular but cool’ in Church attendance is no bad symptom. Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, a young, American ex-naval officer who was pursuing a graduate degree in history in Oxford, whose wife and he had begun to read Lewis’s books and who had now begun the correspondence with Lewis that would become the book, A Severe Mercy: On the psychological doctrine of wish fulfillment; on our deep desire for privacy and no interference; on the real history of religion; on which of the great world religions are believable; on the alternative between Christianity and Hinduism; and on the Tao.
14 DECEMBER 1950
My own position at the threshold of Christianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true: I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all that modern stuff about concealed wishes and wishful thinking, however useful it may be for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one’s wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one’s conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides.
What I think you can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) would be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing ever in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they could say to Him ‘ Keep out. Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction would be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I very much doubt whether even you would find it simply pleasant. Isn’t the truth this: that it would gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and outrage a great many others? So let’s wash out all the Wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.
I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion—Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Christianity. Clear, lucid, transparent, simple religion ( Tao plus a shadowy, ethical god in the background) is a late development, usually arising among highly educated people in great cities. What you really start with is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death and return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all.
The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism and Christianity: there you get both Metaphysics and Cult (continuous with the primeval cults). That is why my first step was to be sure that one or other of these had the answer. For the reality can’t be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things are like that (e.g., matter is the first most obvious thing you meet—milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics).
There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: which I can’t believe. (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: which are not moral enough. (c.) The (claimed) fulfilment of these in Hinduism. (d.) The claimed fulfilment of these in Christianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn’t really join the two strands. Unredeemably savage religion goes on in the village: the Hermit philosophises in the forest: and neither really interferes with the other. It is only Christianity which compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.
Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man? The best popular apologetic I know.
Meanwhile, the attempt to practice the Tao is certainly the right line. Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.’ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans.
I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again, or call, if you think I can be of any help.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On why there is no demonstrable proof, but only reasonable probability, of Christianity; on the slow belief in life after death; more on wish fulfillment; and on God as the only object of total humility. Lewis had just finished creating the character Puddleglum in The Silver Chair and would soon return to these themes in his paper to the Socratic Club, “Obstinacy in Belief.”
23 DECEMBER 1950
I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will and honesty of my best and oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Christianity in general is well given by Chesterton: and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks.
As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which would be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late. ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’ The magnanimity, the generosity which will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you would have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error would even so be more interesting and important than the reality. And yet how could that be? How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life: and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in a fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What would be a bribe if it came first had better come last.
It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But, surely, though it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food? I.e., if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, wasn’t designed to eat, would one feel hungry?
You say the Materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married? I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
Total Humility is not in the Tao because the Tao (as such) says nothing about the object to which it would be the right response: just as there is no law about railways in the acts of Queen Elizabeth. But from the degree of respect which the Tao demands for ancestors, parents, elders, and teachers, it is quite clear what the Tao would prescribe towards an object such as God.
But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!
TO SISTER PENELOPE: On the consequences of Mrs. Moore going into a nursing home; and on cheerful insecurity rather than worry.
30 DECEMBER 1950
Yours was a cheering letter which warmed my heart (I wish it would have warmed my fingers too: as it is they will hardly form the letters!)….
Our state is thus: my ‘ mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.
There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expense is of course very severe and I have worries about that. But it would be very dangerous to have no worries—or rather no occasions of worry. I have been feeling that very much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late and surprised, to the simplest and earliest Christian lessons!
…I am glad to hear your inner news. Mine, too, is I think (but who am I to judge?) fairly good. Oremus pro invicem [Let us pray for each other].