1951
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: More on faith healing; on petitionary prayer and its efficacy; on all personal prayer being united to Christ’s perpetual prayer and to the Church’s prayer; and on praying for people one dislikes.
5 JANUARY 1951
Whether any individual Christian who attempts Faith Healing is prompted by genuine faith and charity or by spiritual pride is, I take it, a question we cannot decide. That is between God and him. Whether the cure occurs in any given case is clearly a question for the doctors. I am speaking now of healing by some act, such as anointing or laying on of hands. Praying for the sick—i.e., praying simply, without any overt act is unquestionably right and indeed we are commanded to pray for all men. And of course your prayers can do real good.
Needless to say, they don’t do it either as a medicine does or as magic is supposed to do: i.e., automatically. Prayer is Request—like asking your employer for a holiday or asking a girl to marry one. God is free to grant the request or not: and if He does you cannot prove scientifically that the thing would not have happened anyway. Just as the boss might (for all you know) have given you a holiday even if you hadn’t asked. (Cynical people of my sex will tell one that if a girl has determined to marry you, married you would have been whether you asked her or not!) Thus one can’t establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics as you might establish the connection between pure milk and fewer cases of tuberculosis. It remains a matter of faith and of God’s personal action: it would become a matter of demonstration only if it were impersonal or mechanical.
When I say ‘ personal’ I do not mean private or individual. All our prayers are united with Christ’s perpetual prayer and are part of the Church’s prayer. (In praying for people one dislikes I find it very helpful to remember that one is joining in His prayer for them.)
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had asked whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology: On the danger of combining one’s vocation with one’s spiritual interest.
5 JANUARY 1951
We must ask three questions about the probable effect of your research subject to something more theological.
(1.) Would it be better for your immediate enjoyment? Answer, probably but not certainly, Yes.
(2.) Would it be better for your academic career? Answer, probably No. You would have to make up in haste a lot of knowledge which could not be very easily digested in the time.
(3.) Would it be better for your soul? I don’t know. I think there is a great deal to be said for having one’s deepest spiritual interest distinct from one’s ordinary duty as a student or professional man.
St. Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I should have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation: and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap.
Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring or repellent in the job may alienate one from the spiritual life. And finally someone has said ‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’: sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want truth for her own sake: how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm. I’ve always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I’d advise you to get on with your tent-making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology would do. Mind, I’m not certain: but that is the view I incline to.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: More on the nature and discernment of vocation.
8 JANUARY 1951
Look: the question is not whether we should bring God into our work or not. We certainly should and must: as MacDonald says ‘All that is not God is death.’ The question is whether we should simply (a.) Bring Him in in the dedication of our work to Him, in the integrity, diligence, and humility with which we do it or also (b.) Make His professed and explicit service our job. The A vocation rests on all men whether they know it or not: the B vocation only on those who are specially called to it. Each vocation has its peculiar dangers and peculiar rewards. Naturally, I can’t say which is yours.
When I spoke of danger to your academic career on a change of subject I was thinking chiefly of time. If you can get an extra year, it would be another matter. I was not at all meaning that ‘intellectual history’ involving Theology would in itself be academically a bad field of research.
I shall at any time be glad to see, or hear from you.
TO “Mrs. LOCKLEY”: On the spiritual danger of happiness and unhappiness; on the temptation to disbelieve; on the devil’s hyperactivity when growth in holiness is near—near the altar, conversion, and the like; and on the varied reception of the first Narnian Chronicle.
5 MARCH 1951
How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’.
Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we should need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment….
I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is very active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures…. But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly….
I am glad you all liked ‘ The Lion’. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children.
TO VERA MATHEWS, whose father had just died: On how death matters and on the good that comes from the dead to the living after the death; and on the great dignity and comicality in each of us, to be revealed and appreciated only in heaven.
27 MARCH 1951
I have just got your letter of the 22nd containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really ‘trying to pretend it didn’t happen’. It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high minded people who make out that it ‘doesn’t matter’. It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel very strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind; His birthday present. Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us. God bless you all and give you grace to receive all the good in this, as in every other event, is intended you.
My brother joins me in great thanks for all your kindnesses, and especially on behalf of dear little comical Victor Drewe—our barber, as you know. When he cut my hair last week he spoke in the most charming way of his wife who has just been ill and (he said) ‘She looks so pretty, Sir, so pretty, but terribly frail.’ It made one want to laugh and cry at the same time—the lover’s speech, and the queer little pot-bellied, grey-headed, unfathomably respectable figure. You don’t misunderstand my wanting to laugh, do you? We shall, I hope, all enjoy one another’s funniness openly in a better world.
TO WARFIELD M. FIROR, who seems to have shared with Lewis three rules for the spiritual life: On the death of Mrs. Moore; on the difficulty of keeping rested; on obedience to God’s plan for the day; and on the difficulty of maintaining stable “inner weather.”
27 MARCH 1951
Your letter came to cheer a rather grim day. I have never known a spring like this: the sun has hardly appeared since last October and this morning a thin mixture of rain and snow is falling. My own household is lucky because we have a wood, and therefore wood (what a valuable idiom) for fires: there is hardly any coal in England. The worst of a wood fire—delightful to eye and nose—is that it demands continual attention. But this is a trifle: many people have to spend most of their leisure at the cinema because it is the only warm place. (I hardly ever go myself. Do you? It seems to me an astonishingly ugly art. I don’t mean ‘ugly’ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye—crowded, unrestful, inharmonious.)
There has been a great change in my life owing to the death of the old lady I called my mother. She died without apparent pain after many months of semi-conscious existence, and it would be hypocritical to pretend that it was a grief to us.
Of your three rules I heartily agree with the first and the third. The second (‘keep rested’ sounds at first as if our obedience to it must very often depend on many factors outside our control. I can think of some in whose ears it would sound like a cruel mockery. But I suspect that you have a reply. Do you mean that there is a kind of rest which ‘no man taketh from us’ and which can be preserved even in the life of a soldier on active service or of a woman who works behind a counter all day and then goes home to work and mend and wash? And no doubt there is: but it doesn’t always include rest for the legs.
‘His plan for the day’—yes, that is all important. And I keep losing sight of it: in days of leisure and happiness perhaps even more than in what we call ‘bad’ days.
The whole difficulty with me is to keep control of the mind and I wish one’s earliest education had given one more training in that. There seems to be a disproportion between the vastness of the soul in one respect (i.e., as a mass of ideas and emotions) and its smallness in another (i.e., as central, controlling ego). The whole inner weather changes so completely in less than a minute. Do you read George Herbert—
If what my soul doth feel sometimes
My soul might always feel—
He’s a good poet and one who helped to bring me back to the Faith.
My brother and all other ham-eating beneficiaries (should I call us Hamsters?) join me in good wishes. All blessings.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had told Lewis he now believed in Christ: On learning to pray and choosing a denomination, while expecting a hellish counterattack.
17 APRIL 1951
My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?
There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up your mind on the denominational question) get confirmed.
Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had mentioned her married daughter Genia’s emotional distress and Chad Walsh’s book, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics: On the relative ease in discerning right from wrong and the relative difficulty in discerning the better or best; and on Lewis’s own domestic troubles. The “different trouble” is his brother’s alcoholism.
18 APRIL 1951
Thanks for your letter of the 7th. I have just returned from a holiday and the time since has been spent in writing about 40 letters with my own hand: so much for Ivory Towers.
I also find your question very difficult in my own life. What is right we usually know, or it is our own fault if we don’t: but what is prudent or sensible we often do not. Is it part of the scheme that we should ordinarily be left to make the best we can of our own very limited and merely probable reasonings? I don’t know. Or would guidance even on these points be more largely given if we had early enough acquired the regular habit of seeking it?
How terrible your anxiety about your daughter must have been. She shall have her place in my prayers, such as they are.
Walsh didn’t know much about my private life. Strictly between ourselves, I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house would was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (though a different trouble has taken its place) do I begin to realise quite how bad it was.
God bless you all.
TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE: On forgiveness of ourselves; and on the mystics’ commonsense disregard of mystical phenomena.
19 APRIL 1951
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On not burdening oneself with any unnecessary cares; on love of country; on ordering the natural loves; and on divine love.
25 MAY 1951
About your idea that error in upbringing might be partly responsible for Genia’s trouble, does any trained psychologist agree with you? From what I hear such people say I should very much doubt whether it could have had any ‘depth’ effect. Do not burden yourself with any unnecessary cares: I suspect you are not at all to blame. I pray for Genia every night.
About loving one’s country, you raise two different questions. About one, about there seeming to be (now) no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As MacDonald says ‘No one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.’
Or say there are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine, because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.
But the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do not find very difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have very little reality. A treaty between the governments of two countries is not at all like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.
I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself ( language, clothes, institutions) and is in that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself a ground for affection. And it is good: because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance, et cetera. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links and debts for literature et cetera (hence we all reverence the ancient Greeks). But I would distinguish this from the talk in the papers. Mind you, I’m in considerable doubt about the whole thing. My mind tends to move in a world of individuals not of societies.
TO SISTER PENELOPE, who had written him of her latest translation: On Lewis’s state of ease; and on his realizing that he had never understood the real meaning of forgiveness (a realization that came to him on April 25th—see the letter below to Don Giovanni Calabria, 26 December 1951).
5 JUNE 1951
My love for George MacDonald has not extended to most of his poetry. I have naturally made several attempts to like it. Except for the Diary of An Old Soul it won’t (so far as I’m concerned) do….
I’m very glad to hear the work is ‘roaring’…and I much look forward to seeing the results. As for me I specially need your prayers because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease’. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present. Indeed (I do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful at confessing this) I realise that until about a month ago I never really believed (though I thought I did) in God’s forgiveness. What an ass I have been both for not knowing and for thinking I knew. I do not feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything: any morning a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality…. But pray for me always, as I do for you.
TO GENIA GOELZ, the married daughter of Mary Van Deusen, who seems to have shared with Lewis some of her theological questions and her quandary about which denomination to join: On distinguishing the fact of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ from any scientific explanation of it; similarly, on the fact of the physical resurrection of Christ; and on what she should do while she is discerning her denominational choice—read the New Testament, pray for guidance, obey her conscience, seek God “with cheerful seriousness,” and submit to the beginnings of her “treatment.”
13 JUNE 1951
(1) I think you are confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The former is a doctrine peculiar to the Roman Catholics and asserts that the mother of Jesus was born free of original sin. It does not concern us at all.
(2) The Virgin Birth is a doctrine plainly stated in the Apostle’s Creed that Jesus had no physical father, and was not conceived as a result of sexual intercourse. It is not a doctrine on which there is any dispute between Presbyterians as such and Episcopalians as such. A few individual Modernists in both these churches have abandoned it; but Presbyterianism or Episcopalianism in general, and in actual historical instances, through the centuries both affirm it. The exact details of such a miracle—an exact point at which a supernatural force enters this world (whether by the creation of a new spermatazoon, or the fertilisation of an ovum without a spermatozoa, or the development of a foetus without an ovum) are not part of the doctrine. These are matters in which no one is obliged and everyone is free, to speculate. Your starting point about this doctrine will not, I think, be to collect the opinions of individual clergymen, but to read Matthew Chap. I and Luke I and II.
(3) Similarly, your question about the resurrection is answered in Luke XXIV. This makes it clear beyond any doubt that what is claimed is physical resurrection. (All Jews except Sadducees already believed in spiritual revival—there would have been nothing novel or exciting in that.)
(4) Thus the questions that you raise are not questions at issue between real Presbyterians and real Episcopalians at all for both these claim to agree with Scripture. Neither church, by the way, seems to be very intelligently represented by the people you have gone to for advice, which is bad luck. I find it very hard to advise in your choice. At any rate the programme, until you can make up your mind, is to read your New Testament (preferably a modern translation) intelligently. Pray for guidance, obey your conscience, in small as well as great matters, as strictly as you can.
(5) Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them: when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour. (I hope all of this is not very dull and disappointing. Write freely again if I can be of any use to you.)
P. S. Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On God’s providential arrangement of what appears to us to be coincidence; on accepting suffering and offering it to God on behalf of others; and on our membership with one another in the body of Christ (what Charles Williams called “co-inherence”).
12 SEPTEMBER 1951
It is very remarkable (or would be if we did not know that God arranges things) that you should write about our vicarious sufferings when another correspondent has recently written on the same matter.
I have not a word to say against the doctrine that Our Lord suffers in all the sufferings of His people (see Acts IX.6) or that when we willingly accept what we suffer for others and offer it to God on their behalf, then it may be united with His sufferings and, in Him, may help to their redemption or even that of others whom we do not dream of. So that it is not in vain: though of course we must not count on seeing it work out exactly as we, in our present ignorance, might think best. The key text for this view is Colossians I.24. Is it not, after all, one more application of the truth that we are all ‘ members of one another’? I wish I had known more when I wrote the Problem of Pain.
God bless you all. Be sure that Grace flows into you and out of you and through you in sorts of ways, and no faithful submission to pain in yourself or in another will be wasted.
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA: On our ability to love and think about and pray for one another across the divide of death. Lewis’s word cogitationes should be translated as “thoughts,” rather than “meditations.”
13 SEPTEMBER 1951
I was moved with unaccustomed joy by your letter and all the more because I had heard you were ill; sometimes I feared lest you had perhaps died.
But never in the least did I cease from my prayers for you; for not even the River of Death ought to abolish the sweet intercourse of love and meditations.
Now I rejoice because I believe (although you keep silent about your health—do not condemn the body: Brother Ass, as St. Francis said!) I believe you are well or at least better.
I am sending you my tale [Out of the Silent Planet] recently translated into Italian in which, frankly, I have rather played than worked. I have given my imagination free rein yet not, I hope, without regard for edification—for building up both my neighbour and myself. I do not know whether you will like this kind of trifle. But if you do not, perhaps some boy or girl will like it from among your ‘good children’.
For myself, after a long succession of minor illnesses (I do not know their Italian names) I am now better.
I salute the fiftieth anniversary of your priesthood with congratulations, prayers and blessings. Farewell. May we always pray for one another both in this world and in the world to come.
TO MRS. JESSUP, who seems to have written Lewis about the difficulties of being in a marriage in which one of the spouses is a Christian and one is not: On the slow process of being remade and how difficult we must be to live with after conversion as before; and on not concealing but not flaunting our conversion.
15 OCTOBER 1951
I agree with everything you say (except that I should publish anything on the subject: a bachelor is not the man to do it—there is such an obvious answer to anything he says!).
Our regeneration is a slow process. As Charles Williams says there are three stages: (1.) The Old Self on the Old Way. (2.) The Old Self on the New Way. (3.) The New Self on the New Way.
After conversion the Old Self can of course be just as arrogant, importunate, and imperialistic about the Faith as it previously was about any other interest. I had almost said ‘Any other Fad’—for just as the loveliest complexion turns green in a green light, so the Faith itself may have at first all the characteristics of a Fad and we may be as ill to live with as if we had taken up Nudism or Psychoanalysis or Pure Wool Clothing. You and I, clearly, both know all about that: one makes blunders.
About obedience, the principle is clear. Obedience to man is limited by obedience to God and, when they really conflict, must go. But of course that gives one very little guidance about particulars. The converted party must pray: I suppose it is not often necessary to pray in the presence of the other! Especially if the converted party is the woman, who usually has the house to herself all day. Of course there must be no concealment, in the sense that if the question comes up one must say frankly that one does pray. But there is a difference between not concealing and flaunting. For the rest (did I quote this before?) MacDonald says ‘the time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.’ Let you and me pray for each other.
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA: On Lewis’s great joy that he now believed in the forgiveness of sins with his whole heart; and on the danger of too much sadness over our sinfulness. The phrase Lewis uses, mistranslated “Lift up our hearts,” in Letters III, is Sursum corda, the opening dialogue to the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer in the liturgies of the Christian Church, dating back to the third century.
26 DECEMBER 1951
Thank you for the letter which I have received from you today and I invoke upon you all spiritual and temporal blessings in the Lord.
As for myself, during the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.
For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St. Mark’s day) this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.
So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance.
Perhaps I was granted this deliverance in response to your intercessions on my behalf!
This emboldens me to say to you something that a layman ought scarcely to say to a priest nor a junior to a senior. (On the other hand, out of the mouths of babes: indeed, as once to Balaam, out of the mouth of an ass!) It is this: you write much about your own sins. Beware (permit me, my dearest Father, to say beware) lest humility should pass over into anxiety or sadness. It is bidden us to ‘ rejoice and always rejoice’. Jesus has cancelled the handwriting which was against us. Lift up your hearts!
Permit me, I pray you, these stammerings. You are ever in my prayers and ever will be.