1954
TO MRS. D. JESSUP: On how hard it is to be a comforter at a time when one needs comforting; on the redemptive value of voluntary and involuntary suffering; and on avoiding the feeling of being the victim of something unfair.
5 JANUARY 1954
Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. I don’t know to which of you my sympathy goes out most. Your share is, however, easier to imagine, for I know what it’s like to have to be the comforter when one most needs comforting, and the competent arranger at the very moment when one feels most disabled.
I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught—that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs and ascetics.
And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my mother’s illness and death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial and prosaic.
May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal and that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings and with deep sorrow.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: Expanding on the line from George Herbert mentioned above (28 December 1953), Lewis counseled even greater patience with the behavior of a priest than with his preaching; on a tentative solution to the problem of petitionary prayer; and on the strength of those who are obedient.
26 JANUARY 1954
I quite agree that God ‘takes a text’ much more forcibly in the general behaviour of a bad priest than in a bad sermon, which is, in comparison, a trifle. You seem, if I may say so, to be taking the treatment well! Finding (as Shakespeare ought to have said) ‘sermons in prigs, books in the cross-grained toughs,’ et cetera.
I suppose I thought in B type of prayer higher because of the portentous promises attached to it and because it seems the type used by Elijah when he calls down fire on the altar or the Apostles when they heal the sick and raise the dead. But I think we are both coming to the right practical conclusion: not struggling, but always saying, as the disciples did, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’
That’s all modern pseudo-democratic nonsense, isn’t it, about obedience being ‘weak’. One doesn’t think nurses, sailors, and soldiers weak; and when we believe spiritual things to be as important as operations, storms at sea, and ‘last stands,’ we shall see obedience as a strong thing there too. Surely one of the marks of the disobedient child is that it is feebler than the obedient, and can’t do dozens of things that the other can?
TO MRS. D. JESSUP: On the difference between intellectual assent to and integrated realization of doctrines; more on the question of Christian vocation to be in the world and not of the world; and on God’s individual care for each of us.
5 FEBRUARY 1954
I fully agree with you about the difference between a doctrine merely accepted by the intellect and one (as Keats says) ‘proved in the pulses’ so that [it] is solid and palpable. You have clearly progressed from the one stage to the other as regards those sins by which (there again you’re right) we daily fashion the Nails. About 2 years ago I made a similar progress from mere intellectual acceptance of, to realisation of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven. That is perhaps the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. How little they know of Christianity who think that the story ends with conversion: novelties we never dreamed of may await us at every turn of the road.
About the question of abandoning the ‘World’ or fighting right inside it, don’t you think that both may be right for different people? Some are called to the one and some to the other. Hence Our Lord, after pointing the contrast between the hermit and ascetic John the Baptist, and Himself who drank wine and went to dinner parties and jostled with every kind of man, concluded ‘But Wisdom is justified of all her children’: meaning, I take it, both these kinds. I fancy we are all too ready, once we are converted ourselves, to assume that God will deal with everyone exactly as He does with us. But He is no mass-producer and treats no two quite alike.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On the four kinds of love; on the various forms of charity; on pride as the pleasure of self-approval; and on self-forgetfulness.
18 FEBRUARY 1954
Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is ‘charity’. Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storgë (family affection) and Philia ( friendship). So there are 4 kinds of ‘love’, all good in their proper place, but Agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. (There are people I mustn’t feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for; but I can practise Agape to God, Angels, Man and Beast, to the good and the bad, the old and the young, the far and the near.
You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St. Paul says about it in First Corinthians Chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Charity (or Agape) in action in St. Luke, chap 10 v. 30–35. And then, better still, look at Matthew chap 25 v. 31–46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time and toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, though it is all giving—you needn’t expect any reward—how you do gets rewarded almost at once.
Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden and the sky) instead.
Yes, I do believe people are still healed by miracles by faith: but of course whether this has happened in any one particular case, is not so easy to find out.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On hypochondria; and on courage as the first and most necessary virtue.
22 FEBRUARY 1954
Thanks for your letter of Jan 13th. I don’t think one gains anything from calling Genia’s fears ‘ Hypochondria’ and regarding them as something pathological. They are, like the fears of a soldier under fire, rational and natural fears of a real evil, so that her problem, like the soldier’s, is moral, not medical. They must be faced on the conscious level and overcome by the Grace of God.
If only people (including myself: I also have fears) were still brought up with the idea that life is a battle where death and wounds await us at every moment, so that courage is the first and most necessary of virtues, things would be easier. As it is, fears are all the harder to combat because they disappoint expectations bred on modern poppycock in which unbroken security is regarded as somehow ‘normal’ and the touch of reality as anomalous. Notice, too, how our bad habit of lying to those who are really ill renders vain our true assurances to those who are not!
I’ve had an exchange of letters with Genia on this very subject. I hope she won’t go to a psychiatrist. How could a psychiatrist help her except by saying ‘It is perfectly certain that you will never get any painful or dangerous disease’—and do you want her to be fool enough to believe that?
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the need to cry; on the need to remember God’s past mercies; on the suitability of his Ransom trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, for children; and on the kinds of snobbery. Lewis asks if he may dedicate The Magician’s Nephew to her friends.
22 FEBRUARY 1954
I am very sorry indeed to hear that anxieties again assail you. (By the way, don’t ‘weep inwardly’ and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we—and especially, my sex—don’t cry enough nowadays. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf and Roland and Lancelot blubbered like school-girls, so why shouldn’t we?) You were wonderfully supported in your worries last time: I shall indeed pray that it may be so again.
Would the Kilmer family like to have the next story but one dedicated to them? Let me know: the site is still vacant.
I didn’t object to the family reading the trilogy on the ground that it would be too difficult—that would do no harm—but because in the last one there is so much evil, in a form not, I think, suitable for their age, and many specifically sexual problems which it would do them no good to think of at present. I daresay the Silent Planet is alright: Perelandra, little less so: T. H. S. most unsuitable.
I don’t think that an appreciation of ancient and noble blood is ‘ snobbery’ at all. What is snobbery is a greedy desire to know those who have it, or a mean desire to flatter them, or a conceited desire to boast of their acquaintance. I think it quite legitimate to feel that such things give an added interest to a person who is nice on other grounds, just as a hotel which was nice on other grounds would have an added charm for me if it was also a building with ‘historic interest’.
I write in great haste—I can’t, like you, do it in working hours! But you’re nothing to [Charles] Lamb: as far as I can make out all his letters, which now fill two volumes, were written in the office. Happy days those.
Well I hope I shall have better news in your next. God bless you.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On disagreeable, nasty people; and on avoiding obsessing about their bullying.
10 MARCH 1954
I am sorry things are not better. I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty. I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all; the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognisable passion is mysterious. (Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked ‘Do you know when we get to Liverpool’ and who replied ‘I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard’). I have found it more among boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity—a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’). But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it. I hope the other job will materialise….
I too had mumps after I was grown up. I didn’t mind it as long as I had the temperature: but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation and the pain—ugh! I never realised ‘the disobedience in our members’ so clearly before. Verily ‘He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart’ (or in his glands).
I shall wait anxiously for all your news, always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.
TO RHONA BODLE, who had written Lewis about difficulties with her father: On his most serious sin; on not expecting to feel affection for a difficult parent; on ways to work on loving such a one; and on Hans Christian Andersen.
24 MARCH 1954
Oh how you touch my conscience! I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious. It is not likely you are equally guilty.
Feelings of affection are not at the command of the will and perhaps the very attempt to produce them has the opposite effect. I have been astonished at the ease (and even the affection) with which I have been able to treat in other old men the very same characteristics I was so impatient with in my Father. I wonder can something be done along these lines?—by remembering how merely funny, how endearing in a whimsical way, the things that divide you from your Father would seem if he were a casual acquaintance. By voluntarily standing further off might one in effect come closer? Part of the difficulty, I fancy, is heredity—a deep awareness that what one likes least in our parents has been bequeathed to oneself and, in oneself, needs to be resisted. While my Father was alive I was shocked when I caught myself acting or speaking like him; now I am amused, and not hostilely. At any rate, work now for the night cometh.
I am delighted to hear how well your Sunday School goes on. I have come to like Hans Andersen better since I grew up than I did in childhood. I think both the pathos and the satire—both very delicate, penetrating and ever-present in his work—disquieted me then. I agree about The Little Mermaid: I’d add The Storks, The Seven Swans and (best of all satires) The Emperor’s New Clothes.
He was, you know, a friend of Kierkegaard’s and a very disappointed novelist, for it was by his novels, not his fairy tales that he wished to be known. I wonder if the story of the Shadow is connected with that—the shadow outgrowing the man as a fairy-tale-writer outgrew the novelist. But I’m glad he did! All blessings.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On God wanting us and not what we can do for God; and on our job to become more and more God’s.
25 MARCH 1954
I must be short for I have had a run of absolutely full days and there are endless things waiting to be done. You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His. Yes, isn’t [William] Law good?
TO MRS. D. JESSUP: On getting rid of fear; and on the real meaning of faith (the only instance in this collection of a deliberately last letter).
26 MARCH 1954
I quite understand about closing your correspondence (with me; not with God, I trust). All congratulations on your good news and sympathy on your bad, and thanks for the merry photo. One last word, about getting rid of fear.
Two men had to cross a dangerous bridge. The first convinced himself that it would bear them, and called this conviction faith. The second said ‘Whether it breaks or holds, whether I die here or somewhere else, I am equally in God’s good hands.’ And the bridge did break and they were both killed: and the second man’s faith was not disappointed and the first man’s was.
God bless you.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (who had continued to be bullied at work; see the letter to her above, 10 March 1954): On offering one’s humiliations; on avoiding both contentment with and anger against oneself; and on the three patiences.
31 MARCH 1954
(I return the compliment by telling you that my friends call me Jack). I am sorry the persecution still goes on. I had that sort of thing at school, and in the army, and here too when I was a junior fellow, and it does very much darken life. I suppose (though it seems a hard saying) we should mind humiliation less if [we] were humbler. It is, at any rate, a form of suffering which we can try to offer, in our small way, along with the supreme humiliation of Christ Himself. There is, if you notice it, a very great deal in the New Testament about His humiliations as distinct from His sufferings in general. And it is the humble and meek who have all the blessings in the Magnificat. So your position is, spiritually, far safer than the opposite one. But don’t think I don’t know how much easier it is to preach than practice….
How right you are to see that anger (even when directed against oneself) ‘ worketh not the righteousness of God’. One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. My old confessor (now dead) used to impress on me the need for the three Patiences: patience with God, with my neighbour, with oneself.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On setting a time limit in making decisions about matters that do not involve duty or necessity.
13 APRIL 1954
For one’s own peace of mind I think it is best to set a time limit for one’s decisions (I mean, decisions of mere pleasure where duty and necessity don’t come in).
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, whose pastor marred her Easter experience: On the ways in which the devil works to mar liturgical celebrations; on involuntary uncharitable thoughts; on the need to take spiritual holidays; “Act as if everything depended on you. Pray as if everything depended on God” (Saint Ignatius of Loyola); and on the mutual respect parents and children own one another.
22 APRIL 1954
It is a pity, isn’t it, that the great feasts which should be times of joy are so often marred in one way or another. (We have a very trying curate in our parish.) Some say ‘ the devil lives very near the altar’, anxious to cut us off from grace by instilling sinful thoughts, or, if that fails, at least to deprive us of the sensible comforts of grace by instilling worry, fears, and inconveniences.
I take it your Rector is just an instance of the brother one has to forgive unto seventy times seven. I don’t think the recurrence of uncharitable thoughts is very serious provided one knocks them on the head each time, though of course it is an unhappiness and a proper ground for self-humiliation. But the real serious sin would lie in yielding to them. And I think you are free to take a spiritual holiday: i.e., when it is very hard to think kindly of someone, one may take a spell of not thinking about him at all. Of course it is hard to be closely connected with something and remain ‘detached’. But does not God want us to reach, is He not helping us to reach, a sort of detachment from things (after all) a good deal closer than a parish: from our very selves, from all our hopes and fears? If they have a bad priest they need good laity all the more. And when one comes to think of it, the place where one is most wanted can hardly ever be the place where one would have chosen for one’s own comfort. (The part of the line which needs troops is not the part where troops will have the best time.) But don’t omit those ‘holidays’. One has to act as if everything depended on one’s own exertions and then, as soon as the moment of action is over, ‘ cast all your care’ upon God and realise that in some deeper sense, you don’t matter in the least and it is only for your sake He uses you to do what He could do very much more easily Himself.
All parents are apt to treat their grown up sons and daughters at times as if they were still children: and perhaps all children are apt to think that this is happening even when it is not. I’m sure myself that respect—or let us say frankly reverence—is the disinfectant without which no affection will work properly.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had asked Lewis how to counsel some Christian homosexuals he and his wife were trying to help: On what is not permitted homosexuals and what might be for their “glorious gain” (Wordsworth, “Character of the Happy Warrior,” line 14); on prayer, particularly petitionary prayer; and on the worthiness and unworthiness of the petitioner. Lewis called this letter “an interim report”; he wrote a further letter, loaned to a homosexual and lost.
14 MAY 1954
I have seen less than you but more than I wanted of this terrible problem. I will discuss your letter with those whom I think wise in Christ. This is only an interim report.
First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homosexual desires is sin. This leaves the homosexual no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind ( Jn. IX 1–3): only the final cause, that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e., that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations which, if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homosexual has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he would be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition.
What should the positive life of the homosexual be? I wish I had a letter which a pious male homosexual, now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social rôle which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague—too long ago. Perhaps any homosexual who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g., by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homosexual admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate.
I have mentioned humility because male homosexuals (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.
I heard you had been troubled with the old spine again. I hope the silence on this topic in your letter does not merely result from selflessness but means that you are now well. Remember me to your very nice wife. You both keep your place in my daily prayers. It is a sweet duty, praying for our friends. I always feel as if I had had a brief meeting with you when I do so: perhaps it is a meeting, and the best kind. Pray for me to be made more charitable: we’re in the middle of a faculty crisis which tempts me to hatred many times a day.
P. S. I’d nearly forgotten your other point. I presume God grants prayers when granting would be good for the petitioner and others and denies them when it would not. Might there be cases where
a. The worthiness of the petitioner made it bad for him to have his prayers granted: i.e., might lead him to think there was an element of bargain about it.
b. The unworthiness made it bad: i.e., might lead him to think that God did not demand righteousness.
c. The worthiness made it good: i.e., might free him from scruples, show him that his conduct had been right after all.
d. The unworthiness made it good: i.e., produced humbled compunction—unde hoc mihi? (St. Elizabeth to the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Luke 1:43.)
All very crude. The point is that worthiness might easily be taken into account though not in the way of direct earning and reward.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, whose difficult pastor had been promoted: On detachment for the sake of attachment, the via negativa for the sake of the via positiva; and on gestures and postures of reverence.
20 MAY 1954
Well, well—so that struggle is over. Perhaps God used this reverend man—all as a hair shirt for the faithful and thinks you have worn (or borne) him long enough (‘Deliver me from the un-godly who is a sword of thine’). It doesn’t surprise me in the least that one who can’t do a job himself should be set to teach others. Failed schoolmasters become inspectors of schools and failed authors become critics. It’s the normal thing.
When we speak of detachment (from worldly interests) we mean it of course only as a preliminary for attachment to spiritual things: as St. Paul wishes to be rid of the earthly body only in order to put on the heavenly (2 Cor. V. 1–4). All the Christian demands are in the end positive—to receive, take, embrace something (‘Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it’)—and negative (‘Love not the World’) only as means to that. As one might say to a slum-child, ‘Stop making that mud pie and come for a holiday to the sea’.
About Reverence, you know, I believe all people all us, all who come from a Western, decayed-Protestant, liberal, commercial background, have a lot of lee-way to make up. We have our own advantages over those who come from a Latin, Catholic, decayed-feudal background: our veracity, manliness, energy. But we are spiritually ill-bred: raw and harsh and crude like yokels in a drawing room. How much even of what we take for democratic feeling is really gaucherie? I.e., we disapprove of ‘ bowings and scraping’ partly because, not having had good dancing-masters, we don’t know how to bow gracefully. What a pity that the progress of democracy in this country has meant that certain people who used to call me Sir now don’t: it ought to have meant that I began calling them Sir. And we carry the same boorishness into spiritual matters.
TO DR. F. MORGAN ROBERTS: On Lewis’s own rules about prayer.
31 JULY 1954
I am certainly unfit to advise anyone else on the devotional life. My own rules are (1) To make sure that, wherever else they may be placed, the main prayers should not be put ‘last thing at night’. (2) To avoid introspection in prayer—I mean not to watch one’s own mind to see if it is in the right frame, but always to turn the attention outwards to God. (3) Never, never to try to generate an emotion by will power. (4) To pray without words when I am able, but to fall back on words when tired or otherwise below par. With renewed thanks. Perhaps you will sometimes pray for me?
TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN: On how, after weathering a bereavement, one feels abandoned by God; on how God works on our behalf even when we feel He is inactive; and on the necessity of continuing to use the ordinary means of the spiritual life during times of extraordinary need.
2 AUGUST 1954
Thank you for your letter of the July 25th. I will certainly put you in my prayers. I can well believe that you were divinely supported at the time of your terrible calamity. People often are. It is afterwards, when the new and bleaker life is beginning to be a routine, that one often feels one has been left rather unaided. I am sure one is not really so. God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.
Loneliness, I am pretty sure, is one of the ways by which we can grow spiritually. Until we are lonely we may easily think we have got further than we really have in Christian love; our (natural and innocent, but merely natural, not heavenly) pleasure in being loved—in being, as you say, an object of interest to someone—can be mistaken for progress in love itself, the outgoing active love which is concerned with giving, not receiving. It is this latter which is the beginning of sanctity.
But of course you know all this: alas, so much easier to know in theory than to submit to day by day in practice! Be very regular in your prayers and communions: and don’t value special ‘guidances’ any more than what comes through ordinary Christian teaching, conscience, and prudence.
I am shocked to hear that your friends think of following me. I wanted them to follow Christ. But they’ll get over this confusion soon, I trust.
Please accept my deepest sympathy.
TO CYNTHIA DONNELLY, who had asked Lewis about being a Christian writer: On good work rather than good works.
14 AUGUST 1954
Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. I think you have a mistaken idea of a Christian writer’s duty. We must use the talent we have, not the talents we haven’t. We must not of course write anything that will flatter lust, pride or ambition. But we needn’t all write patently moral or theological work. Indeed, work whose Christianity is latent may do quite as much good and may reach some whom the more obvious religious work would scare away.
The first business of a story is to be a good story. When Our Lord made a wheel in the carpenter shop, depend upon it: It was first and foremost a good wheel. Don’t try to ‘bring in’ specifically Christian bits: if God wants you to serve him in that way (He may not: there are different vocations), you will find it coming in of its own accord. If not, well—a good story which will give innocent pleasure is a good thing, just like cooking a good nourishing meal. (You don’t put little texts in your family soup, I’ll be bound.)
By the way, none of my stories began with a Christian message. I always start from a mental picture—the floating islands, a faun with an umbrella in a snowy wood, an ‘injured’ human head. Of course my non-fiction works are different. But they succeed because I’m a professional teacher and explanation happens to be one of the things I’ve learned to do.
But the great thing is to cultivate one’s own garden, to do well the job which one’s own natural capacities point out (after first doing well whatever the ‘duties of one’s station’ impose). Any honest workmanship (whether making stories, shoes, or rabbit hutches) can be done to the glory of God….
TO MAUDE M. MCCASLIN: Further on the matter of Christian love being more divine for its outgoing and giving qualities.
19 SEPTEMBER 1954
I must have expressed myself badly if you thought I denied that purely human love could be outgoing and giving as well as in-drawing and receptive. I only meant that the former was more essentially love and more divine, especially when expended (as it can be by saints) on an unlovable object. All this is much better said by George MacDonald. Look at him in my George MacDonald: An Anthology.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how God provides for children raised in atheistic and in devout homes; and on the fear of aging.
19 SEPTEMBER 1954
About the lack of religious education: of course you must be grieved, but remember how much religious education has exactly the opposite effect to that which was intended, how many hard atheists from pious homes. May we not hope, with God’s mercy, that a similarly opposite effect may be produced in her case? Parents are not Providence: their bad intentions may be frustrated as their good ones. Perhaps prayers as a secret indulgence which [the] father disapproves may have a charm they lacked in houses where they were commanded.
…I can well understand your fears about old age. And of course you are doing the very best thing in meditating on the sufferings of Our Lord.
TO “MRS. JONES” (identity withheld): On sexual temptation as not only the most recognizable and least disguisable of our temptations but also as the most pleasurable; and on the consequences of the Fall for women and for men.
27 SEPTEMBER 1954
‘Why has sex become man’s chief stumbling block?’ But has it? Or is it only the most recognisable of the stumbling blocks? I mean, we can mistake pride for a good conscience, and cruelty for zeal, and idleness for the peace of God et cetera. But when lust is upon us, then, owing to the obvious physical symptoms, we can’t pretend it is anything else. Is it perhaps only the least disguisable of our dangers. At the same time I think there is something in what you say. If marriage is an image of the mystical marriage between Christ and the Church, then adultery is an image of apostasy. Also, all the sexual vices have this unfair advantage that the very temptation is itself pleasurable: whereas the temptations, say, to anger or cowardice, are in themselves un pleasant.
I don’t think I can solve your question about the pains of childbirth. I can only say that vicarious suffering seems to be deeply embedded in the post-fall world so that the Atonement is simply the supreme instance of a universal law. Would the inequality between man’s and woman’s share of the cause be less marked if Man (or selected, fortunate men) had not now managed to evade his share? If he still in person tilled the earth and fought the wild beasts? And has civilisation increased the woman’s pain? I’ve heard of savage women who suffer much less. But I am only offering conjecture. I don’t know the answer.
TO BELLE ALLEN: On the power of Satan only to spoil but not to create; on the problem of the suffering of the wicked as well as of the innocent; on the oversimplicity of Christian Science practitioners; and on the essential mystery of suffering, of all of creation and of God so as to turn us into gods.
1 NOVEMBER 1954
I think it would be dangerous to suppose that Satan had created all the creatures that are disagreeable or dangerous to us for (a) those creatures, if they could think, would have just the same reason for thinking that we were created by Satan. (b) I don’t think evil, in the strict sense, can create. It can spoil something that Another has created. Satan may have corrupted other creatures as well as us. Part of the corruption in us might be the unreasoning horror and disgust we feel at some creatures quite apart from any harm they can do us. (I can’t abide a spider myself.) We have scriptural authority for Satan originating diseases—see Luke XIII.16.
Do you know, the suffering of the innocent is less of a problem to me very often than that of the wicked. It sounds absurd: but I’ve met so many innocent sufferers who seem to be gladly offering their pain to God in Christ as part of the Atonement, so patient, so meek, even so at peace, and so unselfish that we can hardly doubt they are being, as St. Paul says, ‘ made perfect by suffering’. On the other hand I meet selfish egoists in whom suffering seems to produce only resentment, hate, blasphemy, and more egoism. They are the real problem.
Christian Scientists seem to me to be altogether too simple. Granted that all the evils are illusions, still, the existence of that illusion would be a real evil and presumably a real evil permitted by God. That brings us back to exactly the same point as we began from. We have gained nothing by the theory. We are still faced with the great mystery, not explained, but coloured, trans-muted, all through the Cross. Faith, not wild over-simplifications, is what will help, don’t you think? It is so very difficult to believe that the travail of all creation which God Himself descended to share, at its most intense, may be necessary in the process of turning finite creatures (with free wills) into—well, into Gods.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the need to break open the alabaster jar of one’s heart over the feet of Jesus for the contents to become perfume.
1 NOVEMBER 1954
No, my rheumatism is not really bad. It only produces extreme footsoreness in the left foot, so that after 50 yards, though the right one is fresh as a daisy the left keeps on whimpering ‘Stop! Stop! We’ve been 25 miles already.’ The real nuisance is that I am beginning to get horribly fat and this foot comes just when I ought to be slimming by long walks. I have had to give up potatoes, milk, and bread: perhaps having to fast for medical reasons is a just punishment for not having fasted enough on higher grounds!
Did I tell you I’ve been made a professor at Cambridge? I take up my duties on Jan. 1st at Magdalene College, Cambridge (England). Note the difference in spelling. It means rather less work for rather more pay. And I think I shall like Magdalene better than Magdalen. It’s a tiny college (a perfect cameo architecturally) and they’re so old fashioned, and pious, and gentle and conservative—unlike this leftist, atheist, cynical, hard-boiled, huge Magdalen. Perhaps from being the fogey and ‘old woman’ here I shall become the enfant terrible there.
It is nice to be still under the care of St. Mary Magdalene: she must by now understand my constitution better than a stranger would, don’t you think? The allegorical sense of her great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box which one must break over the Holy Feet is one’s heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage. All very alarming.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On Lewis’s favorite novel by Charles Dickens; on the desire to die; on longing; on joy; on having; and on wanting.
5 NOVEMBER 1954
The best Dickens always seems to me to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.
About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria. It is the bright frontispiece [which] whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, whose wife, Jean Palmer “Davy” Davis, was dying: On Lewis’s prayers for them by day and by night.
23 NOVEMBER 1954
It is a long time since you wrote and told me of your wife’s grave illness. You asked my prayers and of course have had them: not only daily, for I never wake in the night without remembering you both before God. I have sometimes tried, by sophistical arguments, to persuade myself that your silence might somehow be interpreted as a good omen…but how could it?
If you can bear, will you tell me your news. If she has gone where we can feel no anxiety about her, then I must feel anxious about you. I liked you both so well: never two young people more. And to like is to fear. Whatever has happened and in whatever state you are (I have horrid pictures in my mind) all blessings on you.
TO WALTER HOOPER: On the law of diversion (see The Screwtape Letters, VI).
30 NOVEMBER 1954
Thank you for your kind letter of the 23rd. I am glad if I have been the instrument of Our Lord’s help to you: in His hands almost any instrument will do, otherwise none.
We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!