1955
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had been reading Eros and Agape by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, at Lewis’s recommendation: On an overstrictness in giving the name love to a “need” love and on the final resolution of her problem with her pastor.
19 JANUARY 1955
Yes: I would certainly agree with ‘the disfigured in the best of us, but still an image in the worst’. Nygren is surely wrong if he says that merited love is sinful. It can’t be wrong to love the hand that feeds one. How much more wisely Christ put it: ‘if you love only them that do good to you, do not the Gentiles [do] as much?’ i.e., not that it is sin (indeed not to do it would be sin) but that it is no great matter, is elementary and merely natural. When we say to a boy of 17, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, doing simple long division,’ we don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with long division but that he ought by now to have got on to something more advanced. Is it by some such confusion Nygren has got where he is? Still his book was well worth reading: we both have the very important idea of Eros and Agape now clearly in our minds, and can keep it after we have let all his exaggerations fade out of our minds.
In a way I am glad about your rector’s true story. One finds pitiable human weakness where one had expected hard self-righteousness. It is almost a relief.
I am sorry Genia had a bad turn. She is always in my prayers. It makes me feel as if I had a daughter of my own!
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, whose wife died on 17 January 1955—he had written to ask Lewis to scatter some of her ashes, conveyed by a friend, at their church near Oxford; Lewis had agreed, but his letter saying so was lost en route: On the feelings of bereavement, the good feelings and the dangerous feelings; on the necessity of bereavement; and on the need to take care of oneself.
10 FEBRUARY 1955
I heard from your friend about 2 days ago, and today I have got your letter of Feb. 5. I am most distressed to find that my answer to your previous letter has never reached you; particularly since its miscarriage has left you in doubt whether I would have accepted the very sacred office of scattering the ashes. I would have liked to do (if you can understand) for the very reason that I would not have liked doing it, since a deep spiritual gaucherie makes [me] uneasy in any ceremonial act; and I would have wished in that way to be honoured with a share, however tiny, in this Cross. All you told me in your previous letter and all you tell me in this moves me deeply and it is a high privilege to be admitted to such a beautiful death, an act which consummates (not, as so often, an event which merely stops) the earthly life. And how you reassure me when, to describe your own state, you use the simple, obvious, yet now so rare, word sad. Neither more nor less nor other than sad. It suggests a clean wound—much here for tears, but ‘nothing but good and fair.’
And I am sure it is never sadness—a proper, straight natural response to loss—that does people harm, but all the other things, all the resentment, dismay, doubt and self-pity with which it is usually complicated. I feel (indeed I tried to say something about it in that lost letter) very strongly what you say about the ‘curious consolation’ that ‘nothing now can mar’ your joint lives. I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in which men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and rebirth. But far more have missed the rebirth. Your ‘Manuscript,’ as you well say, has now gone safe to the Printer.
It is remarkable (I have experienced it), that sense that the dead person is. And also, I have felt, is active: can sometimes do more for you now than before—as if God gave them, as a kind of birthday present on arrival, some great blessing to the beloved they have left behind.
Be careful of your own bodily health. You must be, physically, very tired, much more tired than you know. Above all, don’t yield to the feeling that such things ‘don’t matter now.’ You must remain, as she wishes, a good instrument for all heavenly impulses to work on, and the body is part of the instrument.
I shall be nervous about all letters now that one (and at such a moment) has gone astray. If this reaches you, a line in answer will reassure me.
You are always in my prayers, even whenever I wake in the night. Keep me in yours.
under the Omnipotence
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS. D. JESSUP, whose husband has left her for another woman: On granting her husband a civil divorce; and on her inability to remarry while he is still alive.
13 FEBRUARY 1955
I was deeply shocked by the news in your letter of Feb. 7th and can’t tell you how much I sympathise with you. The one bright spot is that you are clearly suffering only from what we may call the ‘clean pain’ of loss, not complicated, as it would be in many women, with those pains of resentment and anger which are so much more likely to fester.
Now as to your problem. I am not quite clear (though you may well have told me long ago—I can’t always remember things now) what ‘ religion’ you are of. You have ‘left the Episcopal church’ and have been staying with nuns. Does this mean you are a Roman Catholic? If so, you have no need of my advice. Your own Church has clear and rigid rules on all these subjects and your confessor will tell you exactly what you are, and are not, allowed to do. But this is so obvious that I don’t think you can be an R.C. or you wouldn’t have asked me.
What, then, is your allegiance? I doubt if I can give advice simply to a ‘mere Christian’ as such, for different bodies have differently interpreted Our Lord’s words. My own very tentative idea would be that you must always regard yourself as his wife, and therefore incapable of a second marriage while he lives: but that I’m not at all clear that this forbids you to ‘ divorce’ him, i.e., to give him legal freedom to make another marriage, though this other would not (in our eyes) be marriage in the full Christian sense. It might, however, prevent connections which would on any view be more sinful.
But I express my view with extreme reluctance. I am only an amateur: you must be guided by the experts (in whatever your own communion is). I feel I am failing you—and also that I am writing in a dry, unfeeling way. Believe me, it doesn’t represent my real reactions. You have never been out of my daily prayers, and you will be even more in them now. May God continue to support you and keep your great sorrow as pure (so then it will heal) as it now clearly is.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On feelings or the lack of them in prayer, especially a sense of the presence of God.
19 FEBRUARY 1955
Thanks for your letter of 14th. But why on earth didn’t you write it a day later and tell me the result of the examination?
I don’t think we ought to try to keep up our normal prayers when we are ill and over-tired. I would not say this to a beginner who still has the habit to form. But you are past that stage. One mustn’t make the Christian life into a punctilious system of law, like the Jewish. Two reasons (1.) It raises scruples when we don’t keep the routine (2.) It raises presumption when we do. Nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith. And people who stay away from Mass with the approval of their director and at the bidding of their doctor are just as obedient as those who go. Check all these points with your confessor: I bet he’ll say just the same.
And of course the presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God. The latter may be due to imagination: the former may be attended with no ‘sensible consolation’. The Father was not really absent from the Son when He said ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ You see God Himself, as man, submitted to man’s sense of being abandoned. The real parallel on the natural level is one which seems odd for a bachelor to write to a lady, but too illuminating not to be used. The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is, attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility; where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes, and that’s all about it.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On the consolations that often attend the first period after conversion; and on the way we will be able to reveal ourselves to one another in heaven.
20 FEBRUARY 1955
I was very glad to get your letter of Feb. 14. And here ‘luck’ worked the other way. It had come unstuck and the envelope was open, but the letter inside, intact.
Your real or supposed change of luck since your conversion (whatever it may really mean) is an old story: read Jeremiah XLIV 15–18. And I have seen it laid down by a modern spiritual author (whose name I forget) that the experience is to be expected. You remember the vision of Our Lord that said to St. Theresa on some frightful occasion, ‘This is how I always treat my friends.’ (I must not conceal her answer, ‘Then, Lord, it is not surprising that You have so few.’)
What you say about the total Jean being apprehensible since the moment-by-moment Jean has been withdrawn (backed by the very good analogy of the novel page-by-page and the novel after you’ve read it) is most true and important. I see no reason why we should not regard it as what St. Paul calls an arrabon or earnest of the mode in which all can reveal themselves to all in heaven.…
Do you know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House and (still more, but the first is to be read as a prelude) Love’s Victory. They deal superbly with some of the experiences you are having.
TO MRS. D. JESSUP: On no such thing as chance; on the need to make up one’s mind about the innocent party’s freedom to remarry before it becomes a question of the heart.
2 MARCH 1955
Thank you for your letter of March 25th. It has done me good. You are so clearly being supported and guided through this tribulation by the Holy Spirit: and, as so often is the case, unexpected helps spring up.
Oh what a rare blessing to have a Christian psychotherapist! I don’t think your question whether these ones were brought into your life by ‘a whimsical fate’ or by God, need detain you long. Once one believes in God at all, surely the question is meaningless? Suppose that in a novel a character gets killed in a railway accident. Is his death due to chance (e.g., the signals being wrong) or to the novelist? Well of course, both. The chance is the way the novelist removes the character at the exact moment his story requires. There’s a good line in Spenser to quote to oneself: ‘It chanced (almighty God that chance did guide)’.
I don’t think it my business to [speak further] about the re-marriage of the innocent party after a divorce. My own opinion carries no authority. All I would say is that the matter should be decided once and for all now while the question of re-marriage is purely academic, so as to save you from painful indecisions later on, and also because your whole future attitude to your thoughts and feelings and indeed much of your social behaviour must be governed by it.
I will indeed pray for the other two: especially Kim. And thank you very much for your prayers.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On God’s unique way with each soul, even in the pattern of conversion; and on various Christian nonessentials.
2 MARCH 1955
It is right and inevitable that we should be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation should conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of ‘conviction’, ‘ conversion,’ et cetera, marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. But (see the last chapter of Problem of Pain) God has His own unique way with each soul.
There is no evidence that St. John even underwent the same kind of ‘ conversion’ as St. Paul. It’s not essential to believe in the devil; and I’m sure a man can get to Heaven without being accurate about Methuselah’s age. Also, as MacDonald says, ‘the time for saying comes seldom, the time for being is always there.’ What we practice, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach, is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On teetotalism; and on the high calling of being a homemaker.
16 MARCH 1955
I am afraid I am not going to be much help about all the religious bodies mentioned in your letter of March 2nd. I have always in my books been concerned simply to put forward ‘mere’ Christianity, and am no guide on these (most regrettable) ‘interdenominational’ questions. I do however strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town’). Don’t they realise that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread?…
I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely, in reality, the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government et cetera exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real Home hereafter: 2nd, in the meantime, to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had sent Lewis printed stationery: On the physical pleasures of youth and of old age; on the sacramentality of eating; on how life expands; and on the human Jesus of the real Gospels.
19 MARCH 1955
I hope you admire the lovely paper! It almost makes letter writing a pleasure: only I feel that I can’t write well enough to live up to it. And the beautiful amplitude of the address! It reminds me of the address I used to put after my name in the fly-leaf of a new book when I was a very small boy, which ended up ‘Ireland, the British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Universe’. Thank you very much. You well divined that nice paper would be one of those things which in a bachelor household is always desired and never got.
I feel strongly, with you, that there was something more than a physical pleasure in those youthful activities. Even now, at my age, do we often have a purely physical pleasure? Well, perhaps, a few of the more hopelessly prosaic ones: say, scratching or getting one’s shoes off when one’s feet are tired. I’m sure my meals are too a purely physical pleasure. All the associations of every other time one has had the same food (every rasher of bacon is now 56 years thick with me) come in: and with things like Bread, Wine, Honey, Apples, there are all the echoes of myth, fairy-tale, poetry, and scripture. So that the physical pleasure is also imaginative and even spiritual. Every meal can be a kind of lower sacrament. ‘Devastating gratitude’ is a good phrase: but my own experience is rather ‘devastating desire’—desire for that-of-which-the-present-joy-is-a-reminder. All my life nature and art have been reminding me of something I’ve never seen: saying ‘Look! What does this—and this—remind you of?’
I am so glad that you are finding (as I do too) that life, far from getting dull and empty as one grows older, opens out. It is like being in a house where one keeps on discovering new rooms.
Yes, Jesus Himself, of course: the heart. Not only the God in Him but the historical Man. I don’t know that I ever got much from reading things about Him. Perhaps, in a queer way, I got most from reading the Apocryphal Gospels…. For there you find things attributed to Him that couldn’t be true. You even find wise and beautiful sayings which nevertheless just don’t ring true. And have you noticed—reading the true saying in the real Gospels—how hardly one of them could have been guessed in advance?
Genia’s theory about the physical cause of depression is probably right nine times out of ten. But the drugs are a matter for the doctor, I presume. She mustn’t believe all the disguised-advertisement poppycock in the press! Blessing on you all, from both of us.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: New “light” on Luke 18:9–14, the Pharisee and the publican.
21 MARCH 1955
We were talking about cats and dogs the other day and decided that both have consciences but the dog, being an honest, humble person, always has a bad one, but the cat is a Pharisee and always has a good one. When he sits and stares you out of countenance he is thanking God that he is not as these dogs, or these humans, or even as these other cats!
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the danger of misinterpreting facial expressions and tones of voice.
24 MARCH 1955
Just a line of sympathy and encouragement on the impending operation. Extra faith has been given to meet crises before, and I pray that it will be now. Be very much on your guard against the growth of a feeling that Fr. A. or anyone else ‘does not sound interested’. When we are in trouble we easily think this, don’t we? And at all times, we very easily misinterpret expressions of face and tones of voice. Often, too, the person we speak to is at that moment full of troubles we know nothing about.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the very comforting fact that Jesus was afraid.
2 APRIL 1955
In great haste. I hope your next letter will bring me news that the operation has gone swimmingly. Fear is horrid, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. Our Lord was afraid (dreadfully so) in Gethsemane. I always cling to that as a very comforting fact. All blessings.
TO JILL FREUD: On the effect the reading of The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Pierre Barbet had on Lewis’s understanding of the sufferings of Christ.
6 APRIL 1955
At present I’m on Barbet’s book on the Holy Shroud. Do you know it? There are things which I have felt, in previous Holy Weeks, that I was not thinking about enough: after an evening of Barber the difficulty is to think of anything else. In fact one gets, not more than one needs, but a good deal more than one bargained for.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On how God’s total creation meets us in every event at every moment, thus blurring the distinction between the significant and the fortuitous; on the danger of trying to preserve the past; and on the duty to be as happy as one can.
6 APRIL 1955
It was a strange experience to get a letter from Jean this morning. I return it. You will see that it deals with a problem on which you also wrote to me, probably at about the same time. Indeed her reason for not sending it might be the discovery that you had done, or were about to do, the same.
I can’t now remember what I said in my lost letter [see the letter above, 10 February 1955] about the ‘Signs’. My general view is that, once we have accepted an omniscient and providential God, the distinction we used to draw between the significant and the fortuitous must either break down or be restated in some very much subtler form. If an event coming about in the ordinary course of nature becomes to me the occasion of hope and faith and love or increased efforts after virtue, do we suppose that this result was unforeseen by, or is indifferent to, God? Obviously not. What we should have called its fortuitous effects must have been present to Him for all eternity. And indeed, we can’t suppose God saying (as a human artist might) ‘That effect, though it has turned out rather well, was, I must admit, no part of my original design.’ Then the total act of creation, including our own creation (which is going on all the time) meets us, doesn’t it? in every event at every moment: the act of a Person dealing with persons and knowing what He does. Thus I wouldn’t now be bothered by a man who said to me ‘This, which you mistake for grace, is really the good functioning of your digestion.’ Does my digestion fall outside God’s act? He made and allowed to me my colon as much as my guardian angel….
I give no advice about the thesis, and I think you ought to be guided by ordinary academic considerations. Forgive me for suggesting that the form ‘What Jean would have liked’ could come to have its dangers. The real question is what she wills now; and you may be sure her will is now one with God’s. A ‘ sovereignty in the pluperfect subjective’ is often a snare. The danger is that of confusing your love for her (gradually—as the years pass) with your love for a period in your own past; and of trying to preserve the past in a way in which it can’t be preserved. Death-corruption-resurrection is the true rhythm: not the pathetic, horrible practice of mummification. Sad you must be at present. You can’t develop a false sense of a duty to cling to sadness if—and when, for nature will not preserve any psychological state forever—sadness begins to vanish? There is great good in bearing sorrow patiently: I don’t know that there is any virtue in sorrow just as such. It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can. But you know all this already.
All love.
TO RHONA BODLE, who had written Lewis to complain that New Zealand teachers were now expected to educate against premarital sex without any reference to religion: On the impossibility of chastity without a supernatural and sacramental view; and on the duty those who are spared suffering have to share the suffering of others.
28 APRIL 1955
Thanks for your letter of March 14th. Yes, here I am (though still, you see, under the same celestial patroness) translated into all the dignity and—what’s very much more important—leisure of a professor.
I am liking Cambridge very much. For one thing, it is still, substantially, a country town, nor ruined like poor Oxford by industrialisation. In the university I am pleasantly surprised to find much more Christianity than at Oxford—at least so it seems, but of course it may be just I have fallen across more here by chance. This is a nice college: after the old Magdalen it is so small that I feel I’d like to take it to bed with me or have it swimming in my bath! But very beautiful and gentle and unobtrusive.
It certainly seems very hard that you should be told to arm the young against Venus without calling in Christ. What do they want? I suppose the usual twaddle about bees and orchids (as if approaching a subject by that devious route would make any possible difference either good or bad). And indeed now that contraceptives have removed the most disastrous consequence for girls, and medicine has largely defeated the worst horrors of syphilis, what argument against promiscuity is there left which will influence the young unless one brings in the whole supernatural and sacramental view of man?
I quite agree that one can’t help wondering why one is (so far) spared many temporal tribulations (better than wondering why one has some!). I think your answer is the safest if one is to attempt an answer at all: i.e., we’re only third line troops. One is sometimes afraid when one reads the beatitudes—I suppose, at any rate, we must try to enter into other’s sufferings more deeply than the less fortunate do. I don’t know. We must believe that whatever our lot is it has been given us for the best. All blessings.
TO PHILINDA KRIEG, who had been reading the Chronicles of Narnia to her son Laurence, who was now worried that he loved Aslan more than Jesus: A letter meant to be shared with a nine-year-old boy with a prayer he might say, and its codicil of intercession for Lewis.
6 MAY 1955
Dear Mrs. Krieg
Tell Laurence from me, with my love:
1/Even if he was loving Aslan more than Jesus (I’ll explain in a moment why he can’t really be doing this) he would not be an idol-worshipper. If he was an idol-worshipper he’d be doing it on purpose, whereas he’s now doing it because he can’t help doing it, and trying hard not to do it. But God knows quite well how hard we find it to love Him more than anyone or anything else, and He won’t be angry with us as long as we are trying. And He will help us.
2/But Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before. Of course there is one thing Aslan has that Jesus has not—I mean, the body of a lion. (But remember, if there are other worlds and they need to be saved and Christ were to save them as He would—He may really have taken all sorts of bodies in them which we don’t know about.)
Now if Laurence is bothered because he finds the lion-body seems nicer to him than the man-body, I don’t think he need be bothered at all. God knows all about the way a little boy’s imagination works (He made it, after all) and knows that at a certain age the idea of talking and friendly animals is very attractive. So I don’t think He minds if Laurence likes the Lion-body. And anyway, Laurence will find as he grows older, that feeling (liking the lion-body better) will die away of itself, without his taking any trouble about it. So he needn’t bother.
3/If I were Laurence I’d just say in my prayers something like this: ‘Dear God, if the things I’ve been thinking and feeling about those books are things You don’t like and are bad for me, please take away those feelings and thoughts. But if they are not bad, then please stop me from worrying about them. And help me every day to love you more in the way that really matters far more than any feelings or imaginations, by doing what you want and growing more like you.’ That is the sort of thing I think Laurence should say for himself; but it would be kind and Christian-like if he then added, ‘And if Mr. Lewis has worried any other children by his books or done them any harm, then please forgive him and help him never to do it again.’
Will this help? I am terribly sorry to have caused such trouble, and would take it as a great favour if you would write again and tell me how Laurence goes on. I shall of course have him daily in my prayers. He must be a corker of a boy: I hope you are prepared for the possibility he might turn out a saint. I dare say the saints’ mothers have, in some ways, a rough time!
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had written Lewis about the agreement he and his late wife had made not to have children lest the children come between them and to die together, and who now asked Lewis whether suicide for love and not despair might be allowed: The justly famous “severe mercy” letter of correction: On the need to reread one’s own story as someone else’s and to interpret it with the rest of humanity looking on, with their various ethical sensitivities, from Pagan to Christian; and on joyfully suffering the birth of the real self.
8 MAY 1955
Your letter is a wonderfully clear and beautiful expression of an experience often desired but not often achieved to the degree you and Jean achieved it. My reason for sending it back is my belief that if you reread it often, till you can look at it as if it were someone else’s story, you will in the end think as I do (but of course far more deeply and fruitfully than I can, because it will cost you so much more) about a life so wholly (at first) devoted to us. Not only as I do, but as the whole ‘sense’ of the human family would on their various levels.
Begin at the bottom. What would the grosser Pagans think? They’d say there was excess in it, that it would provoke the nemesis of the gods; they would ‘see the red light.’ Go up one: the finer Pagans would blame each withdrawal from the claims of common humanity as unmanly, uncitizenly, uxorious. If Stoics they would say that to try to wrest part of the Whole (us) into a self-sufficing Whole on its own was ‘contrary to nature’.
Then come to Christians. They would of course agree that man and wife are ‘ one flesh’; they would perhaps admit that this was most admirably realised by Jean and you. But surely they would add that this One Flesh must not (and in the long run cannot) ‘ live to itself’ any more than the single individual. It was not made, any more than he, to be its own End. It was made for God and (in Him) for its neighbours—first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. (The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g., maternity, which cannot be shared should on that account be avoided, is surely very unsound. For a. (forgive me) the conjugal act itself depends on opposite and reciprocal and therefore unshareable experiences. Did you want her to feel she had a woman in bed with her? b. The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not and could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different and trivial in comparison.)
One way or another the thing had to die. Perpetual springtime is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain. There are various possible ways in which it could have died though both the parties went on living. You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true and how very frequent this is!) that you were jealous of God. And from US you have been led back to us and god: it remains to go on to god and us.
She was further on than you, and she can help you more where she now is than she could have done on earth. You must go on. That is one of the many reasons why suicide is out of the question. (Another is the absence of any ground for believing that death by that route would reunite you with her. Why should it? You might be digging an eternally unbridgeable chasm. Disobedience is not the way to get nearer to the obedient.)
There’s no other man, in such affliction as yours, to whom I’d dare write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love for you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared her (very wrongly) the pains of childbirth; do not evade your own, the travail you must undergo while Christ is being born in you. Do you imagine she herself can now have any greater care about you than that this spiritual maternity of yours should be patiently suffered and joyfully delivered?
God bless you. Pray for me.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On various passages in the Bible and how to interpret them, not just individually, but to see the gradual unfolding and purification of the revelation of God’s character.
14 MAY 1955
Clearly, from a passage in Hebrews, there is something very special about Melchisedech, but I don’t know what it is. There’s lots to find out, here and hereafter, isn’t there?
My own view about Elisha and the bears (not that I haven’t known small boys who’d be much improved by the same treatment!) and other episodes is something like this. If you take the Bible as a whole, you see a process in which something which, in its earliest levels (those aren’t necessarily the ones that come first in the Book as now arranged) was hardly moral at all, and was in some ways not unlike the Pagan religions, is gradually purged and enlightened till it becomes the religion of the great prophets and Our Lord Himself. That whole process is the greatest revelation of God’s true nature. At first hardly anything comes through but mere power. Then (very important) the truth that He is One and there is no other God. Then justice, then mercy, love, wisdom.
Of course Our Lord never drank spirits (they had no distilled liquors) but of course the wine of the Bible was real fermented wine and alcoholic. The repeated references to the sin of drunkenness in the Bible, from Noah’s first discovery of wine down to the warnings in St. Paul’s epistles, make this perfectly plain. The other theory could be (honestly) held only by a very ignorant person. One can understand the bitterness of some ‘temperance’ fanatics if one has ever lived with a drunkard: what one finds it harder to excuse is any educated person telling such lies about history.
I think myself that the point of the shocking reply to the Syrophenician woman (it came alright in the end) is to remind all us Gentile Christians—who forget it easily enough and even flirt with anti-Semitism—that the Jews are spiritually senior to us, that God did entrust the descendants of Abraham with the first revelation of Himself. To ‘put us in our place.’
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On the experience of the replacement for time in eternity; on the relationship between spouses in heaven; and on the need to follow Dante’s advice and to allow God to turn us from any rivulet to the fountain. Lewis loans him the five sonnets later published in Poems, 125–127, and Collected Poems, 139–141.
5 JUNE 1955
What you say about time is what I’ve long thought. It is inadequate to, and partially transcended by, very simple experiences. E.g., when do we hear a musical air? Until the last note is sounded it is incomplete; as soon as that sounds it’s already over. And I’m pretty sure eternal life doesn’t mean this width-less line of moments endlessly prolonged (as if by prolongation it could ‘catch up with’ that which it so obviously could never hold) but getting off that line onto its plane or even the solid. Read von Hügel’s Eternal Life and Boethius Consolation.…
About the nature of the relation between spouses in eternity, I base my idea on St. Paul’s dictum that ‘ he that is joined with a harlot is one flesh’. If the lowest and most corrupt form of sexual union has some mystical ‘oneness’ involved in it (and by the way what an argument against ‘casual practice’!) a fortiori the blessed and lawful form must have it par excellence. That is, I think the union between the risen spouses will be as close as that between the soul and its own risen body. But (and this, as you see, is the snag) the risen body is the body that has died. (‘ If we share this death, we shall also share this resurrection.’) And so—as you say in one of your postscripts—your love for Jean must, in one sense, be ‘killed’ and ‘God must do it.’ You’d better read the Paradiso, hadn’t you? Note the moment at which Beatrice turns her eyes away from Dante ‘to the eternal Fountain’, and Dante is quite content. But of course it’s all in the text ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom…and all these other things shall be added unto you.’ Infinite comfort in the second part: inexorable demand in the first. Hopeless if it were to be done by your own endeavours at some particular moment. But ‘God must do it.’
Your part is what you are already doing: ‘Take me—no conditions.’ After that, through the daily duty, through the increasing effort after holiness—well, like the seed growing secretly. What you say about the she in you and the he in her certainly does not seem to me the plains of Gomorrah and is in some sense (what I don’t well know) probably true. There might be an element of delusion in the form it took: I don’t know…. Possibly all those fine points which distinguish your loss from all the other losses suffered by other lovers are less important than they (very naturally) seem to you.
These sonnets, written about 10 years ago, are not in every way addressed to your condition, but they put some things perhaps a little better than I could put them here. I am in great trouble about my dear brother’s dipsomania: pray for him and me. God bless you.
P. S. Let me have the sonnets back sometime: but no hurry.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On learning to work with jealous colleagues; and on meekness toward oneself when one fails to control uncharitable thoughts.
21 JUNE 1955
I’m sorry about your two jealous colleagues. I suppose the only way with thorns in the flesh (until one can get them out) is not to press on the place where they are embedded: i.e., to stop one’s thoughts (firmly but gently: no good snapping at oneself, it only increases the fuss—read St. François de Sales’ chapter on meekness towards oneself) whenever one finds them moving towards the unpleasant people.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On understanding and dealing with difficult people and oneself.
30 JUNE 1955
About prides, superiorities, and affronts there’s no book better than Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life where you’ll find all of us pinned like butterflies on cards—the cards being little stories of typical characters in the most sober, astringent 18th century prose.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On fasting; and on the depths within the self.
7 JULY 1955
It has seemed odd to me that we should make such a point of fasting [before] Communion. The Roman Catholics, you know, have now so far modified their rule as to allow liquid food—coffee, cocoa et cetera. I practice the fast myself and habit has made it easy as regards food: not as regards water for I’m a thirsty creature. But I never thought it important: nor do I understand on what authority some priests impose it.
Yes, I think I understand the bit in which you describe that ‘variety of religious experience’. I never had it—I mean in that sudden way: but I think all of us find that one result of the Faith is an increasing awareness that what we once called ‘ourselves’ is only like the skin on the saucepan of boiled milk or the earth-crust on the fiery earth-depths. I fancy that all the things the Freudians say are true, but that many things they don’t say are equally true about that depth.
TO WARFIELD M. FIROR, who had written about Martin Buber’s book, I and Thou: On the untrustworthiness of self-consciousness.
11 JULY 1955
I read Buber’s book and have talked to Gabriel Marcel who came (independently) to much the same position. I thought Buber had grasped one most important truth: the immense depth of the Thou experience (firstly, of God, and secondly, of my neighbour) and the danger of letting it get submerged by the shallower He or, still shallower, They experiences. But I thought that he ignored (1.) The Incarnation. He is a Jew. Our Lord, besides being the divine Thou is also a historical character, who must be considered also as He. Indeed this is the essence of our faith. ‘Crucified under Pontius Pilate’—date, and signature of a civil servant and all, crude, historical event.
(2.) The Ye or You (Plural) experience. One’s two best friends, or one’s parents, or one’s wife and daughter, at times are very distinctly neither Thou nor They but ‘You two’.
What I had not yet thought about was your objection, that he ignores the Me. You are probably right. He might even have said that just as the Thou is deeper than Me, so the I is deeper than the Me. For I believe self consciousness to be full of deception and that the object I call me and think about (both in my moments of pride and in my moments of humility) is very different from the I who think about it.
TO JANET WISE, who had asked Lewis for a list of modern books on theology to help her understand the various positions on the authority of the Bible: On the kinds of inspired writings in the Bible; on canonicity; and on how we owe the very Bible itself to the “agreed affirmation of all Christendom.”
5 OCTOBER 1955
I am very ill acquainted with modern theological literature, having seldom found it helpful. One book did a great deal for me: G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. But I can’t give you such a list as you want. A pious and sensible man, who is necessarily knowing about books…would probably be able to advise.
My own position is not Fundamentalist, if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition ‘Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense.’ That would break down at once on the parables. All the same commonsense and general understanding of literary kinds would forbid anyone to take the parables as historical statements, carried a very little further, would force us to distinguish between (1.) Books like Acts or the account of David’s reign, which are everywhere dovetailed into a known history, geography, and genealogies (2.) Books like Esther, or Jonah or Job which deal with otherwise unknown characters living in unspecified period, and pretty well proclaim themselves to be sacred fiction.
Such distinctions are not new. Calvin left the historicity of Job an open question and, from earlier, St. Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done ‘after the method of a popular poet’. Of course I believe the composition, presentation, and selection for inclusion in the Bible, of all the books to have been guided by the Holy Ghost. But I think He meant us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history.
Mind you, I never think a story unhistorical because it is miraculous. I accept miracles. It’s almost the manner that distinguishes the fictions from the histories. Compare the ‘Once upon a time’ opening of Job with the accounts of David, St. Paul, or Our Lord Himself. The basis of our Faith is not the Bible taken by itself but the agreed affirmation of all Christendom: to which we owe the Bible itself.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On domestic difficulties as the ordinary experience of home life.
5 OCTOBER 1955
I am sorry you tell me so little about yourself in your letter, for even when I don’t write I pray. Your oppressed daughter and granddaughter are much in my mind. You have no idea how many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail: how deceptive the smooth surface of life is! The only ‘ordinary’ homes seem to be the ones we don’t know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those 10 miles away. And now, I really must tackle the remaining letters. With all good wishes.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had written him of her diagnosis of cancer: On his empathy for her and even more for those in her situation who do not have faith; on the right to happiness; and on how fear of cancer may be worse than the reality of cancer.
9 OCTOBER 1955
I have just got your letter of the 3rd. The news which it contained came like a thunderbolt—especially as the letter began (and it was rather wonderful that it did begin) on such a trivial subject as my book. And if that first sentence flattered my egoism, imagine how I was rebuked when I came to the next, and was suddenly brought up against the real great issues.
It is difficult to write because you must know by now what I do not yet know. I can’t tell whether I am writing to one who is giving thanks for an escape (oh how I hope you are in that position) or to one who is right up against the Cross. Thank heaven it is His Cross and not merely ours. I was most struck by your saying ‘It doesn’t seem too bad: for me, that is.’ So I am sure you are being supported. (What must such a situation be to those who are the majority, who have no faith, who have never thought of death, and to whom all affliction is a mere meaningless, monstrous interruption of a worldly happiness to which they feel they have a right?)
God bless and keep you: and your husband too. You will indeed, indeed, be in my prayers. I once had a bad scare about cancer myself, so that part I can, I think, imagine. But of course it is now, for you, either better or worse than a scare. If the reality is worse. At any rate it must be different. (The Litany [in the Book of Common Prayer] distinguishes ‘thine agony and blood sweat’ from ‘Thy cross and passion’, the fear from the reality). You know how I shall await your next letter.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On anxiety about the future; on mutual support of faith; on how hard it is not to feel indignant about problem relatives; and on the uselessness of reading the newspaper.
26 OCTOBER 1955
The anxiety about the future is, however, a thing we can all understand, and very hard to bear. You were almost miraculously supported in such anxiety before and I pray you may be now. And I think it is happening. Your faith is a support to me as well as to yourself. But how one even ought to feel—let alone, how one can succeed in feeling—about your unspeakable son-in-law, is a problem. It is very hard to believe that all one’s indignation is simply bad: but I suppose one must stick to the text ‘ The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God’. I suppose one must keep on remembering that there is always something deeply wrong inside with a man so bad as this. For yourself I can only hope—and passages in your letter confirm my hope—that through all this you are being brought closer to God than you would have been otherwise. And it is not forever (wouldn’t it be ghastly to be immortal on earth, like the Wandering Jew?). It will all one day go away like a dream.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the necessity to pray with thanksgiving; and on the ordinary and the extraordinary means of discernment.
9 NOVEMBER 1955
It was a great relief to get your letter telling me the happy results of the medical examination. My prayers for you have been accompanied by thanks. (By the way, it is important to keep on giving thanks. Otherwise, as one continues to pray for the others who have not yet been relieved, one simply fails to notice how many of one’s intercessory prayers have been granted—never notices how the list of Thank-you’s grows and perhaps outstrips the list of mere Please’s.)…
I don’t know anything about syndromes. Presumably the suspicion of cancer arose from pain which has now turned out to be rheumatism or indigestion?…Try to tell me it all in words of one syllable: remembering that I am both ignorant and sceptical about psychology, especially the amateur psychology of the patient’s family. The ordinary hum-drum rules of spiritual and corporal health—or else the professional doctor and the professional directeur—seem to me the thing to rely on; and, of course, the recognition that as we grow older we shall have more ailments. But as you know I’m ‘ of the earth, earthy’.
Meanwhile, you are surely rejoicing, ‘Turn again to thy rest, oh my soul.’
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On keeping to a regular pattern of religious life during the storms of life.
9 NOVEMBER 1955
I agree: the only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either—only ask Our Lord to do so, keeping on meanwhile with one’s sacraments, prayers, and ordinary rule of life. One mustn’t fuss too much about one’s state. Do you read St. Francis de Sales? He has good things to say on this subject. All good wishes.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the hard task of learning to depend only on God and on nothing and no one else.
6 DECEMBER 1955
I was most distressed by the news in your letter of Dec. 2nd…. And I can’t help you, because under the modern laws I’m not allowed to send money to America. (What a barbarous system we live under. I knew a man who had to risk prison in order to smuggle a little money to his own sister, widowed in the u.s.a.) By the way, we mustn’t be too sure there was any irony about your just having refused that other job. There may have been a snag about it which God knew and you didn’t.
I feel it almost impossible to say anything (in my comfort and security—apparent security, for real security is in Heaven and thus earth affords only imitations) which would not sound horribly false and facile. Also, you know it all better than I do. I should in your place be (I have in similar places been) far more panic-stricken and even perhaps rebellious. For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘ having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. That trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwillingly) to begin practising it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us: but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time….
All’s well—I’m half ashamed it should be—with me. God bless and keep you. You shall be constantly in my prayers by day and night.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On how liking to do something is another instance of love replacing law, with an extended meditation on Psalm 36.
16 DECEMBER 1955
About the psychological causes of illness I think I’m probably a bit more sceptical than you, but as we’re both mere laymen I daresay this only means we’re following different fashions….
Well, I think I do know that any work for the prisoner of war, which is all (as the parable tells us) done really to Him, and especially if it is undertaken in the teeth of one’s natural inclination, is a good thing. So the Gift Shop is a good thing. Whether it will cure headaches I’ve no idea: but I’m sure it’s grand for the soul. But don’t be sorry if you grow to like it. Surely that is what ought to happen? Isn’t duty only a second-best to keep one going until one learns to like the thing, and then it is a duty no more. When love fulfils the Law, sin (as such) flies out of the window. Isn’t that part of what St. Paul meant by being free from the Law? And of what St. Augustine meant by ‘Have charity and do what you like’? Re-read Psalms 36, taking oneself as the wicked man in verses 1–4, and oneself under Grace as speaking for the rest of the Psalm except that the ‘foot of pride’ and ‘the ungodly’ in 11, 12 and one’s old self again, trying to come back. Aren’t 5 and 6 absolute corkers? And what unabashed hedonism in 8!
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD, SJ: On how the salutary practice of transferring names from the list of those to be prayed for to those to thank God about provides some “proof” of the efficacy of petitionary prayer. Lewis had thought that his brother’s resolution to give up drinking alcohol altogether would stick—alas it did not.
17 DECEMBER 1955
Give thanks for me, for a great family anxiety has been lifted and perhaps forever removed. No doubt you have found, like me, that if one regularly transfers people from one’s urgent-petition-list to one’s thanksgiving list, the mere statistics of the two lists are some corroboration of faith. (Not of course that the efficacy of prayer could strictly be either proved or disproved by empirical evidence.)
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the reason for Lewis’s “allergy” to Christmas; and on trusting that God’s arms are supporting one even if one doesn’t feel them.
19 DECEMBER 1955
I do hope you will get the nicer of those two jobs, which is certainly the one I also would prefer in your place. Not of course that one can be sure what either is like till one has got inside. Things turn out both so much [better] and so much worse than they look, don’t they? Be sure you remain very much in my thoughts and prayers.
I seem to have been writing Christmas letters most of this day! I’m afraid I hate the weeks just before Christmas, and so much of the (very commercialised and vulgarised) fuss has nothing to do with the Nativity at all. I wish we didn’t live in a world where buying and selling things (especially selling) seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
All blessings. ‘Beneath are the everlasting arms’ even when it doesn’t feel at all like it.