1956
TO PHILINDA KRIEG: On the necessity to work through dullness, even in religious matters.
28 JANUARY 1956
About an hour after posting my last letter to Laurence I realised that I had attributed to The Silver Chair what really comes in The Horse and His Boy. I thought Laurence would enjoy catching me out on my own books and should have been much disappointed if he had not!
One is sorry the Sunday Schools should be so dull. Yet I wonder. In this all important subject, as in every other, the youngsters must meet, if not exactly the dull, at any rate the hard and the dry, sooner or later. The modern attempt is to keep it as late as possible: but does that do any good? They’ve got to cut their teeth. Aren’t many parts of the Bible itself, read at home, quite simple enough and interesting enough to be a counterpoise to the dull teaching?
Anyway, there is no use trying to keep the first thrill. It will come to life again and again only on one condition: that we turn our backs on it and get to work and go through all the dullness….
I don’t think any book I could write would help. You can help: but in the main there is something at this stage which Laurence can (and need we doubt, he will) do for himself.
Love to both.
Of course he must pray to God to keep his interest alive. He knows God is not really dull. He must still remember that and trust in Him even when God doesn’t show him any of the interestingnesses. He is there alright behind the dull work.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On joy (in Lewis’s sense of “longing” or “yearning”) as incapable of examination; and on the glories of Psalm 19.
5 FEBRUARY 1956
Thank you for your letter of Jan. 31st. I agree with you about the early Church and find the Acts one of the most exciting parts of the Bible. I don’t know whether your ‘harmony’ is my ‘ joy’ or not, though I suspect they have in common at any rate one thing: that both are already ‘shattered’ when one first observes them. I suppose this is partly due to the name of time—there being no real present, every moment already past however quickly you try to grab it. How rich we shall be when we get off this single railway-line into the rich green country left and right….
I am so glad you took to Psalm xxxvi. My other great favourite is xix. First, the mere glory of nature (between the Psalms and Wordsworth—a long gap in history—you get nothing equal to either on this theme). Then the disinfectant, inexorable sun beating down on the desert and ‘nothing hid from the heat thereof’. There—implicit, not stated—the imaginative identification of that heat and light with the ‘undefiled’ law, the ‘clean’ fear of the Lord, searching every cranny. Then the characteristically Jewish feeling that the Law is not only obligatory but beautiful, ravishing: delighting the heart, better than gold, sweeter than honey. Only after that, the (more Christian like) self examination and humble petition. Nearly all that could be said before the Incarnation is said in this Psalm. It is so much better Paganism than the real Pagans ever did! And in one way more glorious, more soaring and triumphant, than Christian poetry. For as God humbled Himself to become Man, so religion humbled itself to become Christianity.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, to whom Lewis had dedicated Surprised by Joy, in response to Griffiths’s having dedicated his autobiography, The Golden String, to Lewis: On the insights provided by writing autobiography; and on the necessity and danger of engaging in interreligious dialogue.
8 FEBRUARY 1956
I have just got your letter of Jan. 1st, which is full of interest. I am having a copy of the book sent you and would have done so long ago, but I had lost your address.
Yes, I do feel the old Magdalen years to have been a very important period in both our lives. More generally, I feel the whole of one’s youth to be immensely important and even of immense length. The gradual reading of one’s own life, seeing the pattern emerge, is a great illumination at our age. And partly, I hope, getting freed from the past as past by apprehending it as structure. If ever I write a story about someone like She or the Wandering Jew who lived for millennia, I should make a great point of this: he would, after 10,000 years, still feel his first 50 years to be the biggest part of his life. I am glad you found a Chestertonian quality in the book. Actually, it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.
The one picture that is utterly false is the supposedly realistic fiction of the XIX century where all the real horrors and heavens are excluded. The reality is a queer mixture of idyll, tragedy, farce, hymn, melodrama: and the characters (even the same characters) far better and worse than one ever imagined….
You are (as you well know) on dangerous ground about Hinduism, but someone must go to dangerous places. One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge would leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river—and the continent through which that river flowed turned out to be itself an island—off the shores of a still greater continent—and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.
By the way, that business of having to look up the same word ten times in one evening is no proof of failing powers. You have simply forgotten that it was exactly like that when we began Latin or even French.
Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That’s always been my trouble with Indians—to find any proposition they would pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?
I’m reading [Steven] Runciman’s History of the Crusades: a terrible revelation—the old civilisation of the Eastern Mediterranean destroyed by Turkish barbarians from the East and Frankish barbarians from the West.
Oremus pro invicem.
TO PHILINDA KRIEG: On how to raise an adolescent.
16 FEBRUARY 1956
What to do about adolescence, I’ve no idea: except a recurrent bachelor’s wonder how any one has the nerve to produce and bring up a child at all—yet quite ordinary people seem to do it quite well. Perhaps the uneducated do it best very often. I suppose they don’t attempt to replace Providence as to the Destiny, but just carry on from day to day on ordinary principles of affection, justice, veracity, and humour.
By the way, my Christian Behaviour, if suited for anyone (of which I’m no judge) is quite as suitable for 16 year-olds as for anyone else. Of course one does at that age believe anyone rather than one’s parents. The hard thing is that (after childhood) parents seem usually to be most appreciated when they’re dead. I find so many terms of expression et cetera of my father’s coming out in me and like it now—I’d have fought against it as long as he was alive.
Give my love to Laurence.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On drinking alcoholic beverages, on smoking, and on birthcontrol; on differences in doctrine and in religious taste; and on minding one’s own (religious) business.
13 MARCH 1956
You’ll find my views about drinks in Christian Behaviour. Our Lord would not have made miraculous wine at Cana if the Lord meant us to be teetotallers. See also Matt xi.19. Smoking is much harder to justify. I’d like to give it up but I’d find this very hard, i.e., I can abstain, but I can’t concentrate on anything else while abstaining—not-smoking is a whole time job.
Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong. The doctrines about the Blessed Virgin which you mention are Roman Catholic doctrines aren’t they? And as I’m not an Roman Catholic I don’t see that I need bother about them. But the habit (of various Protestant sects) of plastering the landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb et cetera is a different matter. There is no question here of doctrinal difference: we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree with is their taste. Well, let’s go on disagreeing but don’t let’s judge. What doesn’t suit us may suit possible converts of a different type.
My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a ‘Russian Orthodox’ service, where some sit, some stand, some kneel, some lie on their faces, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. ‘ Mind one’s own business’ is a good rule in religion as in other things.
…All your news is very good and I give thanks for you many times a day. Keep on, keep on: ‘ To him that overcometh I will give the Morning Star.’ All blessings.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On intemperance in work.
19 MARCH 1956
A line in haste about the bits underlined in your letter (which I enclose for reference). Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. Each must do his duty ‘in that state of life to which God has called him’. Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view!
There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says, ‘In holy things may be unholy greed.’ And by doing what ‘one’s station and its duties’ does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!
TO MRS. R. E. HALVORSON: On church music as a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but also a distraction and impediment; on feelings; and on the general rules for discernment.
MARCH 1956
I am glad to hear that you are still numbered among my enthusiastic readers. Concerning hymn singing and organ playing: if they have been helpful and edified anyone, then the fact that they set my teeth on edge is infinitely unimportant.
One must first distinguish the effect which music has on people like me who are musically illiterate and get only the emotional effect, and that which it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure and get an intellectual satisfaction as well.
Either of these effects is, I think, ambivalent from the religious point of view: i.e., each can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but can also be a distraction and impediment. In that respect music is not different from a good many other things, human relations, landscape, poetry, philosophy. The most relevant one is wine which can be used sacramentally or for getting drunk or neutrally.
I think every natural thing which is not in itself sinful can become the servant of the spiritual life, but none is automatically so. When it is not, it becomes either just trivial (as music is to millions of people) or a dangerous idol. The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e., feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural. That means that even genuinely religious emotion is only a servant. No soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The love we are commanded to have for God and our neighbour is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better). So that the test of music or religion or even visions if one has them is always the same—do they make one more obedient, more Godcentred, and neighbour-centred and less self-centred? ‘ Though I speak with the tongues of Bach and Palestrina and have not charity et cetera!
TO JULIE HALVORSON, possibly the daughter of the foregoing woman.
MARCH 1956
Thank you for the most charming letter I have received in a long time. It made me very happy.
I am also glad that your class has been enjoying the Narnian stories. But especially am I happy that you know who Aslan is. Never forget Him.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On seeking Jesus or seeking oneself; and on first and second things—later developed into the essay “First and Second Things.”
2 APRIL 1956
Yes, certainly the thing is always to be seeking God’s way—and I wish I lived up to this. As the author of the Imitation says ‘If you seek Jesus in all things you will find Him in all things: and if you seek yourself in all things you will find yourself, to your undoing.’…
I’m a little, not unamusedly, surprised that my Surprised by Joy causes you envy. I doubt if you would really have enjoyed my life much more than your own. And the whole modern world ludicrously over-values books and learning and what (I loathe the word) they call ‘ culture’. And of course ‘ culture’ itself is the greatest sufferer by this error: for second things are always corrupted when they are put first. Never forget this: souls are immortal, and your children and grandchildren will still be alive when my books have, like the galaxy and Nature herself, passed away.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On ways to deal with suffering.
26 APRIL 1956
I am most sorry to hear about your recent experiences. Though I am not doctor enough nor psychologist enough to understand them, I can see that they must have been very unpleasant indeed. You may be very sure of my continued, and increased, prayers. One of the many reasons for wishing to be a better Christian is that, if one were, one’s prayers for others might be more effectual. Things do come all together and so quickly in life, don’t they?
Of course we have all been taught what to do with suffering—offer it in Christ to God as our little, little share of Christ’s sufferings—but it is so hard to do. I am afraid I can better imagine, than really enter into, this. I suppose that if one loves a person enough one would actually wish to share every part of his life: and I suppose the great saints thus really want to share the divine sufferings and that is how they can actually desire pain. But this is far beyond me. To grin and bear it and (in some feeble, desperate way) to trust is the utmost most of us can manage. One tries to take a lesson not only from the saints but from the beasts: how well a sick dog trusts one if one has to do things that hurt it! And this, I know, in some measure you will be able to do.
Well, I hope your next news will be better. Meanwhile, may Our Lord support you as only He can.
TO LAURENCE KRIEG, a ten-year-old, who had asked if the human children in The Last Battle knew the Apostles’ Creed and had confided in Lewis that he, Laurence, had “only believed the part about life after death for a short time. But since I read The Last Battle I believe it all the time”: On how hard it is to feel belief or unbelief in anything for any length of time.
27 APRIL 1956
Thanks for your nice letter and the photograph. I am so glad you like The Last Battle. As to whether they knew their Creed, I suppose Professor Kirke and the Lady Polly and the Pevensies did, but probably Eustace and Pole, who had been brought up at that rotten school, did not.
Your mother tells me you have all been having chicken pox. I had it long after I was grown up and it’s much worse if you are a man for of course you can’t shave with the spots on your face. So I grew a beard and though my hair is black the beard was half yellow and half red! You should have seen me.
Yes, people do find it hard to keep on feeling as if you believed in the next life: but then it is just as hard to keep on feeling as if you believed you were going to be nothing after death. I know this because in the old days before I was a Christian I used to try.
Last night a young thrush flew into my sitting room and spent the whole night there. I didn’t know what to do, but in the morning one of the college servants very cleverly caught it and put it out without hurting it. Its mother was waiting for it outside and was very glad to meet it again. (By the way, I always forget which birds you have in America. Have you thrushes? They have lovely songs and speckled chests.)
Good-bye for the present and love to you all.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: More on his experience of the reality of the forgiveness of sins; further reflections on the palpability of believing in anything; and on envy as sadness over another’s good.
15 MAY 1956
Almost exactly the same thing that happened to you about the Incarnation happened to me a few years ago about the Forgiveness of Sins. Like you, I had assented to the doctrine years earlier and would have said I believed it. Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called ‘belief’ look absolutely unreal. It is a wonderful thing. But not, on inferior matters, so very uncommon. We all in one sense ‘believe’ we are mortal: but until one’s forties does one really believe one is going to die? On the edge of a cliff can’t one believe, and yet not really believe, that there’s no danger? But certainly this real belief in the truths of our religion is a great gift from God. When in Hebrews ‘ faith’ is defined as ‘the substance of things hoped for’, I would translate ‘substance’ as ‘substantialness’ or ‘solidity’ or (almost) ‘palpableness’….
Envy (invidia) certainly did mean ‘grief at another’s good’ but as the word is now used I don’t think it means anything at all wrong. If I say I envy you those lobsters I hardly mean more than ‘congratulations’.
TO VALERIE PITT: On how God’s will always involves submission, sometimes even for God; and on the invocation of the saints.
17 MAY 1956
A great deal of what you say is very helpful. I fully agree that ‘ Thy will be done’ should principally be taken in the sense ‘ God’s will has blank well got to be done even if I have to go and do it myself’: I doubt if the submissive aspect of it can be entirely extruded. It sometimes is ‘nasty’, and may in a sense be so to God Himself—i.e., what He wills in the situations sin has created is not what He would will simpliciter [simply, unconditionally] (‘I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks—but now’).
Whether the invocation of saints helps one’s devotions or not (it wouldn’t, I believe, help mine) I don’t see how it helps the theoretical problem.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the varied reactions to unrestrained anger; and on how feeling hurt is seldom unmixed with lower feelings.
21 MAY 1956
What a horrid adventure. To meet unrestrained anger in any human being is in itself always very shocking. I think the effect may be partly physical. Have you noticed how one angry man bursts out (say, in a crowded ‘bus) and a tension comes over everyone? Indeed one nearly becomes equally angry oneself. When one gets this shock along with injustice, of course there is a compound reaction.
It is at first sight so easy to forgive (especially when one knows that the anger was pathological) but then one sort of wakes up five minutes later and finds one hasn’t really forgiven at all—the resentment is still tingling through one’s veins. And how one has to watch that ‘feeling hurt’—so seldom (as one would like to believe) mere sorrow, so nearly always mixed with wounded pride, self-justification, fright, even (hiding in the corners) desire for retaliation. But obviously you know all this and have fought your best.
But there remains the quite separate trouble of having lost your job. Oh dear. I am sorry. Surely all these Church people will find some way to provide for you. I will indeed pray—oh, what a business life is. Well, both you and I have most of it behind, not ahead. There will come a moment that will change all this. Nightmares don’t last.
TO KEITH MASSON: On different approaches to moral principles, especially those governing the essential evils of masturbation—the damage it does to one’s ability to love and to one’s imagination; on the holy uses of the imagination and the unholy; “the main work of life is to come out of our selves.”
3 JUNE 1956
There is, first, a difference of approach. You rather take the line that a traditional moral principle must produce a proof of its validity before it is accepted: I rather, that it must be accepted until someone produces a conclusive refutation of it.
But apart from that:—I agree that the stuff about ‘wastage of vital fluids’ is rubbish. For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. Do read Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell and study the character of Mr. Wentworth. And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.
The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions et cetera which ought to be sought outside in the real world—e.g., picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On learning to receive; on the illusion of independence; on taking difficult times bit by bit; and on the tolerability of the present moment.
14 JUNE 1956
I have your letter of the 11th—along with a letter from another lady in almost exactly the same position. Oh dear, what a hard, frightening world it is! And yet not wholly: I am rejoiced to hear that you have some true friends who will not let you sink. And why should there be any (let alone ‘too much’) ‘cringing inside’? We are all members of one another and must all learn to receive as well as to give. I am only sorry that [U.S.] laws prevent me from giving you any lessons in the art. Isn’t the spiritual value of having to accept money just this, that it makes palpable the total dependence in which we always live anyway? For if you were what is called ‘independent’ (i.e., living on inherited wealth), every bit you put into your mouth and every stitch on your back would still be coming from the sweat and skill of others while you (as a person) would not really be doing anything in return. It took me a long time to see this—tho’, heaven knows, with the Cross before our eyes we have little excuse to forget our insolvency.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
I shall pray for you whenever I wake in the night, and hope for better news.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On how hard it is to be a defender and explainer of Christian teachings.
18 JUNE 1956
I envy you not having to think any more about Christian apologetics. My correspondents force the subject on me again and again. It is very wearing, and not very good for one’s faith. A Christian doctrine never seems less real to me than when I have just (even if successfully) been defending it. It is particularly tormenting when those who were converted by my books begin to relapse and raise new difficulties. I know you pray for me: bear all these hammerings in mind.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On avoiding having a special standard for oneself.
5 JULY 1956
Thank you for your letter of June 30th. Yes, what your Franciscan author says is very true. As someone says, ‘ The Devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a trick worth two of that: he organises ’em instead.’
I am very, very glad that God has sent you good friends who won’t let you sink, and that you have turned the corner about that bad feeling that one must not take help even when one needs it. If it were really true that to receive money or money’s worth degraded the recipient, then every act of alms we have done in our lives would be wicked! Dives was quite right to leave Lazarus lying at his gate! Or else (which might be even worse) we should have to hold that to receive was good enough for those we call ‘the poor’ but not for our precious selves however poor we become!
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself! De Quincey says somewhere that probably no murderer mentally describes his own act by the word murder: and how many people in the whole world believe themselves to be snobs, prigs, bores, bullies or tale-bearers?…
…We have no resources but our prayers.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, whose married daughter, Lorraine, had hurt her in some way: On hurting and being hurt; on how Christian spirituality does not despise but rather embraces matter; on bearing one’s actual distress rather than imagined distress; and on the only fear that God teaches.
3 AUGUST 1956
I have your letter of July 30th and am very sorry to hear that you are still in difficulties. Your ‘pleasures’ (i.e., social engagements) seem to be almost as much of an affliction as anything else!—but I can understand that. About Lorraine, I think what one has to remember when people ‘ hurt’ one is that in 99 cases out of 100 they intended to hurt very much less, or not at all, and are often quite unconscious of the whole thing. I’ve learned this from the cases in which I was the ‘hurter’. When I have been really wicked and angry, and meant to be nasty, the other party never cared or even didn’t notice. On the other hand, when I have found out afterwards that I had deeply hurt someone, it had nearly always been quite unconscious on my part. (I loathe ‘sensitive’ people who are ‘easily hurt’ by the way, don’t you? They are a social pest. Vanity is usually the real trouble)….
I have known nice (and nasty) Hindus. I should have thought the nice ones were precisely ‘Pagans’, if one uses Pagan not in the popular modern sense—which means pretty nearly ‘irreligious’,—but strictly. I.e., I think that all extreme refinement and that spirituality which takes the form of despising matter, is very like Pythagoras and Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Poor dears: they don’t know about the sacraments nor the resurrection of the body.
Yes, I know how terrible that doubt is ‘Perhaps He will not.’ But it is so seldom the present and the actual that is intolerable. Remember one is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen. And don’t say God has proved that He can make you fear poverty, illness, et cetera. I am sure God never teaches us the fear of anything but Himself. As the only two good lines in one of our bad hymns says ‘Fear Him ye saints and you will then have nothing else to fear.’…Not all the things you fear can happen to you: the one (if any) that does will perhaps turn out very different from what you think. Of course I know this is easier to say to another than to realise oneself. And always remember that poverty and every other ill, lovingly accepted, has all the spiritual value of voluntary poverty or penance. God bless you; you are always in my prayers.
TO MRS. JOHNSON: On the good the dead do by dying well and by comforting us (in the Holy Spirit) afterward; and on how heaven and earth are better than we can imagine.
7 AUGUST 1956
Would you believe it!—I had recently felt anxious as to how you were getting on and in praying for you (as of course I do for all who correspond with me on religious matters) I had added a prayer that I might soon hear some good news of you. And also at once your letter…arrived.
All you tell me is good and very good. Your mother-in-law has done good to the whole circle by the way she died. And where she has gone I don’t doubt she will do you more still. For I believe that what was true of Our Lord Himself (‘It is expedient for you that I go, for then the Comforter will come to you’) is true in its degree (of course, an infinitesimal degree in comparison, but still true) of all His followers. I think they do something for us by dying and shortly after they have died which they couldn’t do before—and sometimes one can almost feel it happening. (You are right by the way: there is a lot to be said for dying—and being born—at home.)
No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On how relatively hard it is to understand one’s vocation but how relatively easy it is to know what to do next.
17 AUGUST 1956
Do you think one’s vocation which looks so cryptic as a whole, is usually fairly clear from day to day and moment to moment? One usually has an idea what to do next. Need one know any more? If would be a pity if when He came He found me thinking about my vocation at a moment when I would have been better employed writing a letter, making a bed, entertaining a bore—or something quite dull and obvious.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, who had euthanized her cat Fanda: On how we love God, and everything God has made, too little.
18 AUGUST 1956
It’s no good giving you an address for I am moving about. Your letter of Aug. 12th reached me today. I am delighted to hear about the job. It sounds exactly the thing, sent by God, at your most need. I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e., at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little.
No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much—i.e., more than every one of God’s works deserves. But you need not feel ‘like a murderer’. Rather rejoice that God’s law allows you to extend to Fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans. You’ll get over this. I will rejoice in the job.
I’m writing on a dressing table in a small, dark hotel bedroom, very sleepy, so I’ll close. God bless you—and Fanda!
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had confessed to Lewis that, in his discouragement over the remoteness of God, he had tried to reject Christ: On how it often seems that God is “playing fast and loose” with us but how God is really the adult or the master to the child or the dog.
27 AUGUST 1956
I am very glad…to hear that you are re-visiting England. We must have some good and long talks together and perhaps we shall both get high.
At the moment the really important thing seems to be that you were brought to realise the impossibility (strict sense) of rejecting Christ. Of course He must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘ win’ appears, you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be—as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind. But I am, I fancy, repeating things I said before. I look forward very much to our meeting again. God bless you.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how God uses our fellow human beings to do good to us and to themselves.
8 SEPTEMBER 1956
It certainly looks as if God were looking after you financially. I expect that the instruments He uses are kind human beings: and all the better if so, for then it is good for them as well as for you.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who had reported to Lewis that the pastor who had given her so much trouble had actually been ill: On the theological meaning of envy.
8 OCTOBER 1956
About Envy, the question (as so often) is one of language. In modern English ‘I envy you’ is used to mean ‘I’d like to be doing what you’re doing’ or even ‘I congratulate you.’ What the moral Theologians meant by the ‘sin of Envy’ (Invidia) was grudging the other things one hadn’t got oneself and hating the others for having them—wanting to scratch another girl’s face because she was prettier than you, hoping another man’s business would crash because he was richer than you—and so forth.
One is almost relieved to hear that your poor ex-Rector was not (as he seemed) wicked but only desperately ill. We know so little: ‘ judge not.’
TO MICHAEL EDWARDS: On the meaning of the Fall and of the Redemption; on the plain rules of ordinary discernment; and on the need to give up our sins and to attend to our daily duties before we add personal sacrificing.
20 OCTOBER 1956
Most of your questions about unfallen man can’t, as you see, be answered. I suppose there are three conditions: unfallen, fallen, and redeemed. The third is not usually thought to be a mere reproduction of the first. In it the whole travail produced by the Fall will be turned to account and many things that would not have been without the Fall will be redeemed, become the occasions of good. The Cross itself is the supreme instance.
Our job is not to try to recover the unfallen stage but to go on to the redeemed one. In our use of the various things that have come in since the Fall, hadn’t we better be guided by the solitary plain moral rules—namely, kindness, courage, chastity et cetera—rather than by speculation?…
As for ‘ giving up’ things—well, when we’ve given up all our sins (the things everyone knows to be sins), we can think again! The problem will not be immediate. The devil is fond of distracting us from our plain daily duties by suggesting vague and rather faddy ones, you know.
TO MARY NEYLAN: On his need for prayer for his future wife and for himself.
14 NOVEMBER 1956
I wish you and Dan would pray hard for a lady called Joy Gresham and me—I am likely very shortly to be both a bridegroom and a widower, for she has cancer. You needn’t mention this till the marriage (which will be at a hospital bedside if it occurs) is announced. I’ll tell you the whole story someday…. I’m not much in the way of visiting anyone at present.
TO MRS. Mary Margaret MCCASLIN: On the meaning of suffering incurred as the result of making a sacrifice.
15 NOVEMBER 1956
Thank you for your letter of Nov. 9th. I will indeed pray for you: I did so already, but will do so more. You have made a great sacrifice for conscience’ sake. Such things, we may be sure, enrich one: but God knows it doesn’t feel like it at the time. It did not, even for Our Lord Himself, in Gethsemane. I always try to remember what MacDonald said: ‘ The Son of God died not that we might not suffer but that our sufferings might become like His.’
But of course the real difficulty is not in rising to this point of view but in staying there. One does it—and ten minutes later it all has to be done over again. And one gets too tired, doesn’t one? Well, thousands of others are going through the same….
May God strengthen you, as only He can.