1958
TO MR. PITMAN, who, inspired by a scene in The Great Divorce, Chapter 11, had written about masturbation: On the lessons Lewis learned from his struggles with the temptation and the sin—it is a sin principally against the imagination; a tribulation like any other; a temptation that does not last forever; one requiring sweetness and not hatred toward oneself or toward sexuality or toward the body; one not to be treated melodramatically; one to be careful of when tired or sad and to be supplanted by real love of any kind, perhaps especially for, toward, and even with the person one loves.
13 FEBRUARY 1958
I am not quite clear whether you are talking of this problem as it applies to the married or the unmarried. The idea of permanent sexual abstinence within marriage (if that is what you mean at one point in your letter) would seem to be vetoed by St. Paul’s advice, or even command, in I Cor vii, 5–6.
The metamorphosis of the lizard into the stallion was meant to symbolise perfect sublimation, after painful struggle and agonising surrender, not by ordinary psychological law but by supernatural Grace. The evidence seems to be that God sometimes works such a complete metamorphosis and sometimes not. We don’t know why: God forbid we should presume it went by merit.
He never in my unmarried days did it for me. He gave me—at least and after many ups and downs, the power to resist the temptation so far as the act was concerned. He never stopped the recurrent temptations, nor was I guarded from the sin of mental consent. I don’t mean I wasn’t given sufficient Grace. I mean that I sometimes fell into it, Grace or no.
One may, I suppose, regard this as partly penal. One is paying for the physical (and still more the imaginative) sins of one’s earlier life. One may also regard it as a tribulation, like any other. The great discovery for me was that the attack does not last forever. It is the devil’s lie that the only escape from the tension is through yielding. After prolonged resistance it will go away: what seemed yesterday impossible to turn one’s mind from will to-day be utterly unenchanted, insipid, tedious.
Do you know St. François de Sales’ chapter De la douceur: meekness to God, to one’s neighbour, and (surprisingly and importantly) to oneself? Disgust, self-contempt, self-hatred—rhetoric against the sin and (still more) vilification of sexuality or the body in themselves—are emphatically not the weapons for this warfare. We must be relieved, not horrified, by the fact that the whole thing is humiliating, undignified, ridiculous; the lofty vices would be far worse. Nor must we exaggerate our suffering. We talk of ‘torture’: five minutes of really acute toothache would restore our sense of proportion! In a word, no melodrama. The sin, if we fall into it, must be repented, like all our others. God will forgive. The temptation is a darn nuisance, to be born with patience as long as God wills.
On the purely physical side (but people no doubt differ) I’ve always found that tea and bodily weariness are the two great disposing factors, and therefore the great dangers. Sadness is also a danger: lust in my experience follows disgruntlement nearly always. Love of every sort is a guard against lust, even, by a divine paradox, sexual love is a guard against lust. No woman is more easily and painlessly abstained from, if need be, than the woman one loves. And I’m sure purely male society is an enemy to chastity. I don’t mean a temptation to homosexuality: I mean that the absence of ordinary female society provokes the normal appetite.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how sometimes the service God wants is our not being used at all or as we expected or as we perceive.
22 FEBRUARY 1958
Yes, we must not fret about not doing God those supposed services which He in fact does not allow us to do. Very often I expect, the service He really demands is that of not being (apparently) used, or not in the way we expected, or not in a way we can perceive.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On dryness in prayer; on his wife’s experience of being nagged by God until she surrendered to His peace and delight; on keeping our hands empty so that we can receive; and on the things that keep our hands full—sins, earthly cares, attempts to worship God in the way we want, and the tiny distractions of what we are to do next.
31 MARCH 1958
We all go through periods of dryness in our prayers, don’t we? I doubt (but ask your directeur) whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. I sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst; that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. Do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us?
Joy tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that God wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. And till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. But the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came through as plain as a spoken voice. It was ‘ I don’t want you to do anything, I want to give you something’: and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. St. Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’ A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones—things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how difficult it is to feel forgiven of sins, even those long forgiven.
15 APRIL 1958
About past, long past, sins: I had been a Christian for many years before I really believed in the forgiveness of sins, or more strictly, before my theoretical belief became a reality to me. I fancy this may not be so uncommon.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On the “miracle” of Joy’s remission and how it makes Lewis tremble to respond with goodness to God’s goodness; and on how not to take providence into one’s own hands.
26 APRIL 1958
A letter from you is always a refreshment. First as to your question. Joy’s improvement continues. Indeed except that she is a cripple with a limp (the doctors, rather than the disease, shortened one leg) she is in full health. She had an X-ray examination last week which shows that the bones have re-built themselves ‘firm as rock’. The Doctor, doubtless without what a Christian would regard as true seriousness, used the word miraculous. I am also, by the way, nearly quite restored myself. I sometimes tremble when I think how good Joy and I ought to be: how good we would have promised to be if God had offered us these mercies at that price.
…More and more I see how useless it is to try to play Providence either to oneself or to another. All we can do is to try to follow the plain rules of charity, justice and commonsense and leave the issue to God.
All blessings. I wish we lived nearer.
TO LEE TURNER: On the biblical foundations for a biblical theology of inspiration and of the incarnation; and on the advantage of reading the Bible in many translations, if one reads Hebrew and Greek.
19 JULY 1957
The main difficulty seems to me not the question whether the Bible is ‘inspired’, but what exactly we mean by this. Our ancestors, I take it, believed that the Holy Spirit either just replaced the minds of the authors (like the supposed ‘control’ in automatic writing) or at least dictated to them as to secretaries.
Scripture itself refutes these ideas. St. Paul distinguishes between what ‘ the Lord’ says and what he says ‘of himself’—yet both are ‘Scripture’. Similarly the passages in which the prophets describe theophanies and their own reactions to them would be absurd if they were not writing for themselves. Thus, without any modern scholarship, we are driven a long way from the extreme view of inspiration.
I myself think of it as analogous to the Incarnation—that, as in Christ a human soul-and-body are taken up and made the vehicle of Deity, so in Scripture, a mass of human legend, history, moral teaching, et cetera, are taken up and made the vehicle of God’s Word. Errors of minor fact are permitted to remain. (Was Our Lord Himself incapable, qua [as] Man, of such errors? Would it be a real human incarnation if He was?) One must remember of course that our modern and western attention to dates, numbers, et cetera, simply did not exist in the ancient world. No one was looking for that sort of truth. (You’d find something of my views about all this in my forthcoming book on the Psalms.) As for translations, even if one doesn’t know Greek (and I know no Hebrew myself) we have now so many different translations that by using and comparing them all one can usually see what is happening. The blessed and significant thing is that none of all this has bothered your personal faith in Our Lord. Do you see a clear reason why it need bother anyone else’s?
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: More on feeling forgiven of sins, even sins long forgiven; and on ways to heal a troubled conscience.
21 JULY 1958
(1.) Remember what St. John says: ‘If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.’ The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven and loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent and confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance.
(2). Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said, ‘If you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do, or stop doing?’ When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. ‘Details, please!’ is the answer. (3.) The sense of dereliction cannot be a bad symptom for Our Lord Himself experienced it in its depth—‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the providence of books and the providence of being reminded of something one has read in the past; and on how real ecumenism discussions can only happen between people at the centers of their traditions.
27 OCTOBER 1958
What you say about books turning up at what seems to be just the right moment is well supported from my own experience. So much so that now, if I lose or forget something I’ve read that seems important, I do not much bother, for I feel a confidence that if I really need it it will be given to me again, and just in time—in a book on some quite different subject I shall find it quoted or a man I didn’t much want to talk to will mention it in conversation.
It is hardly possible, at such a distance from the scene of action, to have an opinion as to how you should cope with Dr. Higgins. I think, urgently, that it is false wisdom to have any ‘denomination’ represented for ecumenical purposes by those who are on its fringe. People (perhaps naturally) think this will help reunion, whereas in fact it invalidates the whole discussion. Each body should rather be represented by its centre. Only then will any agreements that are achieved be of real value.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On living one day at a time; and on wrinkles as honorable insignia.
30 OCTOBER 1958
I suppose living from day to day (‘take no thought for the morrow’) is precisely what we have to learn—though the Old Adam in me sometimes murmurs that if God wanted me to live like the lilies of the field, I wonder He didn’t give me the same lack of nerves and imagination as they enjoy! Or is that just the point, the precise purpose of this Divine paradox and audacity called Man—to do with a mind what other organisms do without it?
As for wrinkles—pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare. All well with us, in haste, with love.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the dangers and evil in spiritualistic practices.
14 DECEMBER 1958
I don’t see anything sinful in speculating about the perception of the apostles, though I doubt if we have evidence enough to make it very useful. But spiritualistic practices are a very different thing. First, the record of proved fraud in such matters is usually very big and black: there’s money in mediumship! Second, it very often has extremely bad effects on those who dabble in it: even insanity. And thirdly, most supposed communications through mediums are the silliest, sentimental, or even incoherent, twaddle. Why go to spirits to hear bosh when you can hear sense from quite a lot of your neighbours?
But I think the practice is a sin as well as folly. Necromancy (commerce with the dead) is strictly forbidden in the Old Testament, isn’t it? The New frowns on any excessive and irregular interest ever in angels. Now the whole tradition of Christendom is dead against it. I would be shocked at any Christians being, or consulting, a medium.
It is Resurrection, not ‘survival’ that we think of, and the spirit that concerns us is the Holy Spirit!