1960
TO MICHAEL EDWARDS, who had asked Lewis which denomination he should join: On why Lewis steadfastly resisted defending anything else than mere Christianity; and on the illusion of “stable sentiments,” “successful adjustment to life,” and “getting and being what one wants.”
11 FEBRUARY 1960
As regards the ‘interdenominational’ question, I have never said anything in print except that I am not offering guidance on it (this comes in the preface to Mere Christianity). Whatever utility I have as a defender of ‘mere’ Christianity would be lost if I did, and I should become only one more participant in the dog-fight. And I have an idea that the more people there are preaching ‘mere’ Christianity, the more chance there is of some day ending that dog-fight. I should therefore probably be of very little use to you in your own decision. Of course come and see me if, after consideration, you think it worth doing: my own idea is that you would be wasting your time.
As to your other question, I wonder whether you are on the right tract in expecting ‘stable sentiments’ and ‘successful adjustment to life’. This is the language of modern psychology rather than of religion or even of common experience, and I sometimes think that when the psychologists speak of adjustment to life they really mean perfect happiness and unbroken good fortune! Not to get—or, worse still, to be—what one wants is not a disease that can be cured, but the normal condition of man. To feel guilty, when one is guilty, and to realise, not without pain, one’s moral and intellectual inadequacy, is not a disease, but commonsense. To find that one’s emotions do not ‘come to heel’ and line up as stable sentiments in permanent conformity with one’s convictions is simply the facts of being a fallen, and still imperfectly redeemed, man. We may be thankful if, by continual prayer and self-discipline, we can, over years, make some approach to that stability. After all,
St. Paul who was a good deal further along the road than you and I, could still write Romans, chapter 7, verses 21–23.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD, sj: On the techniques of successful lecturing and preaching.
7 MARCH 1960
As an old lecturer may I give a bit of advice about preaching? The joints (we have finished point A: now for B or Here the digression ends) cannot be made too clear. Unless you seem to yourself to be exaggerating them almost absurdly they will escape 9/10 of your hearers. Also, slow, slow. If you want people to weep by the end, make them laugh in the beginning. I hope your priesthood will be blessed. I really agree with your maxim ‘the greater the author the less he understands his own work’. In haste.
TO PETER BIDE, whose wife, Margaret, also had cancer: On the propriety of praying prayers that question God and challenge God rather than insincere prayers; and on the need to risk the heresy that God the Father suffers (Patripassianism) in order to avoid the greater heresy that God is indifferent when we suffer (see the letter below to Gracia Fay Bouwman, 19 July 1960).
14 JUNE 1960
I know your faith will stand firm.
Joy says (do you agree?) that we needn’t be too afraid of questionings and expostulations: it was the impatience of Job, not the theodicies of Elihu, that was pleasing to God. Does He like us to ‘stand up to Him’ a bit? Certainly He cannot like mere flattery—resentment masquerading as submission through fear.
How impossible it would be now to face it without rage if God Himself had not shared the horrors of the world He made! I know this is Patripassianism. But the other way of putting it, however theologically defensible, lets in (psychologically) perhaps a more serious error.
Joy had her right breast removed about 10 days ago, or—as she characteristically put it—became an Amazon….
Thus we can still play the fool…you will not misunderstand it. I wish we could meet. Till we do, be sure of our prayers.
TO PHOEBE HESKETH: On how sorrow seems to isolate; and on how hard it is to forgive. Lewis reveals that Joy’s physician had failed to diagnose her cancer at a stage when it could have been treated successfully.
14 JUNE 1960
The most mischievous—and painful—by-product of any sorrow is the illusion that it isolates one, that one is kicked out alone for this from an otherwise cheerful, bustling, ‘normal’ world. How much better to realise that one is just doing one’s turn in the line like all the rest of the ragged and tired human regiment! Yours is a very terrible bit of it. But I’d sooner be you…than the doctor (one of the closest friends) who could and should have diagnosed Joy’s trouble when she went to him about the symptoms years ago before we were married. The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again.
Yes, we will pray for one another.
TO PETER BIDE: On bereavement.
14 JULY 1960
Joy died at 10 o’clock last night in the [hospital]. I was alone with her at the moment, but she was not conscious. I had never seen the moment of natural death before. It was far less dreadful than I had expected—indeed there’s nothing to it. Pray for her soul. I have prayed twice daily of late for us four together—you and Margy and me and Joy. I shall continue for you two.
I can’t understand my loss yet and hardly (except for brief but terrible moments) feel more than a kind of bewilderment, almost a psychological paralysis. A bit like the first moments after being hit by a shell.
I’d like to meet. Perhaps I could come up to town some day when you are in town and take you to lunch at the Athenaeum. For I am—oh God that I were not—very free now. One doesn’t realise in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied. God bless all three of us.
TO GRACIA FAY BOUWMAN: On which God to pray to—the God pictured by the scriptures or the God conceptualized by philosophy.
19 JULY 1960
I haven’t a copy of the The Problem of Pain to hand and I can’t remember the exact words I used. What I would now say would be something like this.
We have A. The scriptural representative of God—a god not only of love but of storgé whose ‘bowels are moved’ with compassion and who also can fall into ‘fury’.
B. A philosophical concept of the Absolute Being to which (one can hardly say ‘to whom’) all these human characteristics are inapplicable.
We have a tendency to regard B as the literal truth and A either as poetical decoration or as a concession to the ‘primitive’ mind of the ancient Jews.
We are right in thinking that A cannot be literally true. But no more can B. B is an abstract construction of our own minds. It represents to us as an abstraction, a mere concept, what must in reality be the most concrete of all Facts. B can make no claim to be a revelation: we have made it. A does make this claim.
If we accept A literally we shall remain on the mythological level. But it is no improvement to take B literally. Both are only shadows or hints of the reality. A cannot really imagine, and B cannot really conceptualise, God as He is in Himself. To prefer A is to think that the symbol we have made is better than the symbol He has made. I think we are right to use B as a corrective wherever A, taken literally, threatens to become absurd: but we must instantly plunge back into A. Only God Himself knows in what sense He is ‘like’ a father or King, capable of love and anger. But since He has given us that picture of Himself we may be sure that it is more importantly ‘like’ than any concept we might try to substitute for it. You’ll find this dealt with more fully in Chapter XI of my Miracles.
We can get no further than this in knowledge about (savoir) God: but we are vouchsafed some knowledge-by-acquaintance (connaitre) of Him in our devotional and sacramental life. This, if it clothes itself in words and images at all, always borrows them from the A view. But these are not the real point, are they? It is as the moment of personal contact fades that they press upon the mind. We cry ‘Father’ without attending to all those implications which would become more mythological the further we pursued them. As Buber might say [in his book I and Thou] God is most fully real to us as Thou, less so as He, least so as It. We must worship the Thou, not the He in our own minds, which is just as much an image (therefore a possible idol) as a figure of word or stone.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Joy’s death.
30 AUGUST 1960
It is nice to hear from you. It might have been worse. Joy got away easier than many who die of cancer. There were a couple of hours of atrocious pain on her last morning, but the rest of the day mostly asleep, though rational whenever she was conscious. Two of her last remarks were ‘You have made me happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God.’ She died at 10 that evening. I’d seen violent death but never seen natural death before. There’s really nothing to it, is there?
One thing I’ve been glad about is that in the Easter Vac she realised her life long dream of seeing Greece. We had a wonderful time there. And many happy moments even after that. The night before she died we had a long, quiet, nourishing, and tranquil talk.
W. is away on his Irish holiday and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas—the younger boy—is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself.
TO MRS. RAY GARRETT: On the real program of the spiritual life—living in the present moment.
12 SEPTEMBER 1960
The whole lesson of my life has been that no ‘methods of stimulation’ are of any lasting use. They are indeed like drugs—a stronger dose is needed each time and soon no possible dose is effective. We must not bother about thrills at all. Do the present duty—bear the present pain—enjoy the present pleasure—and leave emotions and ‘experiences’ to look after themselves. That’s the programme, isn’t it?
TO PETER BIDE, whose wife had died on 17 September: On grief.
20 SEPTEMBER 1960
My dear Peter
I have just come in from saying my morning prayers in the wood, including as always one for ‘Peter and Margy and Joy and me’, and found your letter. I hope they are allowed to meet and help one another. You and I at any rate can. I shall be here on Wednesday next. If you could let me have a card mentioning the probable time of your arrival, all the better. If not, I shall just ‘stand by’.
Yes—at first one is sort of concussed and ‘life has no taste and no direction’. One soon discovers, however, that grief is not a state but a process—like a walk in a winding valley with a new prospect at every bend.
God bless all four of us.
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: On grieving.
23 SEPTEMBER 1960
My great recent discovery is that when I mourn Joy least I feel nearest to her. Passionate sorrow cuts us off from the dead (there are ballads and folk-tales which hint this). Do you think that much of the traditional ritual of mourning had, unconsciously, that very purpose? For of course the primitive mind is very anxious to keep them away.
Like you, I can’t imagine real Eros coming twice. I still feel married to Joy.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the lessons learned about grieving.
24 SEPTEMBER 1960
As to how I take sorrow, the answer is ‘In nearly all the possible ways.’ Because, as you probably know, it isn’t a state but a process. It keeps on changing—like a winding road with quite a new landscape at each bend. Two curious discoveries I have made. The moments at which you call most desperately and clamorously to God for help are precisely those when you seem to get none. And the moments at which I feel nearest to Joy are precisely those when I mourn her least. Very queer. In both cases a clamorous need seems to shut one off from the thing needed. No one ever told me this. It is almost like ‘Don’t knock and it shall be opened to you.’ I must think it over.
My youngest stepson is the greatest comfort to me. My brother is still away in Ireland.
TO VERA GEBBERT: On the impossibility of imagining the life of the world to come.
16 OCTOBER 1960
I wasn’t at all questioning the life after death, you know: only saying that its character is for us unimaginable….
But don’t let us trouble one another about it. We shall know when we are dead ourselves. The Bible seems scrupulously to avoid any descriptions of the other world, or worlds, except in terms of parable or allegory.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how troubling it is to be angry with someone you love; on how to avoid nursing the anger and on how to remember that we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive; and on the need to avoid injustice and to pray for those who are truly unkind.
28 OCTOBER 1960
Dear, dear, this is very distressing news. How many things have come upon you at once!…
It’s the mixture, or alternation, of resentment and affection that is so very uneasy, isn’t it? For the indulgence of either immediately comes slap up against the other, which then, a few seconds later comes slap up against it, so that the mind does a diabolical ‘shuttle-service’ to and fro between them. We’ve all at some time in our lives, I expect, had this experience. Except possibly anxiety nothing is more hostile to sleep. One must try, I suppose, to keep on remembering that the love part of the suffering is good and purgatorial while the anger part is bad and infernal. Yet how madly one cherishes that base part as if it were one’s dearest possession—dwells on everything that can aggravate the offence—and keeps on thinking of things one would like to say to the other party! I suppose all one can do is to keep on meditating on the petition ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us’.
I find fear a great help—the fear that my own unforgivingness will exclude me from all the promises. Fear tames wrath. And this fear (we have Our Lord’s word for it) is wholly well-grounded. The human heart (mine anyway) is ‘desperately wicked’. Joy often quoted this in connection with the great difficulty she found in forgiving a very near and very nasty relative of her own. One has to keep on doing it over again, doesn’t one?…
P. S.—It’s also useful to think ‘Either X is not so bad as, in my present anger, I think. If not, how unjust I must be. If so, how terribly X needs my prayers.’
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On forgetting; on the fear of nursing homes; and on how to avoid some misunderstandings in family life.
24 NOVEMBER 1960
Thanks for your letter of the 20th. About forgetting things, Dr. Johnson said ‘ If, on leaving the company, a young man cannot remember where he has left his hat, it is nothing. But when an old man forgets, everyone says, Ah, his memory is going.’ So with ourselves. We have always been forgetting things: but now, when we do so, we attribute it to our age. Why, it was years ago that, on finishing my work before lunch, I stopped myself only just in time from putting my cigarette-end into my spectacle case and throwing my spectacles into the fire!
What I was writing about last time was the pain and resentment you were feeling about some thing your daughter had said or done. I wasn’t trying to lecture. Rather, to compare notes about temptation we all have to contend with.
There, by the way, is a sentence ending with a preposition. The silly ‘rule’ against it was invented by Dryden. I think he disliked it only because you can’t do it in either French or Latin which he thought more ‘polite’ languages than English.
As for the bug-bear of Old People’s Homes, remember that our ignorance works both ways. Just as some of the things we have longed and hoped for turn out to be dust and ashes when we get them, so the things we have most dreaded sometimes turn out to be quite nice. If you ever do have to go to a Home, Christ will be there just as much as in any other place.
The bit of conversation with your daughter which you quoted sounds as if there were nothing much wrong on either side but nerves. But I admit I don’t know the cure. Slowing down the speed of the conversation (so far as this depends on oneself) is sometimes helpful. Also sitting down. I think we all talk more excitedly when standing. (Notice how often the actors in a comedy sit whereas those in a tragedy usually stand.)