1962
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On rejoicing in the present moment or at least refraining from trying to live in the past or the future.
4 MAY 1962
Thank you all for your kind prayers. You have mine daily. Yes—it is sometimes hard to obey St. Paul’s ‘ Rejoice.’ We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right Our Lord is about ‘sufficient to the day’. Do even pious people in their reverence for the more radiantly divine element in His sayings, sometimes attend too little to their sheer practical common-sense?
TO STUART ROBERTSON: On the various paradoxes of the New Testament, especially of faith and works.
6 MAY 1962
On this point as on others the New Testament is highly paradoxical. St. Paul at the outset of an epistle sometimes talks as if the converts whom he is addressing were already wholly new creatures, already in the world of light, their old nature completely crucified. Yet by the end of the same epistle he will be warning the same people to avoid the very grossest vices.
Of himself he speaks sometimes as if his reward was perfectly sure: elsewhere he fears lest, having preached to others, he should be himself a castaway.
Our Lord Himself sometimes speaks as if all depended on faith, yet in the parable of the sheep and the goats all seems to depend on works: even works done or undone by those who had no idea what they were doing or undoing.
The best I can do about these mysteries is to think that the New Testament gives us a sort of double vision. A. Into our salvation as eternal fact, as it (and all else) is in the timeless vision of God. B. Into the same thing as a process worked out in time. Both must be true in some sense but it is beyond our capacity to envisage both together. Can one get a faint idea of it by thinking of A. A musical score as it is written down with all the notes there at once. B. The same thing played as a process in time? For practical purposes, however, it seems to me we must usually live by the second vision ‘ working out our own salvation in fear and trembling’ (but it adds ‘for’—not ‘though’—but ‘for’—‘it is God who worketh in us’).
And in this temporal process surely God saves different souls in different ways? To preach instantaneous conversion and eternal security as if they must be the experiences of all who are saved, seems to me very dangerous: the very way to drive some into presumption and others into despair. How very different were the callings of the disciples.
I don’t agree that if anyone were completely a new creature, you and I would necessarily recognise him as such. It takes holiness to detect holiness.
TO MR. GREEN, who seems to have thought he had committed the unforgivable sin: A model letter of extraordinary care in which Lewis shares his own apostasy, reasons with his correspondent, gives good advice, consoles, and asks for mutual prayer—on needing to be reminded that there is a point beyond which return becomes impossible; on the ordinary remedies for overcoming fears; and on the need to seek psychiatric help if the fears become extreme, if one despairs.
11 MAY 1962
I also once ceased to believe and told others there is no God. In fact you and I both lost our faith and then returned to it. But surely we did not return on our own steam? Surely we were recalled by God? For no man can come, nor come back, to God unless God send for him. The grace He has thus shown us for a second time is the proof that He has forgiven us. He has not cast us aside even though we, for a time, cast Him aside.
Don’t forget that Bunyan, as he himself tells us, thought that he had at one time committed the unforgivable sin. Yet he lived to write the Pilgrim’s Progress and to be a great Christian champion.
It has always puzzled me very much that Our Lord should have told us there is an unforgivable sin and yet not told us what it is. If it is a particular act which could be done at a particular time, the warning does not seem to be any use—like being told that there is a poisonous vegetable but not told which it is. But it may mean persistence in ordinary sin, a final refusal to repent or even to try to reform. If so, the warning would then be useful, a reminder that there is a point beyond which return becomes impossible. His purpose would be to fix the danger in our minds, but certainly not to set us looking through all our particular sins and trying to guess if some one of them was It.
As far as you (and I) are concerned I have no doubt that the fear you mention is simply a temptation of the devil, an effort to keep us away from God by despair. It is often the devil working through some defect in our health, and in extreme cases it needs a medical as well as a spiritual cure. So don’t listen to these fears and doubts* any more than you would to any obviously impure or uncharitable thoughts.
With hearty good wishes.
*Of course, like other evil temptations, they will not be silenced at once. You will think you have got rid of them and then they will come back again—and again. But, with all our temptations of all sorts, we must just endure this. Keep on, do your duty, say your prayers, make your communions, and take no notice of the tempter. He goes away in the end. Remember I John iii, 20 ‘If ( = though) our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.’ Let us sometimes pray for one another.
TO MRS. JOHN R. ROLSTON, who had written Lewis to thank him for A Grief Observed.
14 MAY 1962
Thank you for writing. We are only two in the huge number of mourners, but it is cheering when two of us thus meet. Let us remember all the others in our prayers. With all good wishes.
TO MR. GREEN: Another care-filled letter about coping with the fear of having committed the unforgivable sin.
16 MAY 1962
I was not only baptised in infancy, but, what seems to me for worst, I was already an apostate when I hypocritically allowed myself to be confirmed and made my first communion—in a state of total unbelief.
You’ll find Bunyan’s story (about how he thought he had committed the unforgivable sin) in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. I find also that our chaplain—a very good young man—once thought that he had done the same thing. He, by the way, took the view that those who had really done it would be the very last people to be bothered about it (in this life), for they would be hardened, which you—and, I dare to add, I—obviously are not.
There is a lovely passage in Pascal where he represents Our Lord as saying to the timorous soul, ‘Be comforted. Unless you had found me, you would not be seeking me.’ God bless us both. TO EDWARD LOFSTROM: A letter of great encouragement for someone who had been struggling with excessive self-awareness.
10 JUNE 1962
You are of course perfectly right in defining your problem (which is also mine and everyone’s) as ‘excessive selfness’. But perhaps you don’t fully realise how far you have got by so defining it. All have this disease; fortunate are the minority who know they have it. To know that one is dreaming is to be already nearly awake, even if, for the present, one can’t wake up fully. And you have actually got further than that. You have got beyond the illusion (very common) that to recognise a chasm is the same thing as building a bridge over it.
Your danger now is that of being hypnotised by the mere sight of the charm, of constantly looking at this excessive selfness. The important thing now is to go steadily on acting, so far as you can—and you certainly can to some extent, however small—as if it wasn’t there. You can, and I expect you daily do—behave with some degree of unselfishness. You can and do make some attempt at prayer. The continual voice which tells you that your best actions are secretly filled with subtle self-regards, and your best prayers still wholly egocentric—must for the most part be simply disregarded—as one disregards the impulse to keep on looking under the bandage to see whether the cut is healing. If you are always fidgeting with the bandage, it never will.
A text you should keep much is mind is I John iii, 20: ‘If our heart condemns us God is greater than our heart.’ I sometimes pray ‘ Lord give me no more and no less self-knowledge than I can at this moment make a good use of.’ Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep on fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.
TO MR. GREEN: A rare letter of retraction of advice.
11 JUNE 1962
You are kind enough to say that I helped you. This emboldens me to make a very serious request of you, almost an entreaty. Cancel your order for Grace Abounding, or, if it is too late, don’t read it. I implore you not to. It is a strange request, you will say, since I first directed your attention to the book. But the whole point of that was to convince you that a man can come through all that nightmare about the unforgivable sin and live to be a great Christian.
But for you, who have just got out of it, to go back and steep yourself in another man’s sinister nightmare, might do dreadful harm. When a man has just got over malaria one doesn’t advise him to go back to a malarial district. I now blame myself—God forgive me—for having mentioned the book at all. A line from you promising not to read it—not for 10 years or so—would be a very great relief to me.
TO MR. GREEN: On the reasons why Lewis withdrew his recommendation of the book by Bunyan—Bunyan’s method of interpreting the Bible is very misleading, and reading such a book will lead to further introspection when introspection is to be avoided for the time being.
21 JUNE 1962
Dismiss from your mind all idea that Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners contains any facts from which I wish to shield you. Bunyan’s crisis, as anyone can see to-day, was far more pathological than spiritual. The way he got into the trouble and the way he got out of it were both irrational. The one need not alarm, and the other can hardly help, any sane person. What I feared for you was the mere infection of steeping yourself in a very vivid account of all the emotions felt by a man in a condition from which you have so lately emerged yourself.
This is something to be learned from the book, and I will now tell it you. It is this: that the habit of taking isolated texts from the Bible and treating the effect which they have on one in a particular mood at a particular moment as direct messages from God, is very misleading. It fills some people (who are in one state) with morbid terror, and fills others (who are in a different state) with presumption. This, I say, can be learned from Bunyan but I don’t think that is what you would get from him at present. No very introspective book—no books in which a man is wholly preoccupied with his own spiritual state—would be very safe reading for you just now. Convalescents need a careful diet! You need something that will direct your attention away from yourself to God and your neighbours.
I suggest G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man and George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie (if you can manage the Scotch dialect).
Be regular in prayer and the Sacraments: do all the good to those you live among: and trust to God. May He bless us both.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the spiritual profit to be made from imposed mortifications during convalescence.
3 JULY 1962
Yes, we do seem to be having a certain amount of experience in common! Perhaps if we had done more voluntary fasting before God would not now have put us on these darn diets! Well, the theologians say that an imposed mortification can have all the merit of a voluntary one if it is taken in the right spirit.
We are also both ruled by cats. Joy’s Siamese—my ‘step-cat’ as I call her—is the most terribly conversational animal I ever knew. She talks all the time and wants doors and windows to be opened for her 1000 times an hour.
Yes, and one gets bored with the medicines too—besides always wondering ‘Did I remember to take them after breakfast?’ and then wondering whether the risk of missing a dose or the risk of an over dose is the worst! All my sympathy. In haste.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the different ways women and men respond to being ill.
31 JULY 1962
Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another.
I have a notion that, apart from actual pain, men and women are quite diversely affected by illness. To a woman one of the great evils about it is that she can’t do things. To a man (or anyway a man like me) the great consolation is the reflection ‘Well, anyway, no one can now demand that I should do anything.’ I have often had the fancy that one stage in Purgatory might be a great big kitchen in which things are always going wrong—milk boiling over, crockery getting smashed, toast burning, animals stealing. The women have to learn to sit still and mind their own business: the men have to learn to jump up and do something about it. When both sexes have mastered this exercise, they go on to the next.
In your present ménage you seem to be getting a foretaste of this! If I were you I wouldn’t ‘do all you can’. It probably only bothers the other lady and, as you say, makes you ill.
I think I continue to improve physically. As I get better I feel the loss of Joy more. I suppose the capacity for happiness must re-awake before one becomes fully aware of its absence.
Yes, one gets sick of pills. But thank God we don’t live in the age of horrible medicines such as our grandparents had to swallow.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On regrets and humiliations over past blunders and the unintended consequences of past actions.
3 SEPTEMBER 1962
Our situations are curiously reversed: you live in fear that an operation may be necessary, and I in hope that one may become possible. (At least it ought to be hope, but sometimes the flesh is weak!) Nausea is horrible, isn’t it? Worse than all but really severe pains: at least it dominates the mind and the emotions more.
I am surprised that you should doubt your forgiveness for sins from which you have doubtless long since received absolution. Especially as what apparently troubles you is not malice but the unforeseen results (or things only possibly the result) of behaviour whose intention was innocent. No doubt, as I know only too well, the knowledge that one’s acts have, contrary to one’s intention, led to all sorts of dreadful consequences, is a heavy burden. But it is a burden of regret and humiliation, isn’t it?, rather than of guilt. Perhaps we all dislike humiliation so much that we tend to disguise it from ourselves by treating blunders as sins?
Of course you always have my prayers.
My idea of the Purgatorial kitchen didn’t mean that anyone had lately been ‘getting in my hair’. It is simply my lifelong experience—that men are more likely to hand over to others what they ought to do themselves, and women more likely to do themselves what others wish they would leave alone. Hence both sexes must be told ‘Mind your own business,’ but in two different senses!
TO KEITH MANSHIP: On the slow process of being more in Christ; and on doing one’s duty, especially the duty to enjoy.
13 SEPTEMBER 1962
You state the problem very clearly, and the fact that you can do so really shows that you are very much on the right road. Many don’t even get so far.
The whole problem of our life was neatly expressed by John the Baptist when he said (John, chap 3, v. 30) ‘ He must increase, but I must decrease.’ This you have realised. But you are expecting it to happen suddenly: and also expecting that you should be clearly aware when it does. But neither of these is usual. We are doing well enough if the slow process of being more in Christ and less in ourselves has made a decent beginning in a long life (it will be completed only in the next world). Nor can we observe it happening. All our reports on ourselves are unbelievable, even in worldly matters (no one really hears his own voice as others do, or sees his own face). Much more in spiritual matters. God sees us, and we don’t see ourselves. And by trying too hard to do so, we only get the fidgets and become either too complacent or too much the other way.
Your question what to do is already answered. Go on (as you apparently are going on) doing all your duties. And, in all lawful ways, go on enjoying all that can be enjoyed—your friends, your music, your books. Remember we are told to ‘ rejoice’. Sometimes when you are wondering what God wants you to do, He really wants to give you something.
As to your spiritual state, try my plan. I pray ‘Lord, show me just so much (neither more nor less) about myself as I need for doing thy will now.’
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On what Lewis learned from the behavior of cats and dogs.
2 OCTOBER 1962
I am glad to hear you have rehabilitated a displaced cat. I can’t understand the people who say cats are not affectionate. Our Siamese (my ‘step-cat’) is almost suffocatingly so. True, our ginger Tom (a great Don Juan and a mighty hunter before the Lord) will take no notice of me, but he will of others. He thinks I’m not quite socially up to his standards, and makes this very clear. No creature can give such a crushing ‘snub’ as a cat! He sometimes looks at the dog—a big Boxer puppy, very anxious to be friendly—in a way that makes it want to sink into the floor.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On Lewis’s own rule for assisting pan-handlers; and on the suffering and eternal destiny of animals.
26 OCTOBER 1962
I do most thoroughly agree with your father’s principles about alms. It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been ‘had for a sucker’ by any number of impostors: but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need. After all, the parable of the sheep and goats makes our duty perfectly plain, doesn’t it? Another thing that annoys me is when people say ‘Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it.’ My reply is ‘But if I’d kept [it] I should probably have drunk it.’…
I am sorry to hear of the little dog’s death. The animal creation is a strange mystery. We can make some attempt to understand human suffering: but the sufferings of animals from the beginning of the world till now (inflicted not only by us but by one another)—what is one to think? And again, how strange that God brings us into such intimate relations with creatures of whose real purpose and destiny we remain forever ignorant. We know to some degree what angels and men are for. But what is a flea for, or a wild dog?
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how much harder it is to live alone than with others, but how hard it is to avoid the sins of the tongue (which include our look, manner, and intonation).
8 NOVEMBER 1962
Yes, I can well understand how you long for ‘a place of your own’. I nominally have one and am nominally master of the house, but things seldom go as I would have chosen. The truth is that the only alternatives are either solitude (with all its miseries and dangers, both moral and physical) or else all the rubs and frustrations of a joint life. The second, even at its worst, seems to me far the better.
I hope one is rewarded for all the stunning replies one thinks of and does not utter! But alas, even when we don’t say them, more than we suspect comes out in our look, our manner, and our voice. An elaborately patient silence can be very provoking! We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with. It is not only Episcopalians who behave as if they had never read St. James.
I do hope the operation will turn out to be unnecessary.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the difficulties of moving and on the lessons moving teaches us—“We must ‘sit light’ not only to life itself but to all its phases. The useless word is ‘Encore!”
21 NOVEMBER 1962
I think I share, to excess, your feeling about a move. By nature I demand from the arrangements of this world just that permanence which God has expressly refused to give them. It is not merely the nuisance and expense of any big change in one’s way of life that I dread. It is also the psychological uprooting and the feeling—to me, as to you, intensely unwelcome—of having ended a chapter. One more portion of oneself slipping away into the past! I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same garden, the same smells and sounds, always there, changeless. The old wine is to me always better. That is, I desire the ‘ abiding city’ where I well know it is not and ought not to be found. I suppose all these changes should prepare us for the far greater change which has drawn nearer ever since I began this letter. We must ‘sit light’ not only to life itself but to all its phases. The useless word is ‘Encore!’
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the resurrection of the body and of all creation; and on the goodness of the bodies we now have.
26 NOVEMBER 1962
My stuff about animals came long ago in The Problem of Pain. I ventured the supposal—it could be nothing more—that as we are raised in Christ, so at least some animals are raised in us. Who knows, indeed, but that a great deal even of the inanimate creation is raised in the redeemed souls who have, during this life, taken its beauty into themselves? That may be the way in which the ‘ new heaven and the new earth’ are formed. Of course we can only guess and wonder.
But these particular guesses arise in me, I trust, from taking seriously the resurrection of the body: a doctrine which now-a-days is very soft pedalled by nearly all the faithful—to our great impoverishment. Not that you and I have now much reason to rejoice in having bodies! Like old automobiles, aren’t they? where all sorts of apparently different things keep going wrong, but what they add up to is the plain fact that the machine is wearing out. Well, it was not meant to last forever. Still, I have a kindly feeling for the old rattle-trap. Through it God showed me that whole side of His beauty which is embodied in colour, sound, smell and size. No doubt it has often led me astray: but not half so often, I suspect, as my soul has led it astray. For the spiritual evils which we share with the devils ( pride, spite) are far worse than what we share with the beasts: and sensuality really arises more from the imagination than from the appetites: which, if left merely to their own animal strength, and not elaborated by our imagination, would be fairly easily managed. But this is turning into a sermon!
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the illusion of independence.
10 DECEMBER 1962
Thanks for your letter and the amusing enclosure…. About ancient lineage (I haven’t any myself). My feeling is that all such things can legitimately be enjoyed provided one takes them lightly enough. Like tinsel crowns worn for private theatricals! And the prig who considers himself above enjoying his tinsel crown is perhaps as far astray as the paranoiac who mistakes it for gold. This goes for things like beauty, talent, fame, et cetera as well as for blood (Of course a great deal of so-called ‘democratic’ feeling against the claims of blood is really based on a desire to make the claims of money all important: and of all claims to distinction money is, I suppose, the basest).
There is much that is cheering, along with much that isn’t, in your letter. One must get over any false shame about accepting necessary help. One never has been ‘independent’. Always, in some mode or other, one has lived on others, economically, intellectually, spiritually. Who, after all, is less independent than someone with ‘a private income’-every penny of which has been earned by the skill and labour of others? Poverty merely reveals the helpless dependence which has all the time been our real condition. We are members of one another whether we choose to recognise the fact or not.
I get on fairly well. My chief trouble is a difficulty in sleeping at night and keeping awake by day. Perhaps I am turning into a nocturnal animal. Bat? Wolf? Owl? Let’s hope it will be owl, the bird of wisdom (and I always was attracted by mice!).