1931
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the conversation that led to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity; and on the meaning of death. Hugo Dyson, just two years older than Lewis, became his friend in 1930; Maureen was Mrs. Moore’s [ Minto] daughter, and Tykes, a dog.
22 SEPTEMBER 1931
Thanks for your letter of the 11th. I couldn’t write to you last Sunday because I had a week end guest—a man called Dyson who teaches English at Reading University. I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class—i.e., not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien….
He stayed the night with me in College—I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one could hardly do out here [at home]. Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4. It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship—than finally drifted back to poetry and books.
On Sunday he came out here for lunch and Maureen and Minto and I (and Tykes) all motored him to Reading—a very delightful drive with some lovely villages, and the autumn colours are here now.
I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso—that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love Is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy,—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.
The MacDonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St. Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you (though not poor Morris himself) to go further. If ever you feel inclined to relapse into the mundane point of view—to feel that your book and pipe and chair are enough for happiness—it only needs a page or two of Morris to sting you wide awake into uncontrollable longing and to make you feel that everything is worthless except the hope of finding one of his countries. But if you read any of his romances through you will find the country dull before the end. All he has done is to rouse the desire: but so strongly that you must find the real satisfaction. And then you realise that death is at the root of the whole matter, and why he chose the subject of the Earthly Paradise, and how the true solution is one he never saw.
On Monday, 28 September, Warnie took Jack to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his motorbike, and it was during this outing that Jack took the final step in his conversion:
I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 15)
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: Thanking him for sending all the letters Lewis wrote to him, so that Warren could type them into what became the Lewis papers, a family history; explaining that he, Lewis, would keep from Warren any letters about their adolescent sexual trespasses, including Lewis’s invented fornication with a Belgian evacuee early in World War I; making his first reflections on the meaning of his life up to this time; and announcing his conversion to Christianity.
1 OCTOBER 1931
Very many thanks for the letter and enclosure that arrived this morning. Now, as to their return. I confess that I had not supposed you often read them, and had in view merely an ultimate return when W. had finished his editing, that is, in about 4 years’ time. If however you want them at once, they are of course your property and will be returned by registered post whenever you wish. I shall follow absolutely your directions. In the meantime you can feel quite confident about their safe keeping. I have spent this morning on them and established a pretty good order for all except about eight. (How maddening my habit of not dating them now becomes! And how ridiculous the arguments by which I defended it!)
All the ones that deal with what we used to call ‘ It’ I am suppressing and will return to you in a day or two. I am surprised to find what a very large percentage of the whole they are. I am now inclined to agree with you in not regretting that we confided in each other even on this subject, because it has done no harm in the long run—and how could young adolescents really be friends without it? At the same time, the letters give away some of your secrets as well as mine: and I do not wish to recall things of that sort to W’s mind, so that in every way they had better be kept out of the final collection. I am also sending back some others in which my replies to you imply that you have said foolish things—you will see what I mean when I return them. Finally, I am suppressing (i.e., sending back at once and keeping from W.—that is what the word ‘suppressing’ means throughout) all letters that refer to my pretended assignation with the Belgian. I am not at all sure that if Jeremy Taylor were at my elbow he would not tell me that my repentance for that folly was incomplete if I did not submit to the ‘mortification’ of having them typed and laid open to posterity. I hope, however, this is not really necessary in the case of a sin so old and (I hope) so fully abandoned.
Thanks for all you say about the letters in general. You see mine with too friendly eyes. To me, as I re-read them, the most striking thing is their egotism: sometimes in the form of priggery, intellectual and even social: often in the form of downright affectation (I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter): and always in the form of complete absorption in ourselves. I have you to thank that it was at least ‘ourselves’ and not wholly ‘myself’. I can now honestly say that I envy you the much more artless letters you were writing me in those days: they all had at least the grace of humility and of affection. How ironical that the very things which I was proud of in my letters then should make the reading of them a humiliation to me now!
Don’t suppose from this that I have not enjoyed the other aspect of them—the glorious memories they call up. I think I have got over wishing for the past back again. I look at it this way. The delights of those days were given to lure us into the world of the Spirit, as sexual rapture is there to lead to offspring and family life. They were nuptial ardours. To ask that they should return, or should remain is like wishing to prolong the honeymoon at an age when a man should rather be interested in the careers of his growing sons. They have done their work, those days and led on to better things. All the ‘ homeliness’ (which was your chief lesson to me) was the introduction to the Christian virtue of charity or love. I sometimes manage now to get into a state in which I think of all my enemies and can honestly say that I find something lovable (even if it is only an oddity) in them all: and your conception of ‘ homeliness’ is largely the route by which I have reached this. On the other hand, all the ‘strangeness’ (which was my lesson to you) has turned out to be only the first step in far deeper mysteries.
How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it….
Did it strike you in reading those letters how completely both of us were wrong in most of our controversies, or rather in the great standing controversy about ‘ sentiment’ which was the root of most of our quarrels? If anyone had said ‘There is good feeling and bad: you can’t have too much of the first, and you can’t have too little of the second’ it would have blown the gaff on the whole argument. But we blundered along—my indiscriminate hardness only provoking you into a more profound self pity (which is the root of all bad sentiment) and that bad sentiment in return making me harder and more willing to hurt.
P.S. I have just finished The Epistle to the Romans, the first Pauline epistle I have ever seriously read through. It contains many difficult and some horrible things, but the essential idea of Death (the MacDonald idea) is there alright. What I meant about the Earthly Paradise was simply that the whole story turns on a number of people setting out to look for a country where you don’t die.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the intellectual turning point of his conversion—myth become fact (see God in the Dock for the essay “Myth Become Fact”).
18 OCTOBER 1931
What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e., complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, though true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St. Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’—‘ sacrifice’—‘the blood of the Lamb’)—expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself…, I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god ( Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘ doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On why Christianity doesn’t appeal the way Paganism does; and on the spiritual danger of looking for an encore (see Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 27 and 90).
8 NOVEMBER 1931
I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism. Both the things you suggest (unfavourable associations from early upbringing and the corruption of one’s nature) probably are causes: but I have a sort of feeling that the cause must be elsewhere, and I have not yet discovered it. I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings—the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world—while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet of first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think, wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. Any real advance will in its turn be ushered in by a new thrill, different from the old: doomed in its turn to disappear and to become in its turn a temptation to retrogression. Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again. This is only an idea, and may be all rot: but it seems to fit in pretty well with the general law (thrills also must die to live) of autumn and spring, sleep and waking, death and resurrection, and ‘Whosoever loseth his life, shall save it.’ On the other hand, it may be simply part of our probation—one needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the theories of the atonement (see Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 4); and on the defects of Puritanism and of ritualism.
6 DECEMBER 1931
As to [your cousin] Lucius about the atonement not being in the Gospels, I think he is very probably right. But then nearly everyone seems to think that the Gospels are much later than the Epistles, written for people who had already accepted the doctrines and naturally wanted the story. I certainly don’t think it is historical to regard the Gospels as the original and the rest of the New Testament as later elaboration or accretion—though I constantly find myself doing so. But really I feel more and more of a child in the whole matter.
I begin to see how much Puritanism counts in your make up—that both the revulsion from it and the attraction back to it are strong elements. I hardly feel either myself and perhaps am apt to forget in talking to you how different your experience and therefore your feeling is. All I feel that I can say with absolute certainty is this: that if you ever feel that the whole spirit and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good, then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake (though of course it might, at a given moment—say, of temptation, be present as the alternative to some far bigger mistake).
My reasons for this are 1. That the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves: whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2. It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the worst ones—gluttony, avarice, et cetera. 3. It was ignorant. It could give no ‘ reason for the faith that was in it’. Your relations have been found very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial community: Just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community.