by C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity)
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) two thousand years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ 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 wh. I cd 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 (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) 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 tho’ 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 wh. 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 HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College
24 October 1931
I hasten to tell you of a stroke of good luck for us both—I now have the 15 volume in Jeremy Taylor, in perfect condition, and have paid the same price of 20/-. My old pupil Griffiths spent a night with me last Monday and told me that Saunders the bookseller, who is a friend of his, had a copy.142 He went round next day, got the book reserved and arranged the price . . .
On the same visit Griffiths presented me with a poorly bound but otherwise delightful copy (1742) of Law’s An Appeal/ To all that doubt, or disbelieve/ The Truths of the Gospel/ Whether they be Deists, Arians/ Socinians or Nominal Christians/. It bears the book plate of Lord Rivers. I like it much better than the same author’s Serious Call, and indeed like it as well as any religious work I have ever read. The prose of the Serious Call has here all been melted away, and the book is saturated with delight, and the sense of wonder: one of those rare works which make you say of Christianity ‘Here is the very thing you like in poetry and the romances, only this time it’s true’ . . .
I am glad you liked Browne as far as you got when your letter was written. Your query ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ hits the nail on the head. It seems to me that his peculiar strength lies in liking everything both in the serious sense (Christian charity and so forth) and in the Lambian sense of natural gusto: he is thus at once sane and whimsical, and sweet and pungent in the same sentence—as indeed Lamb is. I imagine that I get a sort of double pleasure out of Thomas Browne, one from the author himself and one reflected from Lamb. I always feel Lamb, as it were, reading the book over my shoulder. A lot of nonsense is talked about the society of books, but ‘theres more in it than you boys think’ in a case of this sort: it is almost like getting into a club . . .
Yes, indeed: how many essays I have heard read to me on Descartes’ proofs (there are more than one) of the existence of God. (It was a remark of Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.) The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’) seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attaches some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials . . .
On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’ . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns
22 November 1931
I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox, the chaplain, Benecke and Christie)143 which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter . . . answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home.
My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as
good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner.
On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood (another English don)144 comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner.
The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’.
What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same ocasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed . . .
At the same time he is far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount . . .
Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle Past and Present which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition), obviously by a P’daita: pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc.’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since.
I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves—well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then . . .
I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys. It includes a large chunk of Bagehot’s Essay on Cowper which makes me think I must read all Bagehot. We have him, haven’t we? Not that I ‘hold with him’, he is too much of a pudaita by half: but he has great fun . . . How delicious Cowper himself is—the letters even more than the poetry. Under every disadvantage—presented to me as raw material for a paper and filling with a job an evening wh. I had hoped to have free—even so he charmed me. He is the very essence of what Arthur calls ‘the homely’ which is Arthur’s favourite genre. All these cucumbers, books, parcels, tea-parties, parish affairs. It is wonderful what he makes of them.
I suppose we may expect a Colombo letter from you soon. I will vary the usual ‘must stop now’ by saying ‘I am going to stop now’. I am writing in the common room (Kilns) at 8.30 of a Sunday evening: a moon shining through a fog outside and a bitter cold night.
TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns
Christmas Day 1931
I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in fact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant . . . must have nothing cruel about it . . . it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic . . .
We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well.145 In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live.
How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F. K.146 He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on re-acting against the conventional modern re-action against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman’ . . .
I have bought The Brothers Karamazov but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal’ . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College
17 January 1932
It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather li
ke a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters.
Religion and poetry are about the only language in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’—which still have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all . . .
Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist—a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World—with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat . . .
While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was lacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)—while in Cambridge, or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie—laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church—the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book . . . I should try it if it is in your library. Gad! How it would have bowled one over at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now . . .
