Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

And oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed. Macdonald observes somewhere that ‘the approach of any fate is usually also the preparation for it’. I began to hope he is right. Even at this present moment I don’t feel nearly so bad as I should have done if anyone had prophesied it to me eighteen months ago.

  But I am merely doling out what you know as well as I and are better qualified to say to me that I to you. Blessings on you for everything in our common life these twenty years.

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (In May Warren had been evacuated with his unit from Dunkirk and sent to Wenvoe Camp in Cardiff.)

  12 July 1940

  I’ve been up for some days now, still feeling rather weak, and shall be embroiled in examiners’ meetings all the week end. Before the illness was over I read your copy of Southey’s letters from end to end with great enjoyment:—a bad poet, but a delightful man. I also found things in it that were very consoling; as (a) The daily fear of invasion. (b) The haunting fear of traitors on the home front. (c) The repeated statement that ‘even now’ we might pull through if only we had a decent government. (d) The settled conviction that ‘even if’ we defeated Buonaparte we should still have to face revolution at home. God send it’s a true omen.

  Other impressions were (a) How much nicer people, tho’ worse writers, the Tory romantics were than the other crew—the Shelleys and L. Hunts and even Keats. (b) What a happy life he had on the whole, and yet what a grim business even a happy human life is when you read it rapidly through to the inevitable end . . .

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College

  16 July 1940

  A lot of work and an illness have kept me from answering your letter, but I have been intending ever since I got it to let you know that I think your criticisms on my Aristotelian idea of leisure are largely right. I wouldn’t write that essay now. In fact I have recently come to the conclusion that a besetting sin of mine all my life has been one which I never suspected—laziness—and that a good deal of the high sounding doctrine of leisure is only a defence of that. The Greek error was a punishment for their sin in owning slaves and their consequent contempt for labour. There was a good element in it—the recognition, badly needed by modern commercialism, that the economic activities are not the end of man: beyond that, they were probably wrong. If I still wanted to defend my old view I shd ask you why toil appears in Genesis not as one of the things God originally created and pronounced ‘very good’, but as a punishment for sin, like death. I suppose one wd point out in reply that Adam was a gardener before he was a sinner, and that we must distinguish two degrees and kinds of work—the one wholly good and necessary to the animal side of the animal rationale, the other a punitive deterioration of the former due to the Fall.

  My enjoyment of the Psalms has been greatly increased lately. The point has been made before, but let me make it again: what an admirable thing it is in the Divine economy that the sacred literature of the world shd have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, shd remain poetry in any language you translate it into . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (in which he records the conception of The Screwtape Letters)

  20 July 1940

  Humphrey [Havard] came up to see me last night (not in his medical capacity) and we listened to Hitler’s speech together. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people: but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly. The same weakness is why I am a slow examiner: if a candidate with a bold, mature handwriting attributed Paradise Lost to Wordsworth, I shd feel a tendency to go and look it up for fear he might be right after all . . .

  I resume [21 July] at coffee-time on Sunday morning. I have been to Church for the first time for many weeks owing to the illness, and considered myself invalid enough to make a mid-day communion . . . Before the service was over—one cd wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd be called As One Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’. The idea wd be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view. e.g. ‘About undermining his faith in prayer, I don’t think you need have any difficulty with his intellect, provided you never say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. After all, the Enemy will either answer his prayers or not. If he does not, then that’s simple—it shows prayers are no good. If he does—I’ve always found that, oddly enough, this can be just as easily utilised. It needs only a word from you to make him believe that the very fact of feeling more patient after he’s prayed for patience will be taken as a proof that prayer is a kind of self hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that event will have causes which you can point to, he can be persuaded that it would have happened anyway. You see the idea? Prayer can always be discredited either because it works or because it doesn’t.’ Or again. ‘In attacking faith, I should be chary of argument. Arguments only provoke answers. What you want to work away at is the mere unreasoning feeling that “that sort of thing can’t really be true”’. . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (Jack has begun his duties with the Local Defence Volunteers, the name of which was soon changed to The Home Guard.)

  11 August [1940]

  I have commenced my L.D.V. Duties with the 1.30 A.M. patrol on what they call Saturday morning and mortals call Friday night. As it seemed no use going to bed to be raked out at 12.45 I asked Dyson and Humphrey to dine and the others to join us afterwards so as to make a ‘wake’ of it in the original sense . . .

  We have a very good Inklings breaking up about ten to one, when the others went home and I set out for my rendez-vous at Lake St.—eating my sandwiches on the way, as I didn’t feel I cd provide sandwiches for the whole party and hadn’t the face to eat my own in their presence. I was with two men much younger than myself: one a bluecoat and the other, I think a burley—both very nice and intelligent and neither too talkative nor too silent. One is allowed to smoke and I was pleased to find that our tour of duty included a quite prolonged soak on the veranda of a college pavilion—a pleasant spot, looking out over broad playing fields in a mild but windy night of sufficient starlight and some light clouds—with the occasional interest of a train trundling past. Unfortunately our watch was not so well arranged as Dogberry’s (‘All sit in the church porch till two, and then every man to bed’); still, the three hours passed surprisingly quickly, and if it hadn’t been for the bother of lugging a rifle about all the time I should have said that pleasure distinctly predominated. I had quite forgotten the weight of a ‘tripe’ [rifle]. We broke off at 4.30 and after a really beautiful walk back through an empty and twilight Oxford I was in bed by 5 . . .

  [Warren’s health had been unsatisfactory ever since he went to France, and in August he retired and was transferred to the Reserve List. On 27 August Maureen was married to Leonard Blake who had been the Director of Music at Worksop College since 1935. Jack’s new book, The Problem of Pain, which was both read to The Inklings as it was written and dedicated to them was published on 18 October.]

  TO A FORMER PUPIL: from The Kilns

  4 January 1941

  Congratulations . . . on your own decision. I don’t think this decision comes either too late or too soon. One can’t go on thinking it over for ever; and one can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light. Don’t be worried about feeling flat, or about feeling at all.

  As to what to do, I suppose the normal next step, after self-examination, repentance and restitution, is to make your Co
mmunion; and then to continue as well as you can, praying as well as you can . . . and fulfilling your daily duties as well as you can. And remember always that religious emotion is only a servant . . . This, I say, would be the obvious course. If you want anything more e.g. Confession and Absolution which our church enjoins on no-one but leaves free to all—let me know and I’ll find you a directeur. If you choose this way, remember it’s not the psychoanalyst over again: the confessor is the representative of Our Lord and declares His forgiveness—his advice or ‘understanding’ tho’ of real, is of secondary importance.

  For daily reading I suggest (in small doses) Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and the Theologia Germanica (Golden Treasury series, Macmillan) and of course the Psalms and N.T. Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond: do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you—yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.

  This has been great news for me I need hardly say. You have all my prayers (not that mine are worth much).

  TO THE SAME: from Magdalen College

  29 January 1941

  Thanks very much for your kind letter. My own progress is so very slow (indeed sometimes I seem to be going backwards) that the encouragement of having in any degree helped someone else is just what I wanted. Of course the idea of not relying on emotion carries no implication of not rejoicing in it when it comes: you may remember Donne’s Litanie ‘That our affections kill us not—nor die’. One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out! . . .

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  10 April 1941

  Yes, I will come and address your Junior Sisters next Easter unless ‘wife and oxen’ have by that time taken the form of incarceration in a German Concentration camp, an English Labour Company, or (to pitch on a brighter idea) some sort of Borstal Institution on the lower foot-hills of the mountain of Purgatory. But (if one may say so salva reverentia) what odd tasks God sets us; if anyone had told me ten years ago that I should be lecturing in a convent—! Thanks for the offer of hospitality in the Gate House, which I accept gratefully, though the Protestant in me has just a little suspicion of an oubliette or a chained skeleton—the doors do open outwards as well, I trust.

  Thank you very much for the book.162 It has given me real help. What I particularly enjoy in all your work, specially this, is the avoidance of that curious drabness which characterises so many ‘little books on religion’. Partly it is due to your Hebraic background which I envy you: partly, no doubt, to deeper causes . . . There are, in fact, a good many Gifford Lectures and other such weighty tomes out of which I’ve got less meat (and indeed less efficient cookery!)

  You never told me how you got on with the WAFS. I have just started doing something of the same kind with R.A.F. officers and shd be interested to compare notes . . .

  [One of the immediate results of The Problem of Pain was a great deal of ‘war work’ for Jack. In the Winter of 1941 the Chaplain-in-Chief of the RAF asked him to accept a kind of travelling lectureship, which meant going round to various RAF bases and lecturing on Theology. The first of these talks was given at the RAF base in Abingdon during April 1941. In February 1941 he had been asked to give a series of talks over the BBC, and it is this series which he told Sister Penelope about in the letter which follows. The series consisted of four fifteen-minute talks entitled Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe? and they were given during August. Although Sister Penelope did not speak over the radio herself, she was writing some talks for someone else to deliver.]

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  15 May 1941

  We ought to meet about B.B.C. talks if nothing else as I’m giving four in August. Mine are praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium, an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) imparts despair rather than comfort. You will come after to heal any wounds I may succeed in making. So each of us ought to know what the other is saying.

  I’ve given some talks to the R.A.F. at Abingdon already and as far as I can judge they were a complete failure. I await instructions from the Chaplain in Chief about the Vacation.

  Yes—jobs one dare neither refuse nor perform. One must take comfort in remembering that God used an ass to convert the prophet: perhaps if we do our poor best we shall be allowed a stall near it in the celestial stable—rather like this:

  [The remainder of the sheet is filled with an amusing drawing of the ass, flanked by a nun and a figure in a mortarboard, seated outside a stable in the radiance of the heavenly city.]

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  9 October 1941

  I am ashamed of having grumbled. And your act was not that of a brute—in operation it was more like that of an angel, for (as I said) you started me on a quite new realization of what is meant by being ‘in Christ’, and immediately after that ‘the power which erring men call chance’ put into my hands [E. L.] Mascall’s two books in the Signposts series which continued the process. So I lived for a week end (at Aberystwyth) in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines that have hitherto been only buried seeds began actually to come up—like snowdrops or crocuses. I won’t deny they’ve met a touch of frost since (if only things would last, or rather if only we would!) but I’m still very much, and gladly, in your debt. The only real evil of having read your scripts when I was tired is that it was hardly fair to them and not v. useful to you.

  I have had to refuse a request from Sister Janet. Will you tell her that the ‘wives and oxen’ are quite real ones?

  I enclose the MS. of Screwtape. If it is not a trouble I shd like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed)—after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.

  Thank you very much for the photo of the Shroud. It raises a whole question on which I shall have to straighten out my thoughts one of these days.

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College (The book referred to is Perelandra.)

  9 November 1941

  I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world: a difficult chapter. I hadn’t realised till I came to write it all the Ave-Eva business. I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart—she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But if one can get even a fraction of it into words it is worth doing.

  Have you room for an extra prayer? Pray for Jane if you have. She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do little for her.

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  19 November 1941

  It is a curious fact that the advice we can give to others we cannot give to ourselves and truth is more effective through any life rather than our own. Chas. Williams in Taliessin is good on this ‘No one can live in his own house. My house for my neighbour, his for me’.

  I think what really worries me is the feeling (often on waking in the morning) that there’s really nothing I so much dislike as religion—that it’s all against the grain and I wonder if I can really stand it! Have you ever had this? Does one outgrow it? Of course there’s no intellectual difficulty. If our faith is true then that is just what it ought to feel like, until the new man is full-grown. But it’s a considerable bore. What you say about ‘disappointed with oneself’ is very true—and a te
ndency to mistake mere disappointment (in wh. there is much wounded pride and much of a mere sportsman’s irritation at breaking a record) for true repentance. I ought to have devoted a Screwtape letter to this.

  Please tell Mother Annie Louisa that I have booked April 20th–22nd. I shouldn’t reach Wantage until (I suppose) mid-day or tea-time Monday, but after that will do as I’m told . . .

  TO MISS PATRICIA THOMSON: from Magdalen College

  8 December 1941

  When I said it was ‘no good’ trying to regard Jesus as a human teacher I only meant that it was logically untenable—as you might say ‘It’s no good trying to maintain that the earth is flat’. I was saying nothing in that sermon about the destiny of the ‘virtuous unbeliever’. The parable of the sheep & the goats suggests that they have a very pleasant surprise coming to them. But in the main, we are not told God’s plans about them in any detail.

  If the Church is Christ’s body—the thing He works through—then the more worried one is about the people outside, the more reason to get inside oneself, where one can help—you are giving Him, as it were, a new finger. I assumed last night that I was talking to those who already believed. If I’d been speaking to those who didn’t, of course everything I’d said wd be different.

  Fear isn’t repentance—but it’s alright as a beginning—much better at that stage than not being afraid.

  How interested are you? If you care to come and talk about it I expect we can arrange a date. Let me know.

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns (Jack had asked Dom Bede to read and criticize a second series of talks for the BBC on ‘What Christians Believe’.)

  21 December 1941

  (1) I’m extremely glad you’ve got onto my friend Chas. Williams, tho’ onto one of his worst books. He is living in Oxford during the war and we made him lecture on Milton to the faculty, so that (would you believe it, remembering the English lectures of your own period) we actually heard a lecture on Comus wh. put the importance where Milton had put it. In fact the lecture was a panegyric of chastity! Just fancy the incredulity with which (at first) an audience of undergraduates listened to something so unheard of. But he beat them in the end.