Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  TO MRS JOHN WATT: from The Kilns (following a holiday he and Joy had in Ireland with Arthur Greeves)

  28 August 1958

  All goes amazing well with us. My wife walks up the wooded hill behind our house and shoots—or more stictly shoots at—pigeons, picks peas and beans, and heaven knows what.

  We had a holiday—you might call it a belated honeymoon—in Ireland and were lucky enough to get that perfect fortnight at the beginning of July. We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.

  We flew to Ireland, for, tho’ both of us wd prefer ship to plane, her bones, and even mine, could not risk a sudden lurch. It was the first flight either of us had ever experienced and we found it, after one initial moment of terror, enchanting. The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty—and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees (like Tennyson’s Tithonus) ‘a glimpse of that dark world where I was born’. We had clear weather over the Irish Sea and the first Irish headland, brightly sunlit, stood out from the dark sea (it’s very dark when you’re looking directly down on it) like a bit of enamel.

  As for the picture in The Observer, even our most ribald friends don’t pretend it has any resemblance to either of us.186 As a spiritualist picture of the ectoplasms of a dyspeptic orangutan and an immature Sorn it may have merits, but not as a picture of us . . .

  TO MRS JOHN WATT: from The Kilns

  30 October 1958

  I was much interested to hear of the ‘Eye on research’ programme on TV: myself, I’m glad to say I don’t often see television, but my brother, who sometimes looks in on a friend’s set, says he can well understand your feelings of ‘horror and terror’. He adds that to him the most terrible part of the business is the implicit assumption that progress is an inevitable process like decay, and that the only important thing in life is to increase the comfort of homo sapiens, at whatever cost to posterity and to the other inhabitants of the planet. I can well imagine how a ‘scientific’ programme would jar after watching such a stately ceremony as the opening of Parliament.

  TO MRS HOOK: from The Kilns

  29 December 1958

  By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in wh. immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan a giant represents Despair.

  If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all. So in Perelandra. This also works out a supposition. (‘Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully’.)

  Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan’s picture of Giant Despair does not start from supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary. Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom. Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents Him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) chooses extreme cases.

  There is no conscious connection between any of the phonetic elements in my ‘Old Solar’ words and those of any actual language. I am always playing with syllables and fitting them together (purely by ear) to see if I can hatch up new words that please me. I want them to have an emotional, not intellectual, suggestiveness: the heaviness of glund for as huge a planet as Jupiter, the vibrating, tintillating quality of viritrilbia for the subtlety of Mercury, the liquidity . . . of Maleldil. The only exception I am aware of is hnau which may (but I don’t know) have been influenced by Greek nous.

  TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College

  20 January 1959

  As to Professor Van Til’s point it is certainly scriptural to say that ‘to as many as believed He gave power to become the sons of God’, and the statement ‘God became Man that men might become gods’ is Patristic. Of course Van Til’s wording ‘that man must seek to ascend in the scale of life’ with its suggestions (a) That we could do this by our own efforts, (b) That the difference between God and Man is a difference of position on a ‘scale of life’ like the difference between a (biologically) ‘higher’ and a (biologically) ‘lower’ creature, is wholly foreign to my thought.

  I think an anthology of extracts from a living writer would make both him and the collector look rather ridiculous and I’m sure publishers would not agree to the plan. I am sorry to reply so ungraciously to a proposal which does me so much honour. But I’m convinced it would not do.

  TO FATHER PETER BIDE: from Magdalene College (Father Bide is the priest who married Jack and Joy, and now his wife was dying from cancer.)

  29 April 1959

  Indeed, indeed we both will. I don’t see how any degree of faith can exclude the dismay, since Christ’s faith did not save Him from dismay in Gethsemane. We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us: we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. In a case like the one you refer to, where the growth is detected in its primary state and in the most operable part, there are of course solid grounds for an entirely optimistic view. But then one of your fears and her’s, is of all the fears you will have to suffer before you are out of the wood. The monotony of anxiety—the circular movement of the mind—is horrible. As far as possible I think it is best to treat one’s own anxiety as being also an illness. I wish I could help. Can I? You did so much for me.

  As to the ‘frightening monotony’ I think this disease now ranks as a plague and we live in a plague-striken population.

  God bless you both. I shall have no need to ‘remind’ myself to remember you. Let us have news as soon as there is any.

  If you find (some do) that mental anguish produces an inclination to eat more—paradoxical but it can—I should jolly well do so.

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

  30 April 1959

  First, in answer to your question. My wife has continuously gone on from strength to strength. Except that one leg will always be shorter than the other so that she walks with a stick and a limp, she now leads a normal, and active, life. My own bone-trouble, tho’ not completely cured, is so much better as to be now merely a trivial inconvenience.

  Thanks for Christ and India. It confirms what I had, less clearly, thought already—that the difficulty of preaching Christ in India is that there is no difficulty. One is up against true Paganism—the best sort of it as well as the worst—hospitable to all gods, naturally ‘religious’, ready to take any shape but able to retain none. [fear of the gods] is harder to convert than materialism as a fog is harder to remove than a tree.

  About the Semitic genius, my wife, who is a Jewess by blood, holds two views which wd interest you.


  1. That the only living Judaism is Christianity. Where her own people still have any religion it is archaic, pedantic, and—so to speak—sectarian, so that being a devout Jew is rather like being a Plymouth Brother.

  2. That we Goyim misread much of the O.T. because we start with the assumption that its sacred character excludes humour. That no one who knew the Jewish ethos from inside could fail to see the fully accepted comic element in Abraham’s dialogue with God (Genesis XVIII) or in Jonah.

  While we are on exegesis, am I right in thinking that the key to the parable of the Unjust Steward is to grasp that the Master in it is The World? (= this Aion). The dismissal is the notice—apparently now being served on you and long since served on me—that our present tabernacle will soon be taken down. The moral is ‘Cheat your master’. If he gives us wealth, talent, beauty, power etc. use them for your own (eternal) purposes—spoil the Egyptian! If you can’t do that with his kind of property, who will trust you with the true kind? Of course who praised the Steward is not the Master in the parable but Our Lord, the Master who is telling the story. And telling it not without paradoxical humour.

  It would be very nice to meet when you are in Europe, if this should be at all possible.

  The man (Peter Bide) who laid his hands on my wife and she recovered, writes to me that his own wife is now struck down with the same disease. Would you mention him in your prayers?

  TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College (Professor Kilby says of the following letter,

  ‘Written after I had sent him a copy of the Wheaton College statement concerning inspiration of the Bible and asked for his opinion’.)

  7 May 1959

  I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the issue on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work. To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone—both first class as literature—is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question ‘Is Ruth historical?’ (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain . . .

  Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts.

  1. The distinction which St Paul makes in I Cor vii between (v. 10) and (v. 12).187

  2. The apparent inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matt i and Luke iii: with the accounts of the death of Judas in Matt xxvii 5 and Acts i. 18–19.

  3. St Luke’s own account of how he obtained his matter (i. 1–4).

  4. The universally admitted unhistoricity (I do not say, of course, falsity) of at least some narratives in Scripture (the parables), which may well extend also to Jonah and Job.

  5. If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.

  6. John xi. 49–52. Inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends (propriety of making an innocent man a political scapegoat) as well as the truth he does not intend (the divine sacrifice).

  It seems to me that 2 and 4 rule out the view that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth. And 1, 3, 5, and 6 rule out the view that inspiration is a single thing in the sense that, if present at all, it is always present in the same mode and the same degree. Therefore, I think, rules out the view that any one passage taken in isolation can be assumed to be inerrant in exactly the same sense as any other: e.g. that the numbers of O.T. Armies (which in view of the size of the country, if true, involve continuous miracle) are statistically correct because the story of the Resurrection is historically correct. That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

  TO CHARLES MOORMAN: from Magdalene College (who was writing Arthurian Triptych: Mythic Materials in Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot [1960])

  15 May 1959

  I don’t think your project at all ‘presumptuous’, but I do think you may be chasing after a fox that isn’t there. Charles Williams certainly influenced me and I perhaps influenced him. But after that I think you would draw a blank. No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all. Dorothy Sayers was not living in Oxford at the time and I don’t think she ever in her life met Tolkien. She knew Charles Williams well, and me much later. I am sure she neither exerted nor underwent any literary influence at all. Of course it may be that, just because I was in it myself, I don’t see (objectively) what was really going on. But I give my honest impression for what it is worth.

  To be sure, we had a common point of view, but we had it before we met. It was the cause rather than the result of our friendship.

  I hope I don’t seem to be ‘putting you off’. My real anxiety is lest you shd waste time on what might prove a barren field.

  TO KATHLEEN RAINE (Mrs Madge): from The Kilns

  19 June 1959

  One must (and will) write poetry if one can. That one must therefore return to the place where the Muse once appeared, as if she were bound to appear there again, is quite a different proposition. The gods will not be met by appointment. They never give us their addresses. And tho’ the Faculty has not been able to give you what you, reasonably, want, it does not follow that they don’t want you. At any rate postpone. There will never be a time when you can’t leave Cambridge: there could easily be one when you couldn’t return.

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns

  8 September 1959

  No one, I presume, can imagine life in the glorified body. On this, and on the distinction (in general) between belief and imagination, I have said all I can in Miracles. Lor’ bless us, I can picture very few of the things I believe in. I can’t picture will, thought, time, atoms, astronomical distance, New York, nor even (at this moment) my mother’s face.

  Your whole worry about the word Christian comes from ignoring the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. The best parallel is the word poet. We can argue till the cows come home whether ‘Pope is a poet’. On the other hand a librarian, putting ‘poets’ in one shelf and prose in another, after a single glance at one page of Pope, classifies him as a ‘poet’.

  In other words, the word has a deep, ambiguous, disputable and (for many purposes) useless sense: also a shallower, clear, useful sense. In the second sense it seems to be more useful not to classify Quakers as Christians. But this is a linguistic, not a religious question . . .

  TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalene College

  25 November 1959

  In a sense it might be said that Joy ‘is’ not ill at present. But the last X-ray check revealed that the cancer in the bones is awake again. This last check is the only one we approached without dread—her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the giant when you hav
e passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle. Whether a second miracle will be vouchsafed us, or, if not, when the sentence will be inflicted, remains uncertain. It is quite possible she may be able to do the Greek trip next spring. Pray for us . . .

  TO SIR HENRY WILLINK: from Magdalene College (Sir Henry, the Master of Magdalene College, had just lost his wife.)

  3 December 1959

  I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case ‘What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?’

  People talk as if grief were just a feeling—as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.

  You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.

  I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.