A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  The Shining Barrier came into my mind, mostly as an awareness of danger ahead if we remained a house divided. I did not think of the Appeal to Love, for it was not relevant to the situation. I hadn’t rejected Christianity; I merely hadn’t decided yet. There was a tacit understanding that this period was a hiatus until I did decide. It did not occur to me that if she were now committed to Christ, her commitment to our love must be lesser, as indeed mine must be if I followed her. At all events, I shied away from thinking about the Shining Barrier. Until later.

  Here, on the brink, I hung for two months and more. I continued to read and think. I knew of course that Davy was praying for me. All our Christian friends were praying for me. Perhaps their friends. Perhaps whole churches. I regarded this activity with suspicion. I felt they were all waiting for something to happen. They gave me pleasantly questioning looks when we met on the street.

  I was also suspicious of my own upsurges of feeling about this Jesus. I warned myself about emotion. It seemed to me sometimes that Jesus was giving me friendly but questioning looks, and at other times, intolerably severe ones. At the same time, I recognised that there was a place for emotion as well as reason, and wrote in the Journal:

  It would seem that Christianity requires both emotional and intel-lectual assent. If there is only emotion, the mind asks troubling questions that, if not answered, might lead to a falling away, for love cannot be sustained without understanding. On the other hand, there is a gap which must be bridged by emotion. If one is suspicious of the upsurge of feeling that may be incipient faith, how is one to cross the gap?

  Christianity—in a word, the divinity of Jesus—seemed probable to me. But there is a gap between the probable and proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the Risen Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted certainty. I wanted to see Him eat a bit of fish. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these. And I continued to hang about on the edge of the gap.

  Davy and I, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, were reading Dorothy Sayers’s tremendous series of short plays on the life of Jesus. In one of them, I was forcibly struck by the reply of a man to Jesus’s inquiry about his faith: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ Wasn’t that just my position? Believing and not believing? A paradox, like that other paradox: one must have faith to believe but must believe in order to have faith. A paradox to unlock a paradox? I felt that it was.

  One day later there came the second intellectual breakthrough: it was the rather chilling realisation that / could not go back. In my old easy-going theism, I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him—or reject. My God! There was a gap behind me, too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble—but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God—but, by God, there was no certainty that He was not. If I were to accept, I might and probably would face the thought through the years: ‘Perhaps, after all, it’s a lie; I’ ve been had!’ But if I were to reject, I would certainly face the haunting, terrible thought: ‘Perhaps it’s true—and I have rejected my God!’

  This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do, once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it and flung myself over the gap towards Jesus.

  Early on a damp English morning with spring in the air, I wrote in the Journal and to C. S. Lewis:

  I choose to believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—in Christ, my lord and my God. Christianity has the ring, the feel, of unique truth. Of essential truth. By it, life is made full instead of empty, meaningful instead of meaningless. Cosmos becomes beautiful at the Centre, instead of chillingly ugly beneath the lovely pathos of spring. But the emptiness, the meaninglessness, and the ugliness can only be seen, I think, when one has glimpsed the fullness, the meaning, and the beauty. It is when heaven and hell have both been glimpsed that going back is impossible. But to go on seemed impossible, also. A glimpse is not a vision. A choice was necessary: and there is no certainty. One can only choose a side. So I —I now choose my side: I choose beauty; I choose what I love. But choosing to believe is believing. It’s all I can do: choose. I confess my doubts and ask my Lord Christ to enter my life. I do not know God is, I do but say: Be it unto me according to Thy will. I do not affirm that I am without doubt, I do but ask for help, having chosen, to overcome it. I do but say: Lord, I believe—help Thou mine unbelief.

  Davy sat beside me while I wrote, full of quiet joy. Of course I had told her first. Indeed, she had been in the room when the series of thoughts about the gap behind me had flashed through my mind. She had heard me mutter, ‘My God!’ And then, as she looked up, I’ d said, rather tensely, ‘Wait.’ A couple of minutes went by. Then I said: ‘Davy? . . . dearling .. . I have chosen—the Christ! I choose to believe.’ She looked at me with joy. Then she came over to me and knelt. I knelt, too, and committed my ways to my God. When we rose, we held each other a long moment. It is perhaps significant that we prayed first.

  The sonnet I was to write about the choice was already taking shape in my mind:

  THE GAP

  Did Jesus live? And did he really say

  The burning words that banish mortal fear?

  And are they true? Just this is central, here

  The Church must stand or fall. It’s Christ we weigh.

  All else is off the point: the Flood, the Day

  Of Eden, or the Virgin Birth—Have done!

  The Question is, did God send us the Son

  Incarnate crying Love! Love is the Way!

  Between the probable and proved there yawns

  A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,

  Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,

  Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns

  Our only hope: to leap into the Word

  That opens up the shuttered universe.

  CHAPTER V

  Thou Art the King of Glory

  WE WERE NOW CHRISTIANS. Davy perhaps had got used to it. But I —I a Christian! I, who had been wont to regard Christians with pitying dislike, must now confess myself to be one. I did so, with shrinking and pride. Indeed, I felt a curious mixture of emotions: a sort of embarrassment among my more worldly and presumably non-Christian friends, some of whom would have accepted my becoming a Buddhist or an atheist with less amazement, and a sort of pride as though I had done something laudable— or done God a favour. I was half inclined to conceal my faith, and yet it seemed to me that if I were to take a stand for Christ, my lord, I must wear his colours.

  There was perhaps a want of humility. Even my saying at the moment of conversion ‘I choose to believe’ instead of ‘I believe’, although they may come to the same thing in the end, had something about it of a last-ditch stand. The banner of my independence dipped, lying in the dust and myself kneeling, but somehow proudly still. I did homage to Christ as one pledges his sword and his fealty to a king. In reality, I suspect, it was not like that at all: I did not choose; I was chosen. The loving prayers of Davy and the rest— the prayers of C. S. Lewis, not just his books and letters—these did the work of the King. And yet there is this to be said for the pledged sword, even though it be so only in one’s own mind: if in some future year faith should weaken, one cannot in honour forswear the fealty tendered in ‘I choose to believe’.

  C. S. Lewis wrote, dropping the ‘Mr’ before my name, though I continued to call him ‘Mr Lewis’ until he told me to stop:

  My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice po
ssible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

  There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr. mind on the denominational question) get confirmed. Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

  Davy and I were already Anglicans. All our Christian friends, and Davy lately, had been going to the ancient Norman church of St. Ebbe’s, evangelical and Church of England, so of course I went there, too. It was a church full of faith, and it had a splendid Rector, M. A. P. Wood (since become the Lord Bishop of Norwich). He was a great preacher and a wise counsellor on the Christian way. Davy and I had a series of conversations with him at the Rectory in Paradise Square, and sometimes we stayed for a meal. I was impressed by the Rector’s discerning view of the relationship between mind and heart in conversion. In the church our first Christian communion together was moving. Later Davy and I were to go about a little to sample the riches of the many Oxford churches —the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin and the high-church Anglo-Catholic beauty of St. Mary Magdalen among others. But wherever we went, our young Christian life was shaped by the Church of England; and we always came ‘home’ to St. Ebbe’s. There was the lively life in Christ. St. Ebbe’s sang the Te Deum to a setting that made a triumphant proclamation of the line: ‘Thou Art the King of Glory, 0-0-0-0-0 Christ!’-the O’ s ascending to the mighty ‘Christ!’ That setting came to mean St. Ebbe’s and its strong faith to all of us.

  One night late several of us went round to the place where Peter and Bee lived in an upperstorey flat and found the staircase door locked. So there in the silent street we launched into ‘Thou Art the King of Glory’. As we hit the word ‘Christ!’ the windows were flung open and the astonished heads of Peter and Bee looked down.

  At first I had, as Davy had had, an astonishing assurance and certainty about my choice, despite the doubts that had harried me so long. I believe that a new Christian is given a special grace— joy and assurance—in the beginning, however feeble the choosing. Until the new-born Christian has learned to stand and walk a little. I wrote in our Journal:

  Forty days after: The decision made, one begins to act on it. One prays, goes to church, makes an incredibly meaningful first Christian communion. One tries to rethink everything one has ever thought in this new Light. One tries to subordinate self—to make the Sign of the Cross, crossing out the ‘I’ —and to follow Christ, with something less than brilliant success. C. S. Lewis prophesies the enemy’s counterattack, and is right as usual. Feelings surge in that it’s lies, all lies, that yonder red bus, the hard pavement under one’s heels, the glory of the may tree are the only realities. But one remembers that the Choice was based on reason, the weight of the evidence, and is strengthened. But that’s not quite all. Not only can the doubts be coped with, not only do prayers go better, but the doubts come less often—and when they do are often met with a surge of inexplicable confidence that the Choice was right. We are winning.

  Discussing every line with Davy, I completed my poem on the choice, ‘The Gap’. Even as I worked on that one, I was diverted to another one in which the soul’s act of choosing—though choose she must—is subordinated to the action of grace. These poems, when completed, I sent to C. S. Lewis. Here is the second of the two:

  THE SANDS

  The Soul for comfort holds herself to be

  Inviolate; but like the blowing sands

  That sift in shuttered houses, Christ’s demands

  Intrude and sting, deny her to be free.

  She twists and turns but finds it vain to flee,

  The living Word is in the very air,

  She can’t escape a wound that’s everywhere,

  She can but stand or yield—to ecstasy.

  Her Lord is seeking entrance; she must choose.

  A thickening callus can withstand the pain

  Of this rough irritant, the sands that swirl

  Against her thus defied. But if she lose

  Her self, Christ enters in—the sharp-edged grain

  Of sand embedded grows a shining pearl.

  C. S. Lewis replied:

  Thank you for a letter I prize very much. The sonnets, though in a manner which will win few hearers at the moment (drat all fashions) are really very remarkable. The test is that I found myself at once forgetting all the personal biographical interest and reading them as poetry. The image of sand is real imagination. I thought this was the better of the two at first: but now I don’t know. The second quatrain of The Gap is tip-top argument—and then the ground sinking behind. Excellent.

  As a new Christian, fascinated by Christianity, I might well at this point have considered switching my area of research in that direction. I didn’t, because I had already considered it—before I was a Christian. Subsequently, I was amazed that as a non-believer I could have contemplated, not only a theological subject but even the priesthood. Davy, by then a Christian, was curiously un-enthusiastic, not about historical research in the area—after all, history was my field—but about the priesthood.

  The strange thing was that I, interested in Christianity, saw nothing wrong with the idea of being a priest of a faith I did not accept—a sort of walking lie. Perhaps I felt a need for faith and thought I would find it so. Anyhow, I was interested, as a man might be interested in war and so become a soldier. Nothing so clearly illustrates the radical difference between the believing Christian and the non-Christian as the concept of what a priest should be: a man of faith or a man who can choose it for a career, like law. A priest or bishop without belief is as false as, quite precisely, hell to the one and a nearly innocent careerist to the other. The element of need that may persuade the non-believer to go into the church might offer a clue to the not-altogether-dissimilar phenomenon of unbalanced people, even nuts, becoming psychologists. At all events, men’s need for faith as well as the view of the church as a career like any other presumably explain the unbelieving priests and bishops—shepherds of the flock!—who do the church so much harm yet feel no need to resign, and appear to be almost blind to their own dishonesty.

  In the grip of this deplorable idea I wrote C. S. Lewis about it, arguing further after his first reply. The two letters from him were in January, three days apart, and two months before conversion. The ‘tent-making’ letters follow:

  We must ask three questions about the probable effect of changing your research subject to something more Theological. (1.) Wd. it be better for your immediate enjoyment? Answer, probably but not certainly, Yes. (2.) Wd. it be better for your academic career? Answer, probably No. You wd. have to make up in haste a lot of knowledge which wd. not be v. easily digested in the time. (3.) Wd. it be better for your soul? I don’t know. I think there is a great deal to be said for having one’s deepest spiritual interest distinct from one’s ordinary duty as a student or pro-fessional man. St. Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I shd. have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation; and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap. Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring and repel-lent in the job may alienate one from the spiritual life. And finally, someone has said ‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’; sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want spiritual truth for her own sake; how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm. I’ ve always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I’ d advise you to get on with your tent-making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology wd. do. Mind, I’ m n
ot certain: but that is the view I incline to.

  [Second letter] Look: the question is not whether we should bring God into our work or not. We certainly should and must: as MacDonald says ‘All that is not God is death.’ The question is whether we should simply (a.) Bring Him in in the dedication of our work to Him, in the integrity, diligence, and humility with which we do it or also (b.) Make His professed and explicit service our job. The A vocation rests on all men whether they know it or not; the B vocation only on those who are specially called to it. Each vocation has its peculiar dangers and peculiar rewards. Naturally, I can’t say which is yours. When I spoke of danger to your academic career in a change of subject I was thinking chiefly of time. If you can get an extra year, it would be another matter. I was not at all meaning that ‘intellectual history’ involving Theology wd. in itself be academically a bad field of research.

  I shall at any time be glad to see, and hear from, you.

  After these letters, so admirably sane and logical, I got on with my tent-making, both then and after conversion. But of course Davy and I continued to read theology—for instance, Austin Farrer—on the side. We were both deeply impressed by The Descent of the Dove and He Came Down from Heaven by Charles Williams.

  Then we encountered the Germans—the ‘demythologisers’— and were dismayed. The Resurrection was a myth, the Ascension was a myth, all miracles and prophecy were myths, perhaps Christ’s very existence was a myth—and by ‘myth’ they meant lies or devout fictions. If Jesus wasn’t a myth, he—the real historical Jesus—was quite unknowable. What, then, were we doing, being Christians? What, for the matter of that, were these demythologisers doing, calling themselves Christians still and even being ministers? That perhaps would be taken up with them later. And we, after our first dismay, rallied and began to think. First of all, it appeared plain to us that these fellows were in the position of the man who couldn’t see the wood for the trees, for one thing was absolutely certain: the personality of Jesus that emerged with perfect consistency from all four gospels and from St. Paul was so powerful, so individual, and so remarkable that it was obvious that the New Testament writers knew him, perhaps through others, as we know Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln. They lived in the shadow of a Man so immense that his spirit and words burned in Christian minds. But our real ‘salvation’ from these wreckers came through our recognition of the quite unverifiable fundamental assumptions, in no way derived from the New Testament text, that they brought to it. If Oxford consistently teaches any one thing, it is that fundamental assumptions must be verified. But not the demythologisers: When they say that prophecy must have been inserted after the event, their unverified assumption is that true prophecy cannot occur. They assume—merely assume—that miracles cannot happen: no proof and, by the nature of the case, no proof possible. Apart from being miraculous, the Ascension could not have happened because it contradicts modern cosmology—heaven cannot be ‘up’or ‘out’; the assumption is that God could not have had purposes obscure to critics. They argue that something could not have been said or written when it was supposed to have been because its theology or ecclesiology is too advanced, assuming that no man could have been ahead of his times. If a New Testament event is akin to an earlier myth, it cannot have happened, on the assumption that God couldn’t have intended to turn anticipatory myth into fact. Moreover, Christ’s words were misunderstood by His followers and the early church though quite clear to critics. Assumption : the mind of the infinite God is not unlike that of a German critic. We had no quarrel with legitimate Biblical criticism and scholarship, only with those, like the demythologisers, who bring their unverified assumptions and philosophies to the text. As for them, we retitled Hilaire Belloc’s little thing on a puritan to ‘On a Demythologiser’: ‘He served his god so faithfully and well/That now he sees him face to face in hell.’ The emperors of demythologising had no clothes on; and they themselves required ‘demythologising’.