Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

20/10/50

Dear Walsh

Of course they feel passion about politics but no passion enough for poetry: especially passions that have no commerce with the senses. Sexual passion, you see, has a concrete object before it, and is linked with fundamental impulses.

The real parallel to much modern political poetry is not religious poetry concerned with God or the Passion or Heaven but merely pious poetry concerned with (ugh!) ‘religion’. The religion of politics is a religion without sacraments: for the human sacrifices wh. it practices are mere murder, not even ritual murder. Wordsworth compensated for the (poetically) ghost-like nature of politics by using a strict form, the sonnet. But that matter, with vers libre as the form, is to me quite unpardonable: a noisy vacuity.

My brother is now quite well, thanks. I’ll note the B.P.J.172 If you get some verse from me you’ve brought it on yourself: wéan ahsode173 All the best.

Yours174

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): 175

Magdalen College

Oxford

26/10/50

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. I should need to be either of angelic humility or diabolical pride not to be pleased at all the things you say about my books. (I think, by the way, you have all the ones that wd. matter to you). May I assure you of my deep sympathy in all the very grievous troubles that you have had. May God continue to support you: that He has done so till now, is apparent from the fact that you are not warped or embittered. I will have you in my prayers. With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

REF.50/250.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd November 1950.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

Many thanks for the post card. What a perfectly lovely place, and how I envy you the enjoyment of it! You may be sure that when (and if) it is ever my good fortune to visit the United States, I shall include the Smoky Mountains in my itinerary: preferably at a time when you are in residence.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):

Magdalen etc.

2nd November 1950.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

…I was deeply interested in your sketch of your life, which certainly did not begin easily. Ours was very different; for there was always plenty of money, on the modest scale of provincial comfort in those far-off days; but we really hadn’t anyone to raise us, and ran wild; like Topsy, we just growed176…

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th November 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

I think ‘gracious’ is the word I want. There is a graciousness about your continued kindness which quite floors me: the immediate reference being to the excellent parcel posted on 16th. October, which has just arrived, and whose contents will be stored against the literal and metaphorical rainy day which is rapidly drawing nearer. Very many thanks.

We are all a good deal depressed—and doubtless you are much more so—over the very unpleasant news from Korea. It is horrible to think of the distress of wives and mothers who had thought the fighting over, only to discover that what is virtually a new war has to be faced. And how is it going to end? Of the ultimate end there can of course be no doubt, but I fear there is very little chance now of a decision being reached before the northern winter clamps down on the country. We can but hope and pray for some speedy success.

Here, we have just recovered from the periodical nuisance of a by-election for parliament: our sitting member having been elevated to the House of Lords, much to the poor man’s disgust, for he is a keen party politician. The Socialist vote is down by three thousand on a poll of some 69,000, and the Conservative was returned with a majority of nearly double that polled by his Conservative predecessor at the General Election. It does not do to take by-elections too seriously, but there is a certain significance about this one, since we are now largely an industrial constituency.

Winter is beginning with grey sky and north east winds, and I find myself envying you in comfortable California, where I suppose you are still in summer clothes? You should buy yourself an enormous fur coat, fill the pockets with brandy and aspirin, and come over here and see how the poor live, on the fringes of civilization!

Again many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

P. S. I enclose the fairy tale, and hope you will like it.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

13/11/50

My dear Dom Bede

Good. I think we are in entire agreement on this point. One cd. put it this way. The bad (natural) tree cannot produce good fruit. But oddly, it can produce fruits that by all external tests are indistinguishable from the good ones: the act done from one’s own separate and unredeemed, tho’ ‘moral’ will, looks exactly like the act done by Christ in us. And oddly enough it is the tree’s real duty to go on producing these imitation fruits till it recognises this futility and despairs and is made a new (spiritual) tree. The trouble in the XVIth century was that Luther—who intuited the truth—was fundamentally an uneducated man, a peasant type: and really let the whole question get immediately entangled with political and ecclesiological questions wh. were really quite irrelevant to it. But the whole question must now be raised again. What most people who talk about Reunion don’t realise is that continental Protestantism regards the C. of E. as still theologically ‘uniformed’ and the Lutheran-Anglican gap is really at present at least as wide as the Anglican-Roman. It is thus a three cornered affair.

How very much superior the Imitation177 is to the Scale of Perfection178–yet I’d have said just the opposite once.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20th November 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

The nine pounds fourteen ounces of comfort and cheer, whose arrival was heralded by your last letter, has this morning arrived in good condition, and will be very welcome for what the papers still describe rather pathetically as ‘the festive season’. Which, as I told you, threatens to be even leaner than usual this year; there are amongst other things, cheerful prognostications of turkey at 7/6 per pound. My board will not ‘groan under coarse plenty’ at any such price, especially as we shall be in a position to sacrifice a couple of chickens.

I never read the papers, and would not have known anything about it except for my brother, who kindly reads me out the more cheerful extracts at breakfast. However, I am grateful to him for one excerpt from yesterday’s paper—a delicious printer’s error in a description of a revivalist meeting in the Midlands:–‘At the conclusion of the exercises, a large CROW remained in the hall, singing Abide with Me’. With renewed thanks and all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th November 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 20th, and especially for the quotation from R Giovanni;179 it is good, is’nt it?

I don’t think I should like the climate of Beverly Hills for a permanency; do you never feel the need to get away up north for a holiday and see snow on the ground? My idle brother on the other hand, with nostalgic memories of long lazy days in the tropics—at the taxpayer’s expense—feels it would suit him down to the ground: and talks still at times, generally at dinner times, of a steak and mushrooms which he once ate in San Francisco.

I note, with the usual gratitude—and embarrassment—that the usual stream of gifts is making its way steadily along the pipeline which you have laid from Alpine Drive to Magdalen College. Many, many thanks. Will you despise my pedestrian taste if I say I prefer envelopes to butter Scotch? I fear there is a sort of echo of Goering’s ‘guns before butter’ about this,180 but stationary is for some reason, absurdly hard to get over here, and very dear when got. Probably now that I come to think of it, because we have recently broken off our paper contract with Canada; not unnaturally to the great annoyance of the Canadians.

If a magic carpet could transport you to Oxford this morning, it would work a very rapid cure on your lethargy. The floods are out, and now it is freezing, with a heavy fog; I can’t see across the quadrangle.

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):

Magdalen etc.

25 November 1950.

Dear Mrs Allen,

I too am an admirer of Bernard Shaw’s work, and could love him for his attack on the vivisectionists. That in the preface to the Doctor’s Dilemma is just devastating.181 Many before and since have attacked them for their cruelty, but Shaw was, I think, the first man to attack them for their stupidity; which I’m sure gets them on the raw whilst an attack on their cruelty would most likely leave their withers unwrung. No one who has ever read Shaw is able afterwards to think of vivisectionists without remembering the imbecile who spent his time cutting the tails off generations of mice to see if presently one would be born without a tail…

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): 182

REF.50/4.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th November 1950.

Dear Miss Pitter,

What a delightful surprise! You cheer me up no end, and provide a makeweight to letters from a headmistress which tell me the book will cause confusion and terror, and that many people are much ‘distressed’ at my having written it. But I get nice letters from actual children and parents.* I noted, of course, the lion image in your previous letter and rejoiced darkly.

But next time you write, don’t write all about me: what are you doing, and how are you? Well, I hope. With very many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS HALMBACHER (L):

Magdalen College

Oxford

28 November 1950

I avoided the word ‘Grace’ because I thought it didn’t carry much clear meaning to the uninstructed readers I had in view. I think the thing is dealt with in a rough and ready way in Case for Christianity183 and Beyond Personality.184 Any advanced or technical theology of Grace was quite beyond my scope. Naturally that does not mean that I thought the subject unimportant.

The other question, about the limits of faith and superstition, is also important. But my own mind is v. far from clear on it. I think you must seek counsel (if it is a practical problem for you) from a real theologian, not from an amateur like me. I am sorry to disappoint you: but it is better to refuse than to mislead.

TO WARFIELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 6/50

My dear Firor

It is always a pleasure to hear from you: doubled in this case by finding that you owed (or think you owed) me a letter when I feared the shoe was on the other foot.

The old lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last fifteen years. But it has hardly made me free on such a large scale as you suppose. I visit her pretty nearly every day, and I shd. certainly like to be at hand when the end comes. Also, I naturally have to be a good deal more frugal than before, since the Nursing Home makes a pretty big hole in my income.

The patient is nearly always perfectly placid now and does not seem to suffer at all. Very interested, for the first time in her life, in food. These bedside experiences have much allayed my fear of paralysis. I had not realised that it could be such a quiet return to infancy, or even animality. I suppose one need not be surprised that the evening twilight sometimes is exactly like the morning twilight. But, I fear, no chance of your ranches yet. ‘Ever more thanks.’

I am sometimes much worried about the News, sometimes ashamed that I am not worried more. I suppose it comes from one’s total power-lessness. Our emotions all have a strongly practical side and don’t work much when it is obvious that one can’t do anything. Hence a small noise at night in one’s house, which one can stop, keeps one awake till one has got up and done so: the most notable exception (for me) is when one is being driven in a car by a driver one doesn’t trust along a dangerous road. I do find it v. hard to surrender myself to my fate then. I suppose because one can’t get rid of the idiotic illusion that one could do something.

My great hope is that whenever in the past people have feared a German outbreak, their fears have proved right: but when they have feared a Russian outbreak, they have often, perhaps usually, been pleasantly disappointed. The Russian is not, like the German, a congenital invader. But this is slender. The thought of such a war as that wd. be bad enough in itself: but the thought of entering it with such a government as England now has, is sheer nightmare. Have you any parallel to their imbecility? All rulers lie: but did you ever meet such bad liars?

While you have been reading Letters to Young Churches (a good book, I thought)1851 have been regaling myself on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.1861 wonder why that man never wrote anything else on the same level? The scene in which Huck decides to be ‘good’ by betraying Jim, and then finds he can’t and concludes that he is a reprobate, is really unparalleled in humour, pathos, & tenderness. And it goes down to the very depth of all moral problems.

We still eat hams (or give ‘em to the hard up) with much joy and gratitude, and your name is ‘in our flowing cups freshly remembered’.187 I thought you were running over to this side some time soon again? I wd. dearly like another pow-wow. With all thanks & blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

7/12/50

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

(1.) To the best of my knowledge the Episcopalian Church in America is exactly the same as the Anglican Church.

(2.) The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (‘Do this in remembrance of me’188–‘If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you’189). This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services190 are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.

Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. Others find it easier to approach Him thro’ the services: but they must practice private prayer & reading as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different (and He rejoices in their differences & by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences. (Re-read 1st Corinthians cap 12 and meditate on it. The word translated members wd perhaps be better translated organs).191

If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public & corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face, and life, of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them, teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.

(3.) I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture.192 Whether any instance of it is a real instance, or chance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. V. often, I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, wd. be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole, my attitude wd. be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide whether it is.

‘Regular but cool’ in Church attendance is no bad symptom. Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Sheldon Vanauken’s193 autobiographical A Severe Mercy (1977) is the heartrending story of his marriage to Jean ‘Davy’ Davis. They first met at the outbreak of the Second World War when Vanauken was in his second year at Wabash College in Indiana. They fell in love and married a few months later. From the first they devised what they called ‘The Shining Barrier’ which was meant to act as a ‘defence against creeping separ-ateness’.194 Vanauken joined the Navy in March 1941 and was sent as a US naval lieutenant commander to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed when it was bombed by the Japanese on 7 December 1941.

On leaving the Navy in November 1945 he went to Yale University with Davy where he took an MA degree in History. In the Michaelmas Term 1949 they moved to Oxford where Vanauken began work on a B. Litt. degree at Jesus College. At this time Vanauken spelt his name ‘Van Auken. Neither was a believer, but it was not long before they began to see things differently. They read a number of Lewis’s books and in December 1950 Vanauken wrote to Lewis:

Having felt the aesthetic and historical appeal of Christianity, having begun to study it, I have come to awareness of the strength and ‘possibleness’ of the Christian answer. I should like to believe it. I want to know God…But I cannot pray with any conviction that Someone hears. I can’t believe.

Very simply, it seems to me that some intelligent power made this universe and that all men must know it, axiomatically, and must feel awe at the power’s infiniteness. It seems to me natural that men, knowing and feeling so, should attempt to elaborate on the simplicity—the prophets, the Prince Buddha, the Lord Jesus, Mohammed, the Brahmins—and so arose the world’s religions. But how can just one of them be singled out as true?195

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/12/50

Dear Mr. Van Awten

My own position at the threshold of Xtianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true: I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all that modern stuff about concealed wishes and wishful thinking, however useful it maybe for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one’s wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one’s conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides.

What I think you can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Xtianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing ever in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to Him ‘Keep out. Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I v. much doubt whether even you wd. find it simply pleasant. Isn’t the truth this: that it wd. gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and outrage a great many others? So let’s wash out all the Wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.

I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion—Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xtianity. Clear, lucid, transparent, simple religion (Tao plus a shadowy, ethical god in the background) is a late development, usually arising among highly educated people in great cities. What you really start with is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death & return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all.

The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism & Xtianity: there you get both Metaphysics and Cult (continuous with the primeval cults). That is why my first step was to be sure that one or other of these had the answer. For the reality can’t be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things are like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet—milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics).

There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can’t believe, (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough (c.) The (claimed) fulfilment of these in Hinduism, (d.) The claimed fulfilment of these in Xtianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn’t really join the two strands. Unredeemably savage religion goes on in the village: the Hermit philosophises in the forest: and neither really interferes with the other. It is only Xtianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man?196 The best popular apologetic I know.

Meanwhile, the attempt to practice the Tao is certainly the right line.197 Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.’ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans.

I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again, or call, if you think I can be of any help.