Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ will of God, or, if you like, for Death (Chap. VI). To this demand the soul cannot at first face up (VI). But attempting to return to normal consciousness finds by education that its experiences are not abnormal or trivial but are vouched for by all the great poets and philosophers (VII My Father’s MS). It repents and tries to face the demand, but its original refusal has now rendered real submission temporarily impossible (IX). It has to face instead the impulses of the subconscious (X) and the slightly spurious loyalties to purely human ‘causes’—political, theological etc (XI). It now becomes conscious of its fellow men: and finds them divided into ‘Lovers’ (= ‘Hearts’ in our old classification) and ‘Bags’ or ‘Giants’ (= ‘Spades’). But because it is an unconverted soul, has not yet died, it cannot really help the Lovers and becomes the slave of the Bags. In other words the young man, however amiably disposed towards the sweet and simple people of the world, gets a job or draws a dividend, and becomes in fact the servant of the economic machine (XII—XIII). But he is too good to go on like this, and so becomes a ‘Reformer’, a ‘friend of humanity’—a Shelley, Ruskin, Lenin (XIV). Here follows a digression on Purgatory (XV-XVII).

      With the next section we enter on the deepest part of the book which I still only v. dimly understand. Why do so many purely secular reformers and philanthropists fail and in the end leave men more wretched and wicked than they found them? Apparently the unconverted soul, doing its very best for the Lovers, only succeeds first in waking (at the price of its own blood) and then in becoming the tool of, Lilith. Lilith is still quite beyond me. One can trace in her specially the Will to Power—which here fits in quite well—but there is a great deal more than that. She is also the real ideal somehow spoiled: she is not primarily a sexual symbol, but includes the characteristic female abuse of sex, which is love of Power, as the characteristic male abuse is sensuality (XVIII-XXIX). After a long and stormy attempt to do God’s work in Lilith’s way or Lilith’s work in God’s way, the soul comes to itself again, realises that its previous proceedings are ‘cracked absolutely’ and in fact has a sort of half-conversion. But the new powers of will and imagination which even this half conversion inspires (symbolised in the horse) are so exhilarating that the soul thinks these will do instead of ‘death’ and again shoots off on its own. This passage is v. true and important. Macdonald is aware how religion itself supplies new temptations (XXX-XXXI). This again leads to another attempt to help the Lovers in his own way, with consequent partial disaster in the death of Lona (XXXII-XXXVII). He finds himself the jailer of Lilith: i.e. he is now living in the state of tension with the evil thing inside him only just held down, and at a terrible cost—until he (or Lilith—the Lilith-part of him) at last repents (Mara) and consents to die (XXXVIII-end)

      I hope this has not bored you. I am so excited about it myself that for the moment I can hardly imagine anyone else being bored: but probably I have done it so badly that in the result nothing survives to be excited about. For one thing, I have emphasised the external side too much. Correct everything above by remembering that it is not only helping the Lovers outside against the Bags, but equally the Lover in himself against the Bag in himself.

You will be surprised to hear that I have been at the Cinema again! Don’t be alarmed, it will not become a habit. I was persuaded into going to King Kong⁵¹ because it sounded the sort of Rider Haggardish thing that has always exercised a spell over me. What else I have done I hardly know. Read Plato’s Gorgias, and am reading a long Histoire de la Science Politique (!!) by Janet⁵²—surprisingly interesting. Almost everything is, I find, as one goes on.

You say nothing about Harrogate—was it nice? I have missed our annual meeting a good deal. I remember you at least once a day whatever happens and often in between, and wish we could see more of one another. I wonder if the time will ever come when we shall? And would it work if we did? I often feel that you are the one who has changed. This seems absurd when I have changed from atheism to Christianity and from The Crock of Gold⁵³ to, say, the history of political science! But I feel all my changes to be natural developments of the original thing we had in common, and forget that of course they seem natural to me because they are mine, while yours, doubtless equally natural, can never seem so to me to the same extent. I don’t know how I come to be writing about this and writing it so badly. I had better stop.

      Any news of your MS yet? I have tried to keep myself this time from getting too wrapped up in my own book’s success and think I have partially succeeded—just as well, too!

      Yours

      Jack

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      Hotel Victoria,

      Milford-on-Sea,

      Hants.

      Sept 12 1933

      My dear Arthur,

      It was a delightful surprise to get your long and interesting letter: certainly the longest and one of the most interesting letters I have ever had from you.

      I have been thinking all morning over your question about God and evil which is very far from being ‘elementary’ to me—or for that matter, I suppose, to the angels. If I understand you rightly you are not primarily concerned with the sort of logical problem as to how the All-Good can produce evil, or produce a world in which there is evil, but with a more personal, practical, and intimate problem as to how far God can sympathise with our evil will as well as with our good—or, to draw it milder, whether he does.

      I should begin, I think, by objecting to an expression you use: ‘God must have a potentiality of His opposite—evil.’ For this I would substitute the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as ‘That which has no opposite’ i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all—just as in our constitution the King is neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition, but the thing behind them which alone enables these to be a lawful government and an opposition—or just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big and small arise. This then is my first point. That Evil is not something outside and ‘over against’ God, but in some way included under Him.

My second point seems to be in direct contradiction to this first one, and is (in scriptural language) as follows: that God ‘is the Father of Lights and in Him is no darkness at all’.⁵⁴ In some way there is no evil whatever in God. He is pure Light. All the heat that in us is lust or anger in Him is cool light—eternal morning, eternal freshness, eternal springtime: never disturbed, never strained. Go out on any perfect morning in early summer before the world is awake and see, not the thing itself, but the material symbol of it.

      Well, these are our two starting points. In one way (our old phrase!) God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to do next? My beginning of the ‘next’ will be to deny another remark of yours—where you say ‘no good without evil’. This on my view is absolutely untrue: but the opposite ‘no evil without good’ is absolutely true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy.

      Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. СКАЧАТЬ