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

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СКАЧАТЬ dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho’ in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.

      Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and ‘contained’ his evil. If he did you cd. only reply ‘My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use—why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don’t understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your real wish—that is, the wish to get on—the less can I sympathise (in the sense of ‘share’ or ‘agree with’) your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.’

      I don’t know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption that you do. Let us go back to the original question—whether and, if so in what sense God contains, say, my evil will—or ‘understands’ it. The answer is God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathise or ‘agree’: His sympathy with my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two.

      1. I may always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was good and even divine: it has not got to be unsaid (so to speak) and recanted. But it will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain—if I submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamp-post—God will be guiding me as quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or substitute. If I had it I should not need to fight against sensuality as something impure: rather I should spontaneously turn away from it as something dull, cold, abstract, and artificial. This, I think, is how the doctrine applies to past sins.

      2. On the other hand, when we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are tempted, we must remember that just because God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads where you want to go. Hence Macdonald’s words ‘The all-punishing, all-pardoning Father’. You may go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you: as the dog’s master may extricate the dog after he has tied the whole lead round the lamp-post. But there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God’s way. And what does ‘in the end’ mean? This is a terrible question. If endless time will really help us to go the right way, I believe we shall be given endless time. But perhaps God knows that time makes no difference. Perhaps He knows that if you can’t learn the way in 60 or 70 years on this planet (a place probably constructed by Divine skill for the very purpose of teaching you) then you will never learn it anywhere. There may be nothing left for Him but to destroy you (the kindest thing): if He can.

I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something else than God—some other country (Mary Rose…Mary Rose)⁵⁵ into which He forbids us to trespass—some kind of delight wh. He ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but which wd. be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing just isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give us—a false picture wh. would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing. Therefore God does really in a sense contain evil—i.e. contains what is the real motive power behind all our evil desires. He knows what we want, even in our vilest acts: He is longing to give it to us. He is not looking on from the outside at some new ‘taste’ or ‘separate desire of our own’. Only because he has laid up real goods for us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy, misdirected ways. The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.

Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations—understands them a great deal more than we do. But don’t forget Macdonald again—‘Only God understands evil and hates it.’⁵⁶ Only the dog’s master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the lead knotted round the lamp-post. This is why we must be prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and trivial. How small some of the things that doctors forbid would seem to an ignoramus.

      I expect I have said all these things before: if so, I hope they have not wasted a letter. Alas! they are so (comparatively) easy to say: so hard, so all but impossible to go on feeling when the strain comes.

I have not time left for the rest of your letter. It was bad luck getting ill at the cottage: an illness at home has its pleasures, but on a holiday it is—well ‘disconsolate’ is the word that best fits my feeling about it. We have had a spate of unwanted and mostly uninvited visitors all summer and have (all four of us) come down here to give Minto a rest. It is opposite the Isle of Wight, and quite pleasant. We went to Beaulieu Abbey this afternoon—which would well deserve a letter in itself. I have since I came down read Voltaire’s Candide,⁵⁷ and Gore’s Jesus of Nazareth (Home University Library)⁵⁸ which I most strongly advise you to get at once. It is perhaps the best book about religion I have yet read—I mean of the theological kind—not counting books like Lilith. I am particularly pleased at having at last found out what Sadducees and Pharisees really were: tho’ it is an alarming bit of knowledge because most of the religious people I know are either one or the other. (Warnie is a bit of a Sadducee, and I am a good bit of a Pharisee.) I am now going to tackle a John Buchan.

      When I suggested that you had changed, I didn’t mean that you had changed towards me. I meant that I thought the centre of your interests might have shifted more than mine. This leads on to what you say about being a mere mirror for other people on which each friend can cast his reflection in turn. That certainly is what you might become, just as a hardened bigot shouting every one down till he had no friends left is what I am in danger of becoming. In other words sympathy is your strong point, as stability is mine—if I have a strong point at all, which is doubtful: or weakness is your danger, as Pride is mine. (You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—tho’ I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them.) In other words, we all have our own burdens, and must do the best we can. I do not know which is the worse, nor СКАЧАТЬ