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

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9949a3d3-8801-5f5b-89af-ee43465cb4ee">59 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1623).

60 This concert, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, was given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre on 28 November 1935, For details see The Oxford Magazine, LIV (5 December 1935), pp. 244, 246.

61 Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, first performed in 1870.

62 Beatrix Potter, Squirrel Nutkin (1903): ‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band,/He comes roaring up the land.’

63 Barfield had sent Lewis a copy of a verse-drama he had written, and which remains unpublished.

64 The words ‘sheep-dotted downs’ are found in Canto V, stanza 32 of Lewis’s poem. Dymer (1926), and he discovered them in Barfield’s unpublished novel, ‘English People’.

65 Barfield gave Lewis a copy of George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).

66 As Lewis mentions in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 December 1935, he was correcting the proofs of The Allegory of Love.

1936

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      Jan 8th 1936

      My dear Griffiths,

Thank you for your kind and interesting letter. It must be nice to know some Aristotle, and it is a relief to hear that kind of philosophy praised by you who have a right to judge: for in the Oxford world ‘Neo-Scholasticism’ has become such a fashion among ignorant undergrads. that I am sick of the sound of it. A man who was an atheist two terms ago, and admitted into your Church last term, and who had never read a word of philosophy, comes to me urging me to read the Summa¹ and offering to lend me a copy!

      By the way, I hope that the great religious revival now going on will not get itself too mixed up with Scholasticism, for I am sure that the revival of the latter, however salutary, must be as temporary as any other movement in philosophy. Of things on the natural level, now one, now another, is the ally or the enemy of Faith. The scientists have got us in such a muddle that at present rationalism is on our side, and enthusiasm is an enemy: the opposite was true in the 19th century and will be true again. I mean, we have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes, except the Word.

I should be interested to see your Review of my little book.² I am afraid it will have misled you into thinking my position more catholic than it really is, and that not for a spiritual reason but a merely literary one. I did not want to keep introducing the Lord Himself, and ‘Christianity’ is not a plausible name for a character. Hence the name, and some of the functions, of my Mother Kirk—adopted clumsily for convenience, without my realising till I began to read my reviewers, that I had given a much more ecclesiastical bent to the whole thing than I had intended. You may say ‘All the better’; but I tell you the facts to defend my honesty.³ And by the same token, I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!

      Thank you for your prayers: you know mine too, little worth as they are. Have you found, or is it peculiar to me, that it is much easier to pray for others than for oneself. Doubtless because every return to ones own situation involves action: or to speak more plainly, obedience. That appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one. Did you ever notice a beautiful touch in the Faerie Queene

‘a groom them laid at rest in easie bedd, His name was meek Obedience.’⁴

      What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason.

Remember me to the Prior. Did I tell you that I have met both Waterman⁵ & Skinner⁶ and liked them v. much.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      Feb 20th 1936

      Dear Griffiths

      Thanks very much for the copy of Pax and the too kind review of my little book.

      One sentence in your letter has kept me chuckling ever since: ‘you have no reason to fear that anything you say can have any serious effect on me’. The underlying assumption that anyone who knew you would feel such a fear is not only funny but excruciatingly funny…ask the Prior if he sees the joke: I rather think he will.

      As to the main issue I can only repeat what I have said before. One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You, in your charity, are anxious to convert me: but I am not in the least anxious to convert you. You think my specifically Protestant beliefs a tissue of damnable errors: I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions, but which I think suitable for you. I therefore feel no duty to attack you: and I certainly feel no inclination to add to my other works an epistolary controversy with one of the toughest dialecticians of my acquaintance, to which he can devote as much time and reading as he likes and I can devote very little. As well—who wants to debate with a man who begins by saying that no argument can possibly move him? Talk sense, man! With other Catholics I find no difficulty in deriving much edification from religious talk on the common ground: but you refuse to show any interest except in differences.

It was a great shock to learn that Thomism is now de fide for your Church—if that is what you mean. But is that really so? I should welcome СКАЧАТЬ