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

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СКАЧАТЬ as we do love him, not the pleasure he gives us) must be the good in him. Would it not follow that the redeemed B will differ from B as we now know him not by being simply strange but by being that of which we should say ‘Ah—he is himself at last’?

By the way (tho’ it is a little irrelevant), I am astonished at the reward in knowledge given here and now to even very feeble attempts at obedience. I have found once or twice lately that whenever I succeed in beating down my selfish point of view and make an approach to charity, the motives and feelings of all the other people concerned become transparent: and things about them which one didn’t know a moment before, stare one in the face. Is this self deception? If not, I would put it this way. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is a false maxim with a strong tendency to promote the wrong kind of forgiveness: the really true and fruitful maxim is the converse—tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre.⁶⁹

      I can’t go into your questions about prayer. I don’t find that thinking about prayer (I mean in that introspective way) helps me to pray. Of course philosophical thought about it with a view to answering the common objections is another matter. On the whole, you know, I feel that self-examination should be confined to examining one’s conduct. One’s state in general I don’t think one knows much about. But this is all very tentative.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      P.S. I had a long talk with Barfield who admits that his views are in ‘a very liquid condition’. Perhaps our wish is going to be granted.

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (T):⁷⁰

      [The Kilns]

      Aug 20th 1936

      My dear Chapman

Thanks for both letters. After wondering whether the best reply to the ‘pinpricks’ would not be ‘Ah yes—that’s the worst of depending on these local printers!’, I accept them all except sheows⁷¹ which is Spenser’s own spelling. I will also add two more, worse, p 96 quotation 15. for ye read He. p 331 5 lines before the first quotation for pictures read pictured.

Yes—Cissie and Flossie do appear in Tasso and I trust it doesn’t matter though I’d just as soon they didn’t.⁷² But I don’t mind about the lovely lay—it is just the sort of enervating Omar Khyyam stuff you ought to find there.

      ‘Puryfying complexities’—the next time you come across a real commercial pornogram in a French bookshop read a page or two and note how it all depends on isolating one nerve in a way quite impossible in real life—in fact is just as conventional (tho’ for a worse purpose) as roaring farce.

Smoky rain is alright seasoned with sufficient usquebaugh—see Waverley!⁷³

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

Congratulations to the ‘local printer’ on giving us a translation of Otto’s Das Heilige at 3/6—very nice.⁷⁴

      TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      [Magdalen College]

      Postmark: 14 September 1936

      My dear Griffiths—

Excuse me for having left your letter so long unanswered. One thing that delayed it was the more imperative task of answering an other ex-pupil (much junior to you) who is trying to convert me to Hindooism, or at least has sent me three long books by a Frenchman called Guénon⁷⁵—as obvious a quack as ever I smelled out. My wretched man, mark you, is embarking on this without having given the least attention to Christianity or even to secular European philosophy: consequently to write to him is a double battle against the man and against my own impatience. However, since he was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism is a step upwards (at least if it is better to worship false gods than not even to care whether gods exist or not) and—who knows—by some long way round he may be led home in the end. The more one sees the confusion in which young men’s minds grow up now-a-days, the more cause we have to be thankful on our own part. Now for our affair—

1. I am sorry we should have been fogged by what is really a purely linguistic difficulty about rationalism and intellectualism. Surely I drew your attention in the old days, to the fact that these two words have swapped meanings, so that ‘intellect’ in mod. English means the lower faculty (ratio) and ‘reason’ the higher (intellectus). An exactly similar change has effected fancy and imagination: and both are due to Coleridge.⁷⁶ Don’t let us allow this to confuse us again.

      2. I never meant to give you the idea that I would rule a book out because it was scholastic. I denied your view that scholasticism is the philosophia perennis and I expressed distrust of many moderns who call themselves scholastics: quite a different thing.

2. [sic] Before going on to consider the higher mode of knowledge in the Thomist system, I want to ask you does Aquinas himself connect it with poetry? Is there any reason to suppose that he would have allowed us to do so? Does the word poetria⁷⁷ occur anywhere in the Summa?⁷⁸ I ask this because one of my objections to some ‘neo-scholastics’ is that they often pick out Thomist texts and string them together with little regard to their real position in Aquinas’ thought, thus producing an account of ‘Thomist aesthetics’, ‘St. Thomas on representative government’ etc etc which really corresponds to nothing their master ever thought or could have thought. If you could give me a few references (I now have both Summae) I could look up the passages in situ: but till then I cannot judge their real significance. I have a strong suspicion that if I did look them up I should find they had nothing to do with poetry, and we could then be clear which we were discussing—the nature of intellectus or the nature of poetry. If one had asked the Doctor to define poetria, do you suppose he wd. have said any more than p. est ars dictandi in versibus. Quaest I. Utrum rhythmus sit versus modus⁷⁹—or something of that sort.

      3. Prior to all discussion about the form of knowledge you describe, I must make a logical point. Since this knowledge is admittedly prayer and love, and could be shown, from what you say, to be also painting and music, I do not see what is gained by calling it poetry or ‘poetic experience’: for it clearly covers two things higher than poetry, and two things different. At best it would be one of the pre-conditions of poetry. And other conditions which you have left out (e.g. one of language) are surely the differentia of poetry?

4. The various things said about this higher knowledge rather puzzle me. Thus the criteria since discursu, per contactum, quasi ex habitu⁸⁰ seem to me to apply to a great many experiences of what I would call sensuous acquaintance (by acquaintance I mean the French connaitre as opp. to savoir)—e.g. СКАЧАТЬ