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

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СКАЧАТЬ of being caught in that perpetual to-and-fro. The effect which that first idea of a really possible hell has on Lord Thingummy is excellent.

      I shouldn’t dream of coming to London without visiting you, but I can and do dream of not being in London for a long time. But Canterbury can’t claim you all the time, and there are others besides me who want to meet you. The fourth week of next term (May 18th-May 22nd) would be a good time. Could we nail you now for a week day night between those dates? Of course, I realise that this letter, for more than one cause, may have quenched all wish for a meeting: but acting on the pleasanter hypothesis—

      [C. S. Lewis]

P.S. Thanks for the very kind and intelligent blurb²⁶-a relief, after the nonsensical one put out from Walton Street! But not a word, he²⁷ may have been doing his best.

      TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      [Magdalen College]

      April 24th [1936]

      My dear Griffiths—

I was more than usually glad to hear from you this time because I had been feeling that my last letter was somewhat ill tempered. If so, forgive me. The truth is that I have a constant temptation to over asperity as soon as I get a pen in my hand, even when there is no subjective anger to prompt me: it comes, I think, simply from the pleasure of using the English language forcibly—i.e. is not a species of Ira but of Sapientia.²⁸ This problem of the pleasure in what Aristotle called an ‘unimpeded activity’ is one that exercises me very much—not of course in an instance like the one I have just been discussing where it is plainly abused, but when the work done is a duty, or at least innocent.

      On the one hand, Nature, whether we will or know [not], attaches pleasure to doing as well as we can something we can do fairly well: and as it is a clear duty to practise all virtuous activities until we can do them well—possess the Habit of doing them—it is a sort of duty to increase such pleasures. On the other hand, they are pleasures of a particularly urgent, absorbing sort, very apt to become idols, and very closely allied to Pride. I heard it recently said in a Lenten sermon that even self-denial can become a kind of hobby—and in a way it is true.

      Put in another form, the question is how you decide whether an ability and strong propensity for some activity is a temptation or a vocation. You will answer that it all depends whether we can and do offer it to God. But frankly—and I want your answer very much—have you made any approaches to a state in which the conscious offering to God can be maintained concurrently with the actual donkey work of doing the job? I find that I can do those things (even) which I believe that God wills me to do (such as writing this letter) by forgetting God while I do them. I don’t mean forgetting intellectually (which wd. be absurd in the present instance) but turning away—not offering. Is this due to sin or to the very nature of human consciousness?

About the Scholastics, I must have expressed myself very badly if you thought I held that one system of philosophy was as good as another or that pure reason was mutable. All I meant was that no philosophy is perfect: nor can be, since, whatever is true of Reason herself, in the human process of reasoning there is always error and even what is right, in solving one problem, always poses another. I therefore reject the idea of any real philosophia perennis.²⁹ The dominance (and revival) of particular philosophy does seem to me to have historical causes. In any age, foolish men want that philosophy whose truths they least need and whose errors are most dangerous to them: and wise men want the opposite. In the next age neither fools nor wise want the same.

      My original point was that Scholasticism could hardly have had its present prestige in an age like the 19th century when hard thinking seemed to be on the side of materialism: then the business of Christian philosophy was to remind people that there is something which escapes discursive thought. For the moment, the collapse of scientific dogmatism and the growth of a kind of spurious mysticism among anti-Christian thinkers (Heavens! you ought to know all about it) has reversed the situation. But don’t think this state of affairs will be more permanent than any other. Reason, no doubt, is always on the side of Christianity: but that amount and kind of human reasoning which gives an age its dominant intellectual tone, is surely sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other.

      Again, we must believe that there is no real conflict between the Rational and the Mystical: but in a given period now one, now the other, will be what the world actually needs to be most reminded of—I mean the unbelieving world: and one or the other will usually be the bridge to faith. Thus you and I came to it chiefly by Reason (I don’t mean, of course, that any one comes at all but by God’s grace—I am talking about the route not the motive power) but dozens of other converts, beginning with St. Paul, did not.

I have often wished I had time to learn Hebrew, but I think it would be for me more an indulgence than a duty. I should like to hear more about your doctrine of sophistication: I am inclined to think you may be right, but one would have to define ‘sophistication’ carefully. I certainly suppose (but this may be ignorance) that the Hebrew scriptures are the only document of religion carried to the very highest sub-Christian height, while remaining as anthropomorphic as primitive polytheism…What a bugbear ‘anthropomorphism’ used to be! How long it repelled me from the truth! Yet now that one has submitted to it how easy is the burden, how light the yoke.³⁰ Odd too, that the very things we thought proofs of our humility while we were philosophers, now turn out to be forms of pride.

Sayer—pray for Sayer.³¹ He is just what I was at a slightly earlier age than his: at the mercy of something which is innocent in itself (the desire to be liked) but which, unresisted, leads to ludicrous vanity, pretentiousness, and direct, pitiful lying. Yet he is likable because of the one redeeming trait that he really knows himself to be (at present) rather a little tick: oh, and the good side of his ruling passion, which is a peculiar accessibility to shame. All this, of course, is very much in confidence.

      I re-read St. Augustine’s Confessions during Lent, and found it better than I remember, tho’ still it is the explicitly devotional parts that edify me least. I’ll see if I can let you have a copy of my book if you want it. But the main subject is the rise of a romantic conception of sexual love and the transition from adultery to marriage as the normal channel for it: i.e. it would be an odd book to find in a monastery.

      Write again. Write at the end of every term when I shall have a bright new Vac. to answer in.

      Yours,

      C.S.L.

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      May 1st 1936

      My dear Arthur,

      I must confess it would not have been a good time for you to turn up. Why will you insist on coming to England in vacations and summers? If you would only come in the Autumn term (Oct 11th-Dec. 5th) I would try to make you comfortable in college: and I don’t need to breakfast so early now. About the Kilns, I am sorry: I know that for many reasons it can never be a comfortable house for you to stay in.

      I shall be free on and after June 27th and would come any time you suggested. I look forward СКАЧАТЬ