My dear Arthur,
I have no right to complain that I have not yet heard from you. Nor have I much to say on my own account: but I think I will write a little just to feel that we are keeping the channel open.
W. and I are heartily sick of the summer, the others not. The pond is sinking lower and lower and all sorts of stones and roots that ought to be covered are projecting—it seems almost an indecency. The water is getting dirtier and warmer and bathing has been abandoned. Flowers and vegetables are withering and the ground is so hard that a short walk leaves you footsore as if you had been walking on pavements. This morning we woke to coolness and thick mist and spangled cobwebs. I thought it was the first day of autumn and felt the old excitement. But it was all a cheat and by the time we came out of church it was another blazing day—pitiless blue sky, sun hammering bleached white grass, wasps buzzing, dragon flies darting, and Mr Papworth panting in the shade with his tongue out.
Which reminds me—I am so sorry to hear about your Paddy. I couldn’t lay my hands on your letter when I was writing last—I knew there was something in it I hadn’t dealt with but couldn’t remember what. How heartless you must have thought me. I now have your letter and can fully sympathise. It is always hard luck when you feel that other people have hidden facts from you till it is too late. I don’t now agree—how heartily I once would have—with any idea of ‘trying to forget’ things and people we have lost, or indeed with trying always and on principle to exclude any kind of distressing thought from one’s mind. I don’t mean one ought to sentimentalize a sorrow, or (often) scratch a shame till it is raw. But I had better not go on with the subject as I find my ideas are all in disorder. I know I feel very strongly that when in a wakeful night some idea which one ‘can’t stand’—some painful memory or mean act of ones own or vivid image of physical pain—thrusts itself upon you, that you ought not to thrust it away but look it squarely in the face for some appreciable time: giving it of course an explicitly devotional context. But I don’t fully know why and am not prepared to work the thing out. Anyway, this only very faintly arises out of what you said—and it won’t bring the poor beast back to life!
I have just re-read Lilith
(#ulink_6b47268e-3d41-58c8-9764-abbe0c1cbf6c) and am much clearer about the meaning. The first thing to get out of the way is all Greville Macdonald’s nonsense about ‘dimensions’ and ‘elements’—if you have his preface in your edition.
(#ulink_dc9ed52e-2cbd-532d-b5fc-8bdb7f5dfd49) That is just the sort of mechanical ‘mysticism’ which is worlds away from Geo. Macdonald. The main lesson of the book is against secular philanthropy—against the belief that you can effectively obey the 2nd command about loving your neighbour without first trying to love God.
The story runs like this. The human soul exploring its own house (the Mind) finds itself on the verge of unexpected worlds which at first dismay it (Chap. I-V). The first utterance of these worlds is an unconditional demand for absolute surrender of the Soul to the 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 Kong
(#ulink_68a2bb14-6f9a-5c6f-9779-d3de67b49eff) 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 Janet
(#ulink_a0fa2a95-0acb-530d-ba4b-c27d81109c1b)—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 Gold
(#ulink_f0e38200-bac3-58ad-a021-43177ff90bb8) 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’.
(#ulink_02538f73-4843-5659-b709-d2adbfd530eb) 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. He wants exactly the same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient 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)
(#ulink_590fa0f3-3bc8-5770-a3ac-3b7ca9aedd12) 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.’
(#ulink_a7a54b49-ea70-50e6-be1f-e9d452919fc3) 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,
(#ulink_a8c0b5bb-3b51-5fa8-bd93-fe724f7daeac) and Gore’s Jesus of Nazareth (Home University Library)
(#ulink_256c1015-bf3c-5927-b1d8-3b2bdbad14f0) 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 do we need to: if each of us could imitate the other.
The woods are just beginning to turn here—the drive was exquisite this afternoon. Love from all.
Yours,
Jack
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
