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 a letter clearing the matter up—I don’t mean clearing up the content of Thomism but the degree to which it has been made necessary to salvation.
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With continued good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 26th 1936
My dear Arthur,
I see to my consternation that it is over a month since your letter came. It certainly deserved an earlier answer but you must forgive me.
I was very sorry indeed to hear about ‘Tommy’. I am particularly sorry for John.
(#ulink_cc06b266-81e0-50b5-9e3d-d5e9e3325dd6) You know I crossed with the pair of them last time I left home: and I should like to say as impressively as I can—and you to take note—that I was very much impressed by seeing them together and by the fine, almost the spiritual atmosphere of their whole world of mountain climbing. It gave me a new and most favourable sidelight on John: and I am afraid it is most unlikely that he will find any one to take Tommy’s place. I am very sorry for him. Try to be as nice to him as you can—but I have no doubt you are doing that already.
For yourself I expect days are pretty dim at present. Do you hear good news of the boy? As I said before, I am sure you have done the right thing, and I’m afraid that is all the comfort I can offer.
I quite understand what you say about the comfort derived from all a dog’s ‘little affairs’, and enjoyed reading that passage as much as any in your letter. They are a busy folk. And talking of dogs, poor old Mr Papworth has been gathered to his fathers. He had been ailing for some time and finally got a bad ulcer on his chin. He was given a strong sleeping draught. When I went to bed he was asleep in his basket and breathing as gently as a child: in the morning he was dead. Minto has been very badly upset—almost as if for a human being. I don’t feel it as badly as that myself and would discourage the feeling (I think) if I had it. But it is a parting, and one sometimes remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache.
I have just read what I think a really great book, ‘The Place of the Lion’ by Charles Williams.
(#ulink_e25d0aeb-a3e7-5043-b501-32e244042762) It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archtypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archtypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archtypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them.
It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.
My own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term.
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Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill.
We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather.
Most of Sibelius’ symphonies are recorded and are glorious. I agree with you about the Old Curiosity Shop
(#ulink_1d756028-d1c2-5b47-9d73-cea25d94f5c3)—one of the most homely and friendly of all Dickens. With love to you all.
Yours
Jack
Since the early 1930s a group of Christian friends had been meeting in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms every Thursday evening to talk and usually to read aloud whatever they might be writing. The group had its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s weekly visits to Lewis’s rooms in 1929 where he read aloud his stories of Middle-Earth. Shortly afterwards, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74),
(#ulink_fa5f6dc5-f10b-5b9b-8614-d6de1757cc33) a brilliant young student and one of Lewis’s pupils, founded a society of undergraduates and dons who met in his rooms to read unpublished manuscripts aloud, after which there would be comments and criticism. Lewis and Tolkien both became members. Lean christened the group ‘The Inklings’—suggesting someone who dabbles in ink. The club founded by Lean died when he took his degree and left Oxford. But, wrote Professor Tolkien,
Its name was transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association andits habit would in fact have come into bang at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.
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By 1936 this informal group included Lewis, Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil,
(#ulink_9552a2bb-69c7-54a4-8a1f-1b36419e2e53) Dr Robert E. Havard
(#ulink_c4ac63df-5329-54d3-aba6-e21c990847ed) and Charles Wrenn.
(#ulink_4d5b5fab-d131-58d6-94e5-786d01d13d49) Besides the Thursday meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub. Lewis’s next letter was to a man he was keen to introduce to these friends.
TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):
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[Magdalen College]
March 11th 1936
[Dear Mr Williams,]
I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.
A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification.
I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl…I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it.
Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book: I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks.
[C. S. Lewis]
On 12 March Charles Williams wrote to Lewis from Oxford University Press, Amen House, London:
My dear Mr Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.
To be exact, i finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first…I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology, which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So Amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced.
After vacillating a good deal I permit myself to believe in your letter and in the interests of the subject so far as to send you a copy of one of my early books of verse,
