(#ulink_e760a5fd-0f61-537b-89f3-0f5798fe79b6) because the Poems from page 42—page 81 may interest you…
You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner…I should like very much to come to Oxford as you suggest; the only thing is that I am a little uncertain about next term because I may be at Canterbury offand on to see the rehearsals of the Play
(#ulink_75b82630-5617-550b-919c-8abc47e22453) I have written for the Friends of the Cathedral to do in June…You will conceive Cranmer as coming under a similar danger to that from which Damaris was saved by the Mercy. Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs…P.S.2. And I am 49-so you can decide whether that is too old or too young.
(#ulink_382f17b0-226d-5540-bab4-4a95d587aefa)
TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):
[Magdalen College]
March 23rd 1936
[Dear Williams,]
This is going to be a complicated matter. To make a clean breast of it, that particular species of romanticism which you found in my book and which is expressed in the poems
(#ulink_fa12289f-51a4-5d5c-9564-a1ee731753c0) you send me, is not my kind at all. I see quite clearly why you think it is—the subject of the book, the at any rate respectful treatment of the sentiment, the apparently tell-tale familiarity with Coventry Patmore—it all fits in perfectly and must seem to you almost like a trap: while it shows me for the first time how paradoxical it is that I, of all men, should have elected, or been elected, to treat such a subject. I trust, however, that there has been no writing with (horror of horrors!) my tongue in my cheek. I think you will find that I nowhere commit myself to a definite approval of this blend of erotic and religious feeling. I treat it with respect: I display: I don’t venture very far. And this is perhaps what one ought to expect from a man who is native in a quite distinct, though neighbouring, province of the Romantic country, and who willingly believes well of all her provinces, for love of the country herself, though he dare not affirm except about his own.
I hope you will find that where I talk of the value of the gods and, above all, of their death and resurrection, I speak much more confidently than I ever do of the Celestial and Terrestrial Cupids: there I am on my own ground. That’s where I live.
I don’t know how far I am making myself clear…the matter, at this stage in our knowledge of each other, is not easy. Put briefly, there is a romanticism which finds its revelation in love, which is yours, and another which finds it in mythology (and nature mythically apprehended) which is mine. Ladies, in the one: gods in the other—the bridal chamber, or the wood beyond the world—a service incensed with rich erotic perfume, a service smelling of heather, salt water etc.
But this distinction is a little complicated by two facts. 1. While writing about Courtly Love I have been so long a student of your province that I think, in a humble way, I am nearly naturalised. 2. In the book I am sending you (don’t read it unless it interests) you will find lots about the frontier between sexual and religious experience.
(#ulink_400a7066-d2d4-5e42-bffd-58d9b6685d58) But look to your feet, here. It really has nothing to do with your province: it is simply about desire, longing, the impersonal tiling: which oddly enough can be diverted from the wood beyond the world (are you still following me?) into lust just as quickly as ‘love’ can. We shall have a great deal to talk about when we meet.
After this you will not be surprised to learn that I found your poems excessively difficult. I think I have followed Ascension.
(#ulink_cacbf244-03f6-59e7-afec-ef04b001006c) I take it this deals with the death of passion into matrimonial routine and the discovery that this death is also a birth—the birth of something which is to passion as the Church is to the earthly life of Our Lord. Am I right? If so it is because we touch here: the death and re-birth motive being of the very essence of my kind of romanticism. If so, it is a good poem, specially stanzas 2 and 7. The Christian Year
(#ulink_69f102ec-a759-5f76-9430-f1c2b1a85e9d) I take to be on the same theme, but there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. What I liked best was the bit about the Shepherds at the top of page 73. This may quite possibly be even a great poem—I’ll tell you in a year or so, if I find out. (And talking of years, I’m 37.) Churches I didn’t like, except that dear duplicity of love and Love—which I suppose is the thing we’re talking about. Presentation I liked, and the bit in Gratia Plena about the provincial dialect. Orthodoxy and Ecclesia Docens I definitely disliked. (I embrace the opportunity of establishing the precedent of brutal frankness, without which our acquaintance begun like this would easily be a mere butter bath!) But the thing I liked best of all came outside the ‘pages prescribed for special study’-notably Endings, The Clerk, and Ballade of a Street Door (tho’ I can’t construe line 2).
I have read Many Dimensions
(#ulink_a73c12aa-7415-512e-8411-da68918c5e6c) with an enormous enjoyment—not that it’s as good as the Lion, but then in a sense it hardly means to be. By Jove, it is an experience when this time-travelling business is done by a man who really thinks it out. I believe all your conclusions do really follow—and I never thought 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 blurb
(#ulink_4e5c67ed-c687-508d-a98f-e7cd36c5698b)-a relief, after the nonsensical one put out from Walton Street! But not a word, he
(#ulink_959b58d2-e97e-52c2-b605-5b737a585565) 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.
(#ulink_d3c77782-6dfb-5a99-b63d-dd55d6f20668) 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.
(#ulink_37cbd4c8-f34b-5aa4-aefe-d1def7904a29) 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.
(#ulink_94b58b83-d6a1-5bdd-84db-c8120e04aa8b) 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.
(#ulink_cbd38850-8db4-542f-9851-b503ff2c8379) 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.
