I shall be free on and after June 27th and would come any time you suggested. I look forward to it with enormous pleasure—tho’ rather ashamed that I can make so little return. I trust you won’t be packing all the time I’m with you!
Oddly enough I read Aerial
(#ulink_45c7398f-f217-5ff5-827b-41f660506ac4) too, and in the same edition a few weeks ago—good fun. I don’t know how far it is reliable.
No time to write now. Please let me have a line saying which dates after the 27th wd. suit you. Is the enclosed good?—I can’t help hoping not. I shall be sending you my book in a week or so. Love to all
Yours,
Jack
The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford on 21 May 1936.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
[Magdalen College]
May 23rd 1936
Dear Griffiths
I am very surprised that your old anti-intellectual ism should be so active—and yet perhaps I should not be since it is often said that conversion alters only the direction not the character of our minds. (This, by the bye, is very important and explains how personal and affectional relations between human souls can recognisably survive even in the full blaze of the beatific vision: and that if we are both saved I shall find you to all eternity in one sense still the same old Griffiths—indeed more the same than ever).
I don’t agree. In the first place, I question your account of Our Lord, when you say ‘He is essentially a poet and not at all a philosopher.’ Surely the ‘type of mind’ represented in the human nature of Christ (and in virtue of His humanity we may, I suppose, neither irreverently nor absurdly speak of it as a ‘type of mind’) stands at just about the same distance from the poetic as from the philosopher. The overwhelming majority of His utterances are in fact addressed neither to thought nor to the imagination, but to the ‘heart’—i.e. to the will and the affections: that is, the type is that of the
(#ulink_b3f152fe-9ea6-5864-9a33-12388b95d6ae) (as opposed to the
),
(#ulink_c6a78ce9-d6c0-57a6-b6dd-87fa6fc332b8) the hortatory and advisory practical moralist. I shudder to use so bleak a word as ‘moralist’, but I think it less untrue than ‘poet’ or ‘philosopher’.
You will say that it approaches the poetic in the parables. But this is only an approach: it would (on my view) be an entirely misdirected reverence that would on that basis call him a poet. The parables approach poetry just about as much [as] His argumentative utterances approach philosophy. And it is easy to make too little of these latter. After all, how full of argument, of repartee, even of irony, He is. The passage about the denarius (‘whose image and superscription’);
(#ulink_98c32e19-f15f-541e-a5eb-e8173e617c56) the dilemma about John’s baptism;
(#ulink_ec03ba3e-6592-5b0c-a1f1-e1c1f5c5c44c) the argument against the Sadducees from the words ‘I am the God of Jacob etc’;
(#ulink_27a04f87-5b09-5cd3-a713-4687f4c9f423) the terrible, yet almost humorous, trap laid for his Pharisaic host (‘Simon, I have something to say to you’);
(#ulink_99eb5272-861c-5b2a-a46b-6cae887d33a0) the repeated use of the â fortiori (‘If…, how much more’);
(#ulink_cf8632a6-e369-5bd6-aa3a-536e186a681f) and the appeals to our reason (‘Why do not ye of yourselves judge what is right?’)
(#ulink_8ab049df-b928-5199-84ba-a89c040fcc21)—surely in all these we recognise as the human and natural vehicle of the Word’s incarnation a mental complexion in which a keen-eyed peasant shrewdness is just as noticeable as an imaginative quality—something in other words quite as close (on the natural level) to Socrates as to Aeschylus.
Even about the parables I want to make a point. It is a commonplace that Our Lord, in them, often paradoxically chooses to illustrate the ways of God by the acts not of good men, but of bad men. But surely this means that the mode in which the fable represents its truth is intellectual rather than imaginative—like a philosopher’s illustration rather than a poet’s simile. The unjust judge,
(#ulink_a0237b4a-d426-580f-a0b5-2268831a0721) to the imagination, presents no likeness of God—carries into the story no divine flavour or colour (as the Father of the Prodigal Son,
(#ulink_965f83e6-9aa2-52f8-8a1b-e8b6b34c4332) for instance, does). His likeness to God is purely for the intellect. It is a kind of proportion sum—A:B::C:D.
I therefore on the whole reject any divine authority which your anti-intellectualism seems to draw from the person of Our Lord. I also deny that the ordinary man, with his mind full of images and poor in concepts, is really any nearer to the poet than to the philosopher. For the poet uses images as such, because they are images: the ordinary man (that is, all of us from most of our waking hours) uses them faute de mieux
(#ulink_4b183a25-c103-524a-a15a-58df353968f0) to attain knowledge, i.e. his end is the same as the philosopher’s. What is functional in the poet is merely an accidental imperfection in the plain man. Surely the process of mistaking an image for a concept is quite different from that of using images for their proper purposes: processes are distinguished teleologically. Should I be a surgeon because, lacking a knife, I one day used a lancet to cut up my dinner? To be a surgeon means to use a surgeon’s tools not anyhow but surgically—you can find all this in Aristotle.
Nor does any sane man, however ‘plain’, use images for thought quite as much as you suggest. His thought is accompanied by images but he is quite well aware that it is not about them he thinks—e.g. he knows perfectly well that the things he believes about London are not true of his image of London, which may be a mere huddle of roofs.
Again, if you are suggesting that the Hebrew consciousness was just right and the Greek just wrong, this seems to me to be quite foreign to the tenor of St. Paul’s teaching. He seems to hold quite definitely (a) That Our Lord has ‘broken down the middle wall of partition and made one Man’,
(#ulink_41c46143-b4b1-572d-a14e-1d4ee31d65e3) wh. is quite different from simply bringing errant Hellenism back to Hebraic rectitude (b) That the ‘reasonings’ of the Pagans (see Romans) are related to the new Faith much as the Jewish Law is.
(#ulink_9a113161-667d-5cec-8521-b9eb120966e7) In Galatians he even seems to equate the Pagan bondage to the
with Jewish bondage to the Law.
(#ulink_2fa8698f-35b9-50b8-9853-a07605e95c5b)
I know they dispute what
: means, whether elemental powers (gods, angels) or ‘rudiments’ in the educational sense: but surely it is clear that it means both, that St. Paul is using a double entendre. For the ‘rudiments’ meaning is demanded by III 25, IV 1–3: and the other by IV 3 (
) and 8. In fact the whole relation between Paganism and Judaism wh. I hinted [at] in my Regress is quite Pauline—more so than I really knew at the time.
(#ulink_f5bfe151-c514-5906-8af0-8dff5e8163ba) The great thing is to stick to the ‘one Man’. That is why I have a great objection to any theory that would set parts of us at loggerheads with one another. It is a kind of
.
(#ulink_55887491-98be-5fe0-bfcb-4625838c1ec7) The Pagans, by their lights, may wisely have constructed a hierarchical scheme of Man, Reason ruling Passion politically and Soul ruling body despotically. But in Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free.
(#ulink_e8fe27b2-461d-549f-a443-9682a5d4a9ff) If the whole man is offered to God, all disputes about the value of this or that faculty are, as it were, henceforward out of date.
You said in your letter (going further than some would go) that every natural desire per se shd. be regarded as an attraction of grace. But if so, how much more every natural faculty!
This view of yours about desire is, I suppose, Augustinian. Habe caritatem et fac quod vis.
(#ulink_b802315e-6ef7-53fc-bca8-530de5638e91) This is certainly sound, but not perhaps very practical: for it implies Donec caritatem habens, noli facere quod vis.
(#ulink_b484032e-77f9-599e-8be5-cbe45ee0a1c5) I wholly agree with what you say about escaping from the circle of morality into the love of God: in fact you have written an excellent commentary on St. Paul’s view of the ‘Law’. But in the meantime?
This letter is getting too long: the subject has endless ramifications, but I will wait for your next. Rejoice with me—timidly, for it is only the first streak of dawn and may be false dawn-there are faint signs of a movement away from Anthroposophy in Barfield.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO LEO BAKER (BOD):
Magdalen College
