There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em‘Old Lewis is dyin’For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’
Have a heart!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Ubi est leonis locus?Caecilii lar et focus?
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TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
[Magdalen College
28 July 1936]
My dear Griffiths
First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture.
Surely the truth is that poetry is simply a special kind of speech, a way of saying things, and one can no more talk about poetry in the abstract than about ‘saying’. When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association etc, one is beginning to use ‘poetry’: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element but a mode. Of course poetry falls out of sight in the highest levels of devotion; but only in the same way in which other forms of expression (work, gestures etc) also fall out of sight. Most people who talk about Poetry in the abstract are, I think,
.
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I have not made up my mind about Mysticism. Two things give me pause. 1. That the similarity between Christian and non Christian mysticism is so strong. I by no means conclude from this that it is un-Christian in the sense of being incompatible with Christianity; but I am inclined to think that it is not specifically Christian—that it is simply one of those neutral things which the Spirit utilises in a given man when it happens to be there. I.e. it may be a given man’s vocation to approach God mystically because he has the mystical faculty, but only in the same way as it is another man’s duty to serve God by driving a plough because he is a good ploughman. And if any one tried to impose mysticism as the norm of Christian life I suspect he would be making the same mistake as one who said we ought all to be fishermen because some of the apostles were.
2. I am struck by the absence of much mysticism from the New Testament. I am not, I hope, forgetting which is the first and great commandment—but you would probably agree that the mystic’s way of obeying it is not the only way.
I quite agree with you that the change which even the greatest saint must undergo (how much more, we) in being redeemed is beyond all imagination: I take
(#ulink_f53fe453-fc1a-5ab8-94b0-bb49b2e0e0c7) in as serious sense as I am able. But 1. the new man must still be in some sense the same, or else salvation has no meaning. The very ideas of conversion and regeneration are essentially different from the idea of substitution. Also, don’t we actually see it beginning in this life—I mean the turning round of the very same aptitudes which previously determined the kind of sin.
2. I object to your saying ‘What is of real value in us is that which is hidden from each other and even from ourselves’. I would have said ‘From ourselves and even from each other’. That is, I think that when A loves B, tho’ A’s picture of B is doubtless very unlike the redeemed B, I suppose it to be much less unlike than B’s picture of himself. For we have often agreed, haven’t we, that one can love nothing but good—sin consisting in the love of the inferior good at the expense of the superior. And if so, what we really love in our friend (in so far as we do love him, not the pleasure he gives us) must be the good in him. Would it not follow that the redeemed B will differ from B as we now know him not by being simply strange but by being that of which we should say ‘Ah—he is himself at last’?
By the way (tho’ it is a little irrelevant), I am astonished at the reward in knowledge given here and now to even very feeble attempts at obedience. I have found once or twice lately that whenever I succeed in beating down my selfish point of view and make an approach to charity, the motives and feelings of all the other people concerned become transparent: and things about them which one didn’t know a moment before, stare one in the face. Is this self deception? If not, I would put it this way. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is a false maxim with a strong tendency to promote the wrong kind of forgiveness: the really true and fruitful maxim is the converse—tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre.
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I can’t go into your questions about prayer. I don’t find that thinking about prayer (I mean in that introspective way) helps me to pray. Of course philosophical thought about it with a view to answering the common objections is another matter. On the whole, you know, I feel that self-examination should be confined to examining one’s conduct. One’s state in general I don’t think one knows much about. But this is all very tentative.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. I had a long talk with Barfield who admits that his views are in ‘a very liquid condition’. Perhaps our wish is going to be granted.
TO R. W. CHAPMAN (T):
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[The Kilns]
Aug 20th 1936
My dear Chapman
Thanks for both letters. After wondering whether the best reply to the ‘pinpricks’ would not be ‘Ah yes—that’s the worst of depending on these local printers!’, I accept them all except sheows
(#ulink_e588c9c9-ac84-515b-ad65-8b0fc12dc543) which is Spenser’s own spelling. I will also add two more, worse, p 96 quotation 15. for ye read He. p 331 5 lines before the first quotation for pictures read pictured.
Yes—Cissie and Flossie do appear in Tasso and I trust it doesn’t matter though I’d just as soon they didn’t.
(#ulink_0916afc7-a16e-5d4b-868a-e42e6402d32e) But I don’t mind about the lovely lay—it is just the sort of enervating Omar Khyyam stuff you ought to find there.
‘Puryfying complexities’—the next time you come across a real commercial pornogram in a French bookshop read a page or two and note how it all depends on isolating one nerve in a way quite impossible in real life—in fact is just as conventional (tho’ for a worse purpose) as roaring farce.
Smoky rain is alright seasoned with sufficient usquebaugh—see Waverley!
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Yours
C. S. Lewis
Congratulations to the ‘local printer’ on giving us a translation of Otto’s Das Heilige at 3/6—very nice.
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TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
[Magdalen College]
Postmark: 14 September 1936
My dear Griffiths—
Excuse me for having left your letter so long unanswered. One thing that delayed it was the more imperative task of answering an other ex-pupil (much junior to you) who is trying to convert me to Hindooism, or at least has sent me three long books by a Frenchman called Guénon
(#ulink_2718bde3-076b-55e2-b87d-ca7dac2a58b6)—as obvious a quack as ever I smelled out. My wretched man, mark you, is embarking on this without having given the least attention to Christianity or even to secular European philosophy: consequently to write to him is a double battle against the man and against my own impatience. However, since he was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism is a step upwards (at least if it is better to worship false gods than not even to care whether gods exist or not) and—who knows—by some long way round he may be led home in the end. The more one sees the confusion in which young men’s minds grow up now-a-days, the more cause we have to be thankful on our own part. Now for our affair—
1. I am sorry we should have been fogged by what is really a purely linguistic difficulty about rationalism and intellectualism. Surely I drew your attention in the old days, to the fact that these two words have swapped meanings, so that ‘intellect’ in mod. English means the lower faculty (ratio) and ‘reason’ the higher (intellectus). An exactly similar change has effected fancy and imagination: and both are due to Coleridge.
(#ulink_c3071da8-afc5-5f1f-a575-34f76558047b) Don’t let us allow this to confuse us again.
2. I never meant to give you the idea that I would rule a book out because it was scholastic. I denied your view that scholasticism is the philosophia perennis and I expressed distrust of many moderns who call themselves scholastics: quite a different thing.
