TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford
Oct 5th 1938
Dear Dom Bede
I am afraid I have forgotten most of the things I said in my last letter. The opinion of my friend about the end of life was not, I should suppose, quoted with any approval of mine. As to whether reason can rigorously prove God and immortality, what is one to say? I do not remember to have seen a proof that appeared to me absolutely compelling, but that may be only my reason or the writer’s reason: At any rate it is obvious that pure reason, in human beings, is very often in fact not convinced. I shd. suppose that the truths imbedded in Paganism owe at least as much to tradition and divine guidance as to ratiocination. About war—I have always believed that it is lawful for a Christian to bear arms in war when commanded by constituted authority unless he has very good reason (which a private person rarely has) for believing the war to be unjust. I base this 1. On the fact that Our Lord does not appear to have regarded the Roman soldiers as ex officio sinners. 2. On the fact that the Baptist told soldiers not to leave the army, but to be good soldiers.
(#ulink_b1183e60-02e5-56d9-be6a-1e0abf6ed1f7). On the opinion of St Augustine (somewhere in De Civitate).
(#ulink_663aab20-988f-5e49-a73b-0bf07e110a68) 4. On the general agreement of all Christian communities except a few sects—who generally combine pacifism with other odd opinions. I take the dicta in the Sermon on the Mount to be prohibitions of revenge, not as a counsel of perfection but as absolutely binding on all Christians.
(#ulink_65b446cd-b015-58a1-a48d-6915e799db87) But I do not think punishment inflicted by lawful authorities for the right motives is revenge: still less, violent action in the defence of innocent people. I cannot believe the knight errant idea to be sinful. Even in the very act of fighting I think charity (to the enemy) is not more endangered than in many necessary acts wh. we all admit to be lawful.
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On reunion I have no contribution to make: it is a matter quite above my sphere.
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I was terrified to find how terrified I was by the crisis. Pray for me for courage.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS STUART MOORE (EVELYN UNDERHILL) (M):
(#ulink_af6a099b-72d6-53b9-ae98-94f5729f0267)
As from Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Oct 29th 1938
Dear Madam
Your letter is one of the most surprising and, in a way, alarming honours I have ever had. I have not been for very long a believer and have hitherto regarded the great mystical writers as a man in the foothills regards the glaciers and precipices: to find myself noticed from regions which I scarcely feel qualified to notice is really quite overwhelming. In trying to thank you, I find myself regretting that we have given such an ugly meaning to the word ‘Condescension’ which ought to have remained a beautiful name for a beautiful action.
I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book.
(#ulink_085db9c8-d913-5c0f-9ffc-c59538888c50) Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well!
Again thanking you very much,
Yours very truly,
C. S. Lewis
During the course of 1938 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press asked F. P. Wilson to prepare a ‘progress report’ on the Oxford History of English Literature. In his Report to the Delegates, dated 20 December 1938, Wilson said that C. S. Lewis had written to him thus:
I go on reading and write on each subject while it is fresh in mind. Out of these scattered sheets, perhaps after much correction, I hope to build up a book. The subjects so treated already are Platonism, Douglas, Lyndsay, Tottel, Mulcaster’s Elementarie, Sir Thomas More, Prayer-book, Sidney, Marlowe (non-dramatic), Nashe, Watson, Barclay, Googe, Raleigh (poems), Shakespeare (poems), Webbe; and among other sources Petrarch and Machiavelli.
I am at present hard at work not directly on the book but on a lecture entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’: a similar Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry which I have and still give proved to be a useful buttress to the other book.
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I can give no indication of when it will be done. I find the work to be got through is enormous and would be delighted for an honourable pretext to withdraw: excessive pressure from the delegates might come to constitute an honourable pretext.
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TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
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[The Kilns]
Dec. 28th 1938
Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure.
You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.)
(#ulink_6018de38-7480-5c96-9b25-6c2e36d19d60) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds
(#ulink_7a06f706-5e5e-53d7-8fee-4f7a1be19854) both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon
(#ulink_29745ccf-63df-5843-a342-0c5f7a126303) the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs
(#ulink_989093fe-e30f-5cb9-b398-59ce40b87f8d) in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen.
I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre,
(#ulink_ba2c689b-59e3-5063-9659-f598d6e0f794) but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Micromégas
(#ulink_19c5bd2f-6d3a-5fda-a0fb-bef2c055d1aa) but purely satiric.
Yrs.
C. S. Lewis
1 (#ulink_a35f07f1-4554-58ac-9b25-412f405fd428) Professor Douglas Bush (1896–1983), born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, was educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. An instructor in English at Harvard, 1924–7, he taught in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, 1927–36. In 1936 he returned to Harvard as Professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 1966. He and Lewis were both writing volumes for the Oxford History of English Literature, Bush’s contribution being English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945). His other boob include Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (1952), John Milton (1964) and Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry (1968).
