My brother joins me in sending you all best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W): TS
REF.50/18.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 21st December 1950
Dear Mrs. Jones,
What, again!! Really two large and handsome food parcels in the same month is spoiling us completely. Here is a beauty from CARE just come in, in nice time for Christmas, and we are all very grateful indeed to you for it. On your bounty we shall ride comfortably into the New Year. Let us hope that it will be a better one than 1950, though I’m afraid there is not a very bright prospect before any of us.
I must also thank you and Mr. Jones for the two beautiful engagement books; I have had a preliminary look through them, and though California must be a very attractive state, I confess I prefer New England. It is more my sort of country. My brother, who is really more concerned with my engagements than I am, asks me to send his thanks too.
The weather forecast promises us Christmas weather over the holiday, and it is a prospect which I regard with very mixed feelings; I’m getting too old for ice and snow, and now share the views of Kipling’s MacAndrew:—
Hail ice and snow which praise the Lord, I’ve met you at your work And wished that we’d another route Or you another Kirk.200
All blessings on you both.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS
REF.50/81
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 21st December 1950.
Dear Miss Mathews,
Hard on the heels of your last letter comes yet another of your excellent parcels. If you go on at this rate, the Customs people will begin to suspect that what you are really doing is to run a black market shop in Oxford, with me as your distributing agent! But seriously, you spoil us—and very many thanks for doing so.
You will understand if I cut you off with the shortest of notes: I am knee deep in the hideous task of dealing with my Christmas mail. All blessings.
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): 201
Magdalen College
Oxford 23 Dec. 1950
Dear Mr. Van Auken
The contradiction ‘We must have faith to believe and must believe to have faith’ belongs to the same class as those by which the Eliatic philosophers proved that all motion was impossible.202 And there are many others. You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water & you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim. Or again, in any act of volition (e.g. getting up in the morning) is the very beginning of the act itself voluntary or involuntary? If voluntary then you must have willed it, you were willing already, it was not really the beginning. If involuntary, then the continuation of the act (being determined by the first moment) is involuntary too. But in spite of this we do swim, & we do get out of bed.
I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will & honesty of my best & oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Xtianity in general is well given by Chesterton: and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks.
As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which wd. be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late.203 Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late.204 ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’205 The magnanimity, the generosity wh. will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you wd. have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error wd. even so be more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how cd. that be? How cd. an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life: and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in a fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What wd. be a bribe if it came first had better come last.
It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But, surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food? i.e. if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, wasn’t designed to eat, wd. one feel hungry?
You say the Materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married? I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
Total Humility is not in the Tao because the Tao (as such) says nothing about the object to which it wd. be the right response: just as there is no law about railways in the acts of Q. Elizabeth. But from the degree of respect wh. the Tao demands for ancestors, parents, elders, & teachers, it is quite clear what the Tao wd. prescribe towards an object such as God.
But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS
REF.50/19.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 28th December 1950.
Dear Mrs. Allen,
Many thanks for your interesting letter of the 12th, which gave me much pleasure. Some words do tend to look queer when they