You could hardly conceive how different my approach was from yours. The germ of Perelandra was simply the picture of the floating islands themselves, with no location, no story, and no [?]29 The way you allegorise the 3 species on Mars is masterly: and those three, because—well, however one does invent things: presumably because I’m human and therefore can’t invent things except by splicing up human nature. Query—is it possible for any man to write a fantastic story which another man can’t read as an allegory? (The history of medieval criticism makes it clear that the answer is No).
Do come, and name your day: 1 o’ clock at the college lodge, and ask to be shown to the Smoking Room.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen
31/1/52
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
How singular! In the last year my life also became much ‘better’ and, just like you, I often feel a little frightened. We must both distinguish (a.) The bad Pagan feeling that the gods don’t like us to be happy and that it excites Nemesis: see Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos30 (b.) The good Christian caution lest we become soft and self indulgent and cease to recognise one’s dependence on God.
That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John IX. 1-4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It wd. certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is ‘absolutely’ contrary to my will: i.e. if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e. granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother smacking a child wd. be in the same position: she wd. rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she wd. like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.
On the heathen, see I Tim. IV. 10.31 Also in Matt. XXV. 31-46 the people don’t sound as if they were believers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell* and preaching to the dead: wd. that would be outside time, and include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a.) All justice & mercy will be done, (b) But that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers. All blessings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC)?32
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Sir,–
I welcome the letter from the Rural Dean of Gravesend,33 though I am sorry that anyone should have regarded it necessary to describe the Bishop of Birmingham as an Evangelical. To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the ‘Liberal’ or ‘Modernist’ is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the Four Last Things. This unites them not only with one another, but with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus.34
The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions, or than the gulf which separates both from any non-miraculous version of Christianity, is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether ‘Low’ or ‘High’ Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest ‘Deep Church’; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s ‘mere Christians’?35
C. S. Lewis
TO JILL FREUD (T):
Magdalen College
Oxford 15/2/52
It lies on my mind that I talked some nonsense about a ‘tread mill’ in my note yesterday. Pretty good rot for a man who is being given full pay for doing what most people do in their spare time. Wash it out. I only meant the engine is happily doing N revs, per second!
J
TO VERA MATHEWS (W):
Magdalen College,
Magdalen 17/2/52
Dear Miss Mathews
You will think I have taken a terribly long time over the Nabob,36 but the only time I have for such things is the week ends and the last two have been fully occupied by going through proofs of a new translation (someone else’s) of the gospels.37 And now, before I say anything, remember that—as I think I said, the short story is not my Form at all, so that my criticism will be amateurish.
I think the general narrative manner is good, and, with certain reservations, the character of the wife. I don’t find Cobham so good: but my reasons will best come out as we go along. These are my notes;
P. 2. Having worked…everything seemed. Am I pedantic to object to the syntax? If everything is the subject of the sentence then it ought to be everything, not Hermione, who had ‘once worked’ etc
P. 3. just that. I don’t understand what these words mean. But perhaps it’s an American idiom that I don’t know. If so, O.K.
righteously felt sincerely? genuinely? I don’t know what ‘righteously feeling’ wd. mean
P. 4. his bent was military etc. This is the first of many passages in wh. you refer to C. as a soldier. But wouldn’t the governor of a province in India be in the I.C.S. (Indian Civil Service) not in the Army?
enlisted. Do you mean went in as a private soldier? (wh. is what enlist means to us). If so this is infinitely improbable for a young man of C’s social position at that time. You mean, don’t you, that he ‘went into the army’ i.e. got a commission?
P 5. to never yield, ‘never to yield’?
P. 6. What are the drafts?.
P. 9. para 3. v. good P. 20. How those vicars. But they wouldn’t, you know. They might have v. likely 100 or so years earlier. In Cs time they’d all have been talking about a God of love. I don’t mean that our Englishman in India, bitten with Oriental wisdom, might not say what C. does, but then he wd. be a fool, which you don’t mean C. to be.
savant. Doesn’t this suggest something academic and even scientific? Perhaps ‘sage’ wd. do.
P. 24. What are physical virtues? It ought to mean good muscles, good digestion, sound teeth etc, but I don’t think that’s what you do