Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
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isbn: 9780007332663
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if such a collection is ever made.

      What is of most importance to me as an individual is that you have made me understand for the first time why most of the representatives of the present Christian renaissance so hate Idealism-perhaps you will have made them understand too. To you it may be a matter of surprise that I could ever have found this hatred unintelligible: but you would not wonder if you had travelled the same route as I, which was from materialism to idealism, from idealism to Pantheism, from pantheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity.

      I am bold to do this because my whole case rests on mere experience—this is the door by which, as a mere matter of fact, I entered and it will always be dear to me on that account. Contrariwise I most freely acknowledge that your whole treatment of the subject has reminded me of the ‘door out’ aspect, which I had certainly unduly neglected hitherto. And now I am wondering just how far I can go with you. Not the whole way, I think. Fully realising the danger of the ‘Illusion of Reason’ (so much I owe to your book), I still find it not so much a philosophical as a religious impossibility quite to relinquish the Absolutist view of God.

25 (I dare put no accents, writing to you!) might win—a Twilight of the Gods? If so, I am afraid it would be as great a blow to my ‘intuitions’ as materialism itself. My ‘wish-belief’ demands the eternal, even, in a sense, the necessary: while also not wanting the immobile, the unanswering. In fine, I want to have it both ways: and this would be the flimsiest self indulgence, but for the huge historic fact of the doctrine of the Trinity. For surely that doctrine is just the doctrine that we are to give up neither of those conceptions of God of which you accept one and (most convincingly, yet in the long run dismayingly) reject the other. Is the traditional Christian belief not precisely this; that the same being which is eternally perfect,purus actus,26 already at the End etc etc, yet also, in some incomprehensible way, is a purposing, feeling, and finally crucified Man in a particular place and time? So that somehow or other, we have it both ways?

      I wish you could visit England more often. My spiritual fathers are many and scattered, but I left you, on the two occasions we met, with the sensation of having been with a spiritual uncle-and appropriately enough, in your avuncular character, you have sent me a spiritual tip. Very many thanks for the book. There is a lot more to say about it, but that would reach the scale of an article rather than a letter. I have an obituary of Irving Babbitt also to thank you for.

      With my kindest regards and thanks,

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      Nov. 16th 1934.

      Dear Miss Spens

      I had envisaged this as a letter of discussion, but I am finding so few disagreements with you that I have less to discuss, and more to re-echo, than I had supposed.

      Chap 5, I think, stands next in importance. The main contention that the predominance of the love theme is mainly due to the allegory—i.e. that it is ever-present in the symbols precisely because it is not the thing symbolised-convinced me at once: and this again opens doors, gives me the feeling of being more free within the world of the F.Q. than I was.

      1 Genius (still retaining his connection with gigno) the spirit of Reproduction or Generation (cf. ‘torus genialis’ etc). This is the ‘Genius’ of Alanus De Planctu,37 the Rom. of the Rose, the Confessio Amantis,38 and the Garden of Adonis.39

      2 Genius