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.
Our different views are natural enough. A field which seems a high place to one ascending the mountain, seems almost part of the valley to one descending. Idealism is suspect to you as a door out of Christianity: for me it was the door in. Clearly a door, ex vi termini,24 has this double aspect. I do not think I should be disrespectful in urging to you remember the ‘door in’ aspect—to remember that in shutting the door to keep the faithful in, as you do so very firmly, you are inevitably, by the same act, shutting out those who might return.
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.
For one thing I am not quite clear how far your ‘teleology’ will go. Does it imply that God can be better, more blessed, wiser, tomorrow than He is from of old? Does it involve that He may fail, that the
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
TO JANET SPENS (BOD):27
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.
The only thing I almost regret in your book28 is the inevitable prominence of the thesis developed in Chap 1: not because I dissent from it (indeed without a careful re-reading of the whole F.Q.29 I hardly could) but because I foresee that it will draw off attention from succeeding chapters which seem to me very much more important, and that the question ‘What do you think of Miss Spens’ book?’ will come among careless people to mean simply and solely ‘Do you agree with this theory about the composition of the F.Q.?’ However, there is no help for this.
As regards the thesis itself I certainly think you have made a good prima fade case; the part about Orgoglio’s castle (pp. 24, 25) seems to me very strong—so strong that here at any rate the onus probandi30 now almost rests on the supporters of the traditional view. But chap 2 really interests me more, and I have learned a good deal from your analysis of the Mutability cantos. Can you tell me something more about Professor Nygren’s Eros and Agape?31 I haven’t heard of it.
But chap 3 is the best of all. It was the second paragraph on p. 55 that delivered me from an old error: incredible as it now seems to me I had never before realised that the figures were to the Elizabethans what the landscape was to the 19th century.32 For this and for the four pages that follow I cannot thank you enough: they open doors, and your treatment of Una and Superstition (pp. 58, 59) is that rare sort of criticism which, as I believe, does truly and substantially create new qualities in the poem criticised. (Whom are you quoting at the bottom of p. 61?) The explanation of the importance of the clothes of Spenser’s figures (62, ad fin.) must, I think, be right, and ought to silence a deal of misguided censure.
Addisonian on p. 68 is delicious: the one right epithet out of a score of possibles.33 And I’m glad you have inserted a cooling card for the ‘new poet’ business on p. 71. Personally I find the whole of Renwick’s treatment curiously antipathetic.34
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.
I am not at all sure where, in detail, your interpretation of Busyrane is right, but of course I must wait till I have re-read the poem.35 But ought not the conflicts to be mainly those of the Soul herself rather than those of one soul against another in particular human relationships?
By the bye I disagree with you about ‘an unconvincing attempt’ to distinguish the two people called Genius (top of p. 22). Although Lewis & Short36 do not distinguish, I am pretty certain that Genius always did mean two quite distinct people:
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