I should be interested to see your Review of my little book.2 I am afraid it will have misled you into thinking my position more catholic than it really is, and that not for a spiritual reason but a merely literary one. I did not want to keep introducing the Lord Himself, and ‘Christianity’ is not a plausible name for a character. Hence the name, and some of the functions, of my Mother Kirk—adopted clumsily for convenience, without my realising till I began to read my reviewers, that I had given a much more ecclesiastical bent to the whole thing than I had intended. You may say ‘All the better’; but I tell you the facts to defend my honesty.3 And by the same token, I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!
Thank you for your prayers: you know mine too, little worth as they are. Have you found, or is it peculiar to me, that it is much easier to pray for others than for oneself. Doubtless because every return to ones own situation involves action: or to speak more plainly, obedience. That appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one. Did you ever notice a beautiful touch in the Faerie Queene
‘a groom them laid at rest in easie bedd, His name was meek Obedience.’4
What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason.
Remember me to the Prior. Did I tell you that I have met both Waterman5 & Skinner6 and liked them v. much.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 20th 1936
Dear Griffiths
Thanks very much for the copy of Pax and the too kind review of my little book.
One sentence in your letter has kept me chuckling ever since: ‘you have no reason to fear that anything you say can have any serious effect on me’. The underlying assumption that anyone who knew you would feel such a fear is not only funny but excruciatingly funny…ask the Prior if he sees the joke: I rather think he will.
As to the main issue I can only repeat what I have said before. One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You, in your charity, are anxious to convert me: but I am not in the least anxious to convert you. You think my specifically Protestant beliefs a tissue of damnable errors: I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions, but which I think suitable for you. I therefore feel no duty to attack you: and I certainly feel no inclination to add to my other works an epistolary controversy with one of the toughest dialecticians of my acquaintance, to which he can devote as much time and reading as he likes and I can devote very little. As well—who wants to debate with a man who begins by saying that no argument can possibly move him? Talk sense, man! With other Catholics I find no difficulty in deriving much edification from religious talk on the common ground: but you refuse to show any interest except in differences.
It was a great shock to learn that Thomism is now de fide for your Church—if that is what you mean. But is that really so? I should welcome a letter clearing the matter up—I don’t mean clearing up the content of Thomism but the degree to which it has been made necessary to salvation.7
With continued good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 26th 1936
My dear Arthur,
I see to my consternation that it is over a month since your letter came. It certainly deserved an earlier answer but you must forgive me.
I was very sorry indeed to hear about ‘Tommy’. I am particularly sorry for John.8 You know I crossed with the pair of them last time I left home: and I should like to say as impressively as I can—and you to take note—that I was very much impressed by seeing them together and by the fine, almost the spiritual atmosphere of their whole world of mountain climbing. It gave me a new and most favourable sidelight on John: and I am afraid it is most unlikely that he will find any one to take Tommy’s place. I am very sorry for him. Try to be as nice to him as you can—but I have no doubt you are doing that already.
For yourself I expect days are pretty dim at present. Do you hear good news of the boy? As I said before, I am sure you have done the right thing, and I’m afraid that is all the comfort I can offer.
I quite understand what you say about the comfort derived from all a dog’s ‘little affairs’, and enjoyed reading that passage as much as any in your letter. They are a busy folk. And talking of dogs, poor old Mr Papworth has been gathered to his fathers. He had been ailing for some time and finally got a bad ulcer on his chin. He was given a strong sleeping draught. When I went to bed he was asleep in his basket and breathing as gently as a child: in the morning he was dead. Minto has been very badly upset—almost as if for a human being. I don’t feel it as badly as that myself and would discourage the feeling (I think) if I had it. But it is a parting, and one sometimes remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache.
I have just read what I think a really great book, ‘The Place of the Lion’ by Charles Williams.9 It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archtypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archtypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archtypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them.
It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a