Yours, Jack

The Inspirational Letters of C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis, Paul F. Ford, Paul F. Ford

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780007332281
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

A collection of 365 readings containing the best and most compelling writing culled from more than 4,000 pages of C.S.Lewis‘s famous published letters.

1916

TO ARTHUR GREEVES, his oldest friend: On the book that baptized Lewis’s imagination—see Surprised by Joy, 180-181. Anodos is the hero of the book Phantastes; Cosmo is the hero of a story Anodos tells in the book.¹

7 MARCH 1916

I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle—our very own set: never since I first read ‘The well at the world’s end’ have I enjoyed a book so much—and indeed I think my new ‘find’ is quite as good as [Thomas] Malory or [William] Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy—by the way isn’t it funny, they cost I/Id. now—on our station bookstall last Saturday. Have you read it? I suppose not, as if you had, you could not have helped telling me about it. At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply must get this at once: and it is quite worth getting in a superior Everyman binding too.

Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along that little stream to the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree and how the shadow of his gnarled, knotted hand falls upon the book the hero is reading, when you have read about the faery palace…and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know that you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you have finished. There are one or two poems in the tale—as in the Morris tales you know—which, with one or two exceptions are shockingly bad, so don’t try to appreciate them: it is just a sign, isn’t it, of how some geniuses can’t work in metrical forms—another example being the Brontës.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Lewis’s religious views as a seventeen-year-old.²

12 OCTOBER 1916

As to the other question about religion, I was sad to read your letter. You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes et cetera: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices et cetera. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods: and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.

Thus religion, that is to say mythology grew up. Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happen to have been brought up in.

Now all this you must have heard before: it is the recognised scientific account of the growth of religions. Superstition of course in every age has held the common people, but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience. I had thought that you were gradually being emancipated from the old beliefs, but if this is not so, I hope we are too sensible to quarrel about abstract ideas. I must only add that one’s views on religious subjects don’t make any difference in morals, of course. A good member of society must of course try to be honest, chaste, truthful, kindly et cetera: these are things we owe to our own manhood and dignity and not to any imagined god or gods.

Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world: considering the discoveries that are always being made, this would be foolish. Anything may exist: but until we know that it does, we can’t make any assumptions. The universe is an absolute mystery: man has made many guesses at it, but the answer is yet to seek. Whenever any new light can be got as to such matters, I will be glad to welcome it. In the meantime I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (and already decaying) superstition.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Lewis’s favorite short story by George MacDonald.³

15 NOVEMBER 1916

And talking about books I am surprised that you don’t say more of the ‘Golden Key’: to me it was absolute heaven from the moment when Tangle ran into the wood to the glorious end in those mysterious caves. What a lovely idea ‘The country from which the shadows fall’!

¹Letters I, 169-170.

²Letters I, 230-231.

³Letters I, 254.

1920

TO LEO BAKER an actor, a teacher of acting, and a friend Lewis made in Oxford in 1919, who introduced Lewis to Owen Barfield, a fellow anthroposophist: On Lewis’s growing sense of God.¹

5 SEPTEMBER 1920

You will be interested to hear that in the course of my philosophy—on the existence of matter—I have had to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory: but of course we know nothing. At any rate we don’t know what the real Good is, and consequently I have stopped defying heaven: it can’t know less than I, so perhaps things really are alright. This, to you, will be old news but perhaps you will see it in me as a sign of grace. Don’t mistake the position: its no cry of ‘all’s well with the world’: it’s only a sense that I have no business to object to the universe as long as I have nothing to offer myself—and in that respect we are all bankrupt.

¹Letters I, 386.

1921

TO HIS BROTHER, WARREN LEWIS: On prayer as writing letters to someone who never replies.¹

1 JULY 1921

I was delighted to get your letter this morning; for some reason it had been sent first to a non-existent address in Liverpool. I had deliberately written nothing to you since those two you mention: not that I was tired of the job, but because I did not feel disposed to go on posting into the void until I had some assurance that my effusions would reach you. That seemed a process too like prayer for my taste: as I once said to Baker—my mystical friend with the crowded poetry—the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong. I admitted that it was of great moment: but what was the use of going on despatching fervent messages—say to Edinburgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office: nay more, if you couldn’t even find Edinburgh on the map. His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out. I am glad however that you have ceased to occupy such a divine position, and will do my best to continue: though I hope it won’t be for fifteen months.

¹Letters I, 555–556.

1929

Sometime in the spring (Trinity Sunday was May 22 that year) Lewis came to believe in God, though not yet in Christ:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him of whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 14)

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Lewis’s praise for MacDonald’s cycle of prayer-poems.¹

10 OCTOBER 1929

I am slowly reading a book that we have known about, but not known, for many a long day—MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul. How I would have scorned it once! I strongly advise you to try it. He seems to know everything and I find my own experience in it constantly: as regards the literary quality, I am coming to like even his clumsiness. There is a delicious home-spun, earthy flavour about it, as in George Herbert. Indeed for me he is better than Herbert.

¹Letters I, 834.

1930

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the seven deadly sins.¹

10 FEBRUARY 1930

When I said that your besetting sin was Indolence and mine Pride I was thinking of the old classification of the seven deadly sins: They are Gula (Gluttony), Luxuria (Unchastity), Accidia (Indolence), Ira (Anger), Superbia (Pride), Invidia (Envy), Avaritia (Avarice). Accidia, which is sometimes called Tristitia (despondence) is the kind of indolence which comes from indifference to the good—the mood in which though it tries to play on us we have no string to respond. Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of Lucifer—so you are rather better off than I am. You at your worst are an instrument unstrung: I am an instrument strung but pr...