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Oxford.
9th March 1950.
My dear Miss Mathews,
You will no doubt be wondering—not angrily I’m sure, but sympathetically—why your two excellent parcels have gone unacknowledged.
The fact is that my secretary-brother chose the most inconvenient time of the term to retire to his bed and has only just ‘come to the surface’ again. While he was away I found my self very rushed, and my correspondence suffered accordingly.
I have so often tried to tell you how grateful I am for all your kindness that I find myself reduced to a simple ‘thank you’: but if the words are stale, the sentiment which prompts them is as fresh as ever.
Here we are enjoying the dubious delights of early English spring, and I often wonder what visiting Americans make of it: for they are already arriving in surprisingly large numbers considering the time of year. I can only suppose that they all come from Northern Alaska, and find our climate a nice change! If you have any friends who think of coming over, tell them that the English summer generally falls in the third week in June.
With many thanks and all my best wishes,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):
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Magdalen etc.
12/3/50
Dear Firor–
Well, term is over. And the election is over too, but you don’t want to hear about that:
(#ulink_94a975fd-8424-50db-bba1-5a81a27ede86) except (which is the really remarkable thing) that despite the heavy poll I never knew an election pass with less apparent excitement. Perhaps this is because it was felt to be so important: it is not in the front line that War forms the incessant subject of conversation!
As for term, the last bit of it has been heavy for me with Scholarship Examinations. One answer is so puzzling that I wd. like to hand it on. Commenting on Hamlet’s words
Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unus’d,
(#ulink_09dc1a0b-117b-5d3a-a118-2721edeb1edd)
one boy explained the first line as meaning ‘He who made the creation of man seem important by talking about it.’ Since this youth, needless to say, has no chance of a scholarship and therefore will not be summoned for an interview, we shall all go to our graves without knowing what he meant. What, do you think, is the Theology implied? My own vein of Irreverence (still, I fear, inexhausted) cannot help building up a picture: the Almighty feeling (and is one surprised?–) that Homo Sapiens could hardly be reckoned among His chefs d’oeuvre,
(#ulink_eceb49f6-c557-585b-a4bc-df9cc421f697) and wondering if a publicity campaign could mend matters.
Not, of course, that all the young men we have to examine are like this. At the other end of the scale comes the candidate for a mathematical Fellowship who said–and was understood by the other mathematician who was examining him, but by no one else in the room—‘I assume that All Stars are Trivially Embedded.’ Can you do that one? (Stars does not mean the things in the night sky, I’m told: nor even, which wd. make sense of another sort, film-stars).
But there is something about this endless examining, quite apart from the labour, which bothers me. It sets me wondering about the whole system under which you, as well as we, now live. Behind all these closely written sheets which I have to read every year, even behind the worst of them, lie hours of hard, long work. Even the bad candidates are doing their best and have been trained up to this ever since they went to school. And naturally enough: for in the Democracies now, as formerly in China under the mandarin system, success in competitive examinations is the only moyen de parvenir,
(#ulink_6481b5d9-b996-576a-ad30-e8c74b14867e) the road from elementary school to the better schools, and thence to college, and thence to the professions. (You still have a flourishing alternative route to desirable jobs through business which is largely disappearing with us: but it is at least equally competitive).
This of course is what Democratic education means—give them all an equal start and let the winners show their form. Hence Equality of Opportunity in practice means ruthless Competition during those very years which, I can’t help feeling, nature meant to be free and frolicsome. Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health? (N.B. Boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue. I think we shall find that up to the XVIIIth Century, and back into Pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly).
The old Inegalitarian societies had at least this in their favour, that at least some of their members (the eldest sons of gentlemen living on inherited land, and the agricultural labourers with no chance to rise and therefore no thought of rising) were often really outside the competitive struggle. I have an uneasy feeling that much of the manliness and toughness of the community depended on them. I’m not idealising such societies. The gentry were often bad, the peasantry often (perhaps nearly always) ill treated. I mean only that we haven’t solved the problem. Or, generalising this, I find the social problem insoluble. It is ‘How to extend to all the good life which unequal societies have (sometimes) produced for the few.’
For the good life as (I suppose) you and I conceive it—independence, calling one’s house one’s castle, saying ‘Mind your own business’ to impertinent people, resisting bribes and threats as a matter of course, culture, honour, courtesy, un-assertiveness, the ease and elbow-room of the mind—all this is no natural endowment of the animal Man, but the fine flower of a privileged class. And because it is so fine a flower it breeds, within the privileged class itself, a desire to equalise, a guilty conscience about their privileges. (At least I don’t think the revolt from below has often succeeded, or even got going, without this help from above).
But then, the moment you try to spread this good life you find yourself removing the very conditions of it both from the few and from the many, in other words for all. (The simplest case of all is when you say ‘Here is a beautiful solitude—let us bring charabanc-loads of the poor townsmen to enjoy it’: i.e. let it cease to be a beautiful solitude). The many, merely by being the many, annihilate the goals as soon as they reach them: as in this case of education that I started with.
Don’t imagine that I am constructing a concealed argument in favour of a return to the old order. I know that is not the solution. But what is? Or are we assuming that there must be a solution? Perhaps in a fallen world the social problem can in fact never be solved and we must take more seriously—what all Christians admit in theory–that our home is elsewhere.
Writing to you, as I do, quite irregularly and dealing with whatever happens to be uppermost in my mind at the moment, I feel I am in great danger of repeating myself. Does the same thing always ‘happen to be uppermost’? In other words, have I written this identical letter before? I hope not.
Crocus, primrose, daffodil have all appeared now: almond blossom and catkins too: but no leaves on trees yet. And there’s a Firor Ham in the refrigerator—I’ve never spelled that word before and have my doubts. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
4/4/50
My dear Roger
Thanks v. much for the blurb:
(#ulink_0fe7e490-3792-598a-9b7b-46e53284075a) I shall send it to Bles
(#ulink_9a392cea-a3c1-5dc8-953c-50928dc91ac2) today. It seems excellent to me, but like you I don’t really understand Blurbology.
The man running this series of Lives is Milton Waldman c/o Collins.
(#ulink_5909f121-6fc9-5a56-9874-a529e732f471) I will write to him about you at once.
I look forward v. much to Castle in L.
I may (i.e. will if I can) look for you at the K.A.
(#ulink_aac74639-48f6-53d1-8268-6a5f573c8159) tomorrow (Wed) about 11.30.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER(W):
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Magdalen College,
Oxford
6/4/50
My dear George
What ho? Any time between now and April 21st cd. you come up for two (= 2 = II = B) nights? I’ll stand myself two nights in College if you can and we can make of it two evenings and one day’s walking. Week-days of course. Do. Love to Moira.
Yours
Jack L.
TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):
Magdalen College
Oxford
6/4/50
Dear Mr. Dell
I had not thought of it before but it might be, as you say, that the decay of serious male friendship has results unfavourable to male religion.
(#ulink_a8988107-0338-514c-980c-7c553b37bf22) One can’t be sure, though, because, if more women than men respond to religion, after all more women than men seem to respond to everything. Aren’t they much more easily stirred up than we in all directions? Isn’t it always easier to get female members for anything you are getting up?
I don’t know enough about the Ecumenical Movement to give an opinion.
Yes.
(#ulink_db8c0783-4427-56be-a74a-64765d00f366) If (as I hope) the new earth contains beasts they will not be a mere continuation of (the present) biological life but a resurrection, a participation (to their appropriate degree) in Zoe.
(#ulink_ee100ad2-6e23-5263-909f-96d7a863b28a) See my remarks on this in Problem of Pain.
(#ulink_8d6519ec-2630-506a-b32a-ade1aee8e517) Nature will rise again now fully digested & assimilated by Spirit.
Bother!–I’ve no copy of the trans, of Athanasius at present. The theory you suggest seems to me sensible but I can’t say without the text (or perhaps with it) whether St. A. actually held it.
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With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford
6/4/50
Dear Mrs. Jones
No, I don’t agree that loyalty to an institution is simply loyalty to the personnel and their policy. If I join a ship because I like the captain I am not justified in deserting the moment he dies, nor because I dislike his successor. There might come a point (e.g. if the new captain were using the ship for piracy) at which it wd. be my right, and my duty, to leave: not because I simply disliked him and his polity, but because the particular duty (keep your contracts) wd. now conflict with, and yield to, the higher and more universal duty (Don’t be a pirate).
I don’t see how there could be institutions at all if loyalty was abrogated the moment you didn’t like the personnel. Of course in the case of temporary and voluntary institutions (say, this College) there is no very acute problem. One is entitled to resign, and resignation of course ends all the duties (and all the privileges) I had as a fellow of it.
It is much more difficult with an institution like a nation. I am sure you don’t in fact regard all your duties to the U.S.A. as null and void the moment a party or a President you don’t like is in power. At what point the policy of one’s own country becomes so manifestly wicked that all one’s duties to it cease, I don’t know. But surely mere disapproval is not enough? One must be able to say, ‘What the State now demands of me is contrary to my plain moral duty.’
Do you know I doubt if your dog has the consciousness of ‘I’ (by that of course I meant, not saying the words—otherwise some parrots wd. have souls!). Even young children don’t seem to have it, and speak of themselves as he. Not that they haven’t souls, but their souls are not fully on the spot yet. Your dog may have a rudimentary soul for all I know—I said what I could about this in the chap, on Animal Pain in the Problem of Pain. And if you call learning by experience ‘reasoning’ then he does reason. But I doubt if he is aware of himself as something distinct from all other things. My dog if shut in a room and calling for his walk never dreams of barking to tell me where he is: which looks v. much as if all his tail wagging etc, however much it may be a language to me, is not language to him and he has no idea of using it as a sign. It is spontaneous, unreflective expression of emotion. His bark tells me he is excited, but he doesn’t bark in order to tell me: just as my sneeze may tell you I have a cold, but I didn’t sneeze in order to tell you.
Thanks, and thanks, and thanks again. I don’t think we have ever spoiled anything thru’ not opening a parcel promptly! With our good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):
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Easter Eve [9 April] 1950
My dear Dom Bede
Thank you v. much for yr. kind letter and for sending me yr. article.
(#ulink_883a2138-4a7a-53e5-936c-c48554c1f020) Isn’t Havard a beautiful creature?
(#ulink_7170b8fb-e627-55fc-8e66-a63615ca7c0a)anima candida.
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I was much interested in the article with a great deal of which I agree. The bit I’m least happy about is ‘we are all alike saved by Christ whether His grace comes to us by way of the Natural Law etc’.
(#ulink_a771d30a-046e-5be2-a7cc-cfa397d5f5f4) All saved by Christ or not at all, I agree. But I wonder ought you to make clearer what you mean by His Grace coming ‘by the way of the Natural Law’–or any other Law.
We are absolutely at one about the universality of the Nat. Law, and its objectivity, and its Divine origin.
(#ulink_07bf252b-6996-5d13-8f37-ed08b211946f) But can one just leave out the whole endless Pauline reiteration of the doctrine that Law, as such, cannot be kept and serves in fact to make sin exceedingly sinful?
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I’m not here labouring a point which I think we have retained and you have lost, because I don’t think we (in the C. of E., whatever may be true of some Lutherans) have really retained it.
(#ulink_d9e5819a-7e62-5037-9115-fe030fa383e5) Nor do I in the least want to see it again swollen and inflamed (as it was by the original Protestants) into a hypertrophy wh. destroys all the other truths of Christianity. But it must be got in. I never meet anyone, of whatever communion or school, who shows that Pauline sense of liberation from the Law: but I have an idea, from things you once said, that you have some qualifications for helping us all on this point. Perhaps it is not the main need at the moment—I don’t know.
