returned from a holiday and the time since has been spent in writing about 40 letters with my own hand: so much for Ivory Towers.
I also find your question v. difficult in my own life. What is right we usually know, or it is our own fault if we don’t: but what is prudent or sensible we often do not. Is it part of the scheme that we shd. ordinarily be left to make the best we can of our own v. limited and merely probable reasonings? I don’t know. Or wd. guidance even on these points be more largely given if we had early enough acquired the regular habit of seeking it?
How terrible your anxiety about your daughter must have been. She shall have her place in my prayers, such as they are.
Walsh didn’t know much about my private life.70 Strictly between ourselves, I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house wh. was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (tho’ a different trouble has taken its place)71 do I begin to realise quite how bad it was.
God bless you all.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W): 72
Magdalen College,
Oxford 18/4/51
Dear Sister Madeleva
I don’t know whether I shd. thank you or your publishers for so kindly sending me a copy of your wholly delightful Lost Language.73 At any rate I have to thank you for writing it. There has been nothing v. like it before and it emphasises a side of Chaucer too often neglected. I am glad you say a word on behalf of ‘conventions’ on p. 17. I always tell my pupils that a ‘convention’ appears to be such only when it has ended.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE (I):
Magdalen etc
19 April 1951
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object…
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
[The Kilns]
22/4/51
My dear Arthur
You were quite right to leave me when you did. A farewell meal is a doleful business: it was much better for me to get my luggage dumped and my berth found & for you to be back at home as soon as possible.
Thank Elizabeth for her letter.74 She will understand, I am sure, why I don’t want to continue the discussion by post: my correspondence involves a great number of theological letters already which can’t be neglected because they are answers to people in great need of help & often in great misery.
I have hardly ever had so much happiness as during our late holiday. God bless you–and the Unbelievable.75 Pas de jambon encore.76
Yours
Jack
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford 22/4/51
My dear Roger—
May 31st & June 1st will do me nicely. May I book you a room for those two nights?
I doubt if you’ll find me both in and without a pupil on April 26th except between lunch & tea, when I suppose June will be in the Sheldonian. Cd. you ring me up if convenient?
Love to all three.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
[The Kins]
23/4/51
My dear Arthur
(1.) A Ham has been posted to you today.
(2.) My plans, if they fit with Yours, for the summer are as follows.
(a.) Short visit to C’fordsburn with W. Aug. 10 (arrive llth)-Aug. 14
(b.) Stay with W. in S’thern Ireland Aug. 14-28.
(c.) Longer visit to C’fordsburn alone Aug. 28-Sept. 11th. Can you be in residence at Silver Hill Aug. 28th-Sept. 11th?
Blessings,
Jack
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):
Magdalen etc.
23/4/51
Dear Dom Bede—
A succession of illnesses and a holiday in Ireland have so far kept me from tackling Lubac.77 The Prelude78 has accompanied me through all the stages of my pilgrimage: it and the Aeneid (which I never feel you value sufficiently) are the two long poems to wh. I most often return.
The tension you speak of (if it is a tension) between doing full & generous justice to the Natural while also paying unconditional & humble obedience to the Supernatural is to me an absolute key position. I have no use for mere either-or people (except, of course, in that last resort, when the choice, the plucking out the right eye, is upon us: as it is in some mode, every day.79 But even then a man needn’t abuse & blackguard his right eye. It was a good creature: it is my fault, not its, that I have got myself into a state wh. necessitates jettisoning it).
The reason I doubt whether it is, in principle, even a tension is that, as it seems to me, the subordination of Nature is demanded if only in the interests of Nature herself. All the beauty of nature withers when we try to make it absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.80 We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.
As to Man being in ‘evolution’, I agree, tho’ I wd. rather say ‘in process of being created’.
I am no nearer to your Church than I was but don’t feel v. inclined