to know all about it) has reversed the situation. But don’t think this state of affairs will be more permanent than any other. Reason, no doubt, is always on the side of Christianity: but that amount and kind of human reasoning which gives an age its dominant intellectual tone, is surely sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other.
Again, we must believe that there is no real conflict between the Rational and the Mystical: but in a given period now one, now the other, will be what the world actually needs to be most reminded of—I mean the unbelieving world: and one or the other will usually be the bridge to faith. Thus you and I came to it chiefly by Reason (I don’t mean, of course, that any one comes at all but by God’s grace—I am talking about the route not the motive power) but dozens of other converts, beginning with St. Paul, did not.
I have often wished I had time to learn Hebrew, but I think it would be for me more an indulgence than a duty. I should like to hear more about your doctrine of sophistication: I am inclined to think you may be right, but one would have to define ‘sophistication’ carefully. I certainly suppose (but this may be ignorance) that the Hebrew scriptures are the only document of religion carried to the very highest sub-Christian height, while remaining as anthropomorphic as primitive polytheism…What a bugbear ‘anthropomorphism’ used to be! How long it repelled me from the truth! Yet now that one has submitted to it how easy is the burden, how light the yoke.30 Odd too, that the very things we thought proofs of our humility while we were philosophers, now turn out to be forms of pride.
Sayer—pray for Sayer.31 He is just what I was at a slightly earlier age than his: at the mercy of something which is innocent in itself (the desire to be liked) but which, unresisted, leads to ludicrous vanity, pretentiousness, and direct, pitiful lying. Yet he is likable because of the one redeeming trait that he really knows himself to be (at present) rather a little tick: oh, and the good side of his ruling passion, which is a peculiar accessibility to shame. All this, of course, is very much in confidence.
I re-read St. Augustine’s Confessions during Lent, and found it better than I remember, tho’ still it is the explicitly devotional parts that edify me least. I’ll see if I can let you have a copy of my book if you want it. But the main subject is the rise of a romantic conception of sexual love and the transition from adultery to marriage as the normal channel for it: i.e. it would be an odd book to find in a monastery.
Write again. Write at the end of every term when I shall have a bright new Vac. to answer in.
Yours,
C.S.L.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 1st 1936
My dear Arthur,
I must confess it would not have been a good time for you to turn up. Why will you insist on coming to England in vacations and summers? If you would only come in the Autumn term (Oct 11th-Dec. 5th) I would try to make you comfortable in college: and I don’t need to breakfast so early now. About the Kilns, I am sorry: I know that for many reasons it can never be a comfortable house for you to stay in.
I shall be free on and after June 27th and would come any time you suggested. I look forward to it with enormous pleasure—tho’ rather ashamed that I can make so little return. I trust you won’t be packing all the time I’m with you!
Oddly enough I read Aerial32 too, and in the same edition a few weeks ago—good fun. I don’t know how far it is reliable.
No time to write now. Please let me have a line saying which dates after the 27th wd. suit you. Is the enclosed good?—I can’t help hoping not. I shall be sending you my book in a week or so. Love to all
Yours,
Jack
The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford on 21 May 1936.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
[Magdalen College]
May 23rd 1936
Dear Griffiths
I am very surprised that your old anti-intellectual ism should be so active—and yet perhaps I should not be since it is often said that conversion alters only the direction not the character of our minds. (This, by the bye, is very important and explains how personal and affectional relations between human souls can recognisably survive even in the full blaze of the beatific vision: and that if we are both saved I shall find you to all eternity in one sense still the same old Griffiths—indeed more the same than ever).
I don’t agree. In the first place, I question your account of Our Lord, when you say ‘He is essentially a poet and not at all a philosopher.’ Surely the ‘type of mind’ represented in the human nature of Christ (and in virtue of His humanity we may, I suppose, neither irreverently nor absurdly speak of it as a ‘type of mind’) stands at just about the same distance from the poetic as from the philosopher. The overwhelming majority of His utterances are in fact addressed neither to thought nor to the imagination, but to the ‘heart’—i.e. to the will and the affections: that is, the type is that of the
You will say that it approaches the poetic in the parables. But this is only an approach: it would (on my view) be an entirely misdirected reverence that would on that basis call him a poet. The parables approach poetry just about as much [as] His argumentative utterances approach philosophy. And it is easy to make too little of these latter. After all, how full of argument, of repartee, even of irony, He is. The passage about the denarius (‘whose image and superscription’);35 the dilemma about John’s baptism;36 the argument against the Sadducees from the words ‘I am the God of Jacob etc’;37 the terrible, yet almost humorous, trap laid for his Pharisaic host (‘Simon, I have something to say to you’);38 the repeated use of the â fortiori (‘If…, how much more’);39 and the appeals to our reason (‘Why do not ye of yourselves judge what is right?’)40—surely in all these we recognise as the human and natural vehicle of the Word’s incarnation a mental complexion in which a keen-eyed peasant shrewdness is just as noticeable as an imaginative quality—something in other words quite as close (on the natural level) to Socrates as to Aeschylus.
Even about the parables I want to make a point. It is a commonplace that Our Lord, in them, often paradoxically chooses to illustrate the ways of God by the acts not of good men, but of bad men. But surely this means that the mode in which the fable represents its truth is intellectual rather than imaginative—like a philosopher’s illustration rather than a poet’s simile. The unjust judge,41 to the imagination, presents no likeness of God—carries into the story no divine flavour or colour (as the Father of the Prodigal