for instance, does). His likeness to God is purely for the intellect. It is a kind of proportion sum—A:B::C:D.
I therefore on the whole reject any divine authority which your anti-intellectualism seems to draw from the person of Our Lord. I also deny that the ordinary man, with his mind full of images and poor in concepts, is really any nearer to the poet than to the philosopher. For the poet uses images as such, because they are images: the ordinary man (that is, all of us from most of our waking hours) uses them faute de mieux43 to attain knowledge, i.e. his end is the same as the philosopher’s. What is functional in the poet is merely an accidental imperfection in the plain man. Surely the process of mistaking an image for a concept is quite different from that of using images for their proper purposes: processes are distinguished teleologically. Should I be a surgeon because, lacking a knife, I one day used a lancet to cut up my dinner? To be a surgeon means to use a surgeon’s tools not anyhow but surgically—you can find all this in Aristotle.
Nor does any sane man, however ‘plain’, use images for thought quite as much as you suggest. His thought is accompanied by images but he is quite well aware that it is not about them he thinks—e.g. he knows perfectly well that the things he believes about London are not true of his image of London, which may be a mere huddle of roofs.
Again, if you are suggesting that the Hebrew consciousness was just right and the Greek just wrong, this seems to me to be quite foreign to the tenor of St. Paul’s teaching. He seems to hold quite definitely (a) That Our Lord has ‘broken down the middle wall of partition and made one Man’,44 wh. is quite different from simply bringing errant Hellenism back to Hebraic rectitude (b) That the ‘reasonings’ of the Pagans (see Romans) are related to the new Faith much as the Jewish Law is.45 In Galatians he even seems to equate the Pagan bondage to the
I know they dispute what
You said in your letter (going further than some would go) that every natural desire per se shd. be regarded as an attraction of grace. But if so, how much more every natural faculty!
This view of yours about desire is, I suppose, Augustinian. Habe caritatem et fac quod vis.50 This is certainly sound, but not perhaps very practical: for it implies Donec caritatem habens, noli facere quod vis.51 I wholly agree with what you say about escaping from the circle of morality into the love of God: in fact you have written an excellent commentary on St. Paul’s view of the ‘Law’. But in the meantime?
This letter is getting too long: the subject has endless ramifications, but I will wait for your next. Rejoice with me—timidly, for it is only the first streak of dawn and may be false dawn-there are faint signs of a movement away from Anthroposophy in Barfield.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO LEO BAKER (BOD):
Magdalen College
June 24th /36
My dear Baker
I should have hesitated to send you the book52 if I had known that it would find you in pain and by the need to acknowledge it lay a new burden on you. The book itself, I fear, is more than a grasshopper—as I find from this dialogue between myself and the Merton Professor of English53—more or less my ‘chief’ as they would say in the disciplined professions.
P. Well, Lewis, you’ve certainly gone beyond the whole English school with your new book. L. (Blushing at the supposed extremity of the compliment) Oh, really- P. Oh clearly. Much the longest book any of us has written. L. (With ghastly laughter) Oh surely not. I can understand it seeming the longest. P. No, no, there’s no seeming about it. It is a very long book. (Pause) A very long book indeed. L. Come, it’s not as long as X. P. X? It’s half as long again. Far longer than X. Far longer. (And so on)
I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering. Is it possible that the doctors can have a man so long in their hands and find out so little about him. It is indeed a comfort that the number of serious diseases which you know you have not got must be higher—far higher than anything the ordinary person in health could boast of. I take it, if the arthritis diagnosis is correct, the pain is the main thing i.e. that it hurts out of all proportion to the harm it will do. Am I right?
I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too—nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’,54 it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.
I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain—I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.
You were talking about Peele55 when you last wrote. Personally I find Renaissance poetry on the whole less and less attractive as time goes on. When it succeeds (‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’—‘Take but thy lute and make the mountains dance’)56 it has a wonderful gloss on; but even then I prefer the dull finish—something either humbler or harder.