C. S. LEWIS

Excerpts from The Problem Of Pain:

· Nowadays, by LOVE most of us mean kindness - the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.

I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets, that Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, "a lord of terrible aspect". There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

· God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs or desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, love-ability.

· The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads.

· Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his “faith in human nature”, who is really sad.

· Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil, or error in its own right breeds evil, e.g. by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Pain has no tendency to proliferate.

· There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say: "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

Excerpts from: The Screwtape Letters:

[Purporting to be correspondence from an experienced devil, “Screwtape”, to his nephew “Wormwood”, advising the latter as to the techniques of tempting/corrupting a human ‘patient’. It follows that in the following extracts from Screwtape’s letters (numbered in brackets), God is sometimes referred to as “The Enemy”, while the Arch Devil is referred to as “Our Father”.]

· [As to Prayer] I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it –to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who made him. (4)

· The Law of Undulation : Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back - a series of troughs and peaks. - - To get permanent possession of a soul, The Enemy relies on the troughs even more than the peaks. Our cause is never in more danger than when a human - no longer desiring but still intending to do The Enemy’s will - looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. (8)

· All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. (10)

· A soul arriving in Hell said: “I see now that I spent most of my life in doing NEITHER what I might NOR what I liked.” (12)

· To keep a human from converting repentance to action, let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which God plants in their souls. Active habits are strengthened with repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often one feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. (13)

· To corrupt a human, keep him always thinking of the past and the future. Never let him live in the present. The past and the future are in time. The present is timeless and eternal. Humans live in time, but God destines them to eternity. He wants them to attend to eternity itself and to that point of time they call the Present – which is the point at which time touches eternity. (15)

· [As to marriage] –the truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce – and, if obediently entered into, too often will produce – affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear and desire which they call “being in love” is the only thing which makes marriage either happy or holy. (18)

· When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, The Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation [as to motivation]. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested Love which he has been circulating ever since. This, Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored The Enemy to lay his cards on the table, admitting that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; The Enemy replied, “I wish with all my heart that you did.” (19)

· Our Father always encourages in humans the sense of ownership – ownership of life, body, time, etc. Humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and Hell. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from man’s beliefs that they “own” their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another. (21)

· Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. (23)

· We have trained them (humans) to think of the future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain – not as something everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. (25)

· Where ‘nominal’ unselfishness has been established ‘as a rule’, it is often impossible to find out either A or B’s real wishes; Often they end up doing something that neither wants, each feeling a glow of self-righteousness and a secret grudge against the other -- (26)

· The Enemy sees as well as we that COURAGE is not simply ONE of the virtues, but rather the form of EVERY virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky. --- The ACT of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear, in itself, is no sin and, though Our Father enjoys it, does him no good. (29)

Excerpts from: A GRIEF OBSERVED

[C. S. Lewis, an Oxford literature professor and don, had been a bachelor, and in his late '50s had been interviewed by an American divorcee n/o Joy Davidman, concerning an earlier book of his. They became quite intellectually interested in each other, and then she came down with terminal cancer and was dying. To safeguard the security of her two young sons, Lewis married her while she was hospitalized and adopted her boys. Then Joy had a remission, left the hospital, the two fell completely in love and for several months were together in all ways. Then Joy’s cancer came back with a vengeance and she died, some 3 years after they'd originally met. 

To better understand his grief, within the first month after Joy's death Lewis started writing a set of four notebooks about what he was going through and what he was learning, and eventually this material was consolidated as a little book and published. 

This was C. S. Lewis’ last book, for he himself died soon after of renal failure]

· The death of a beloved is an amputation.

· 'It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next

· … And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off— something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.                              

· I have always been able to pray for the dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H. [as he calls Joy Davidman in this journal], I halt.

[And this feeling I well understand. The beloved is so much a part of ourselves that we do not have the perspective of distance. How do we pray for what is part of own heart?]

· Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

· Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives – to both, but perhaps especially to the woman – a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

· Once very near the end I said, 'If you can -- if it is allowed -- come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits’.

· How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all eterna fontana. [Then I return to the eternal fountain]

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