Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

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.

(#ulink_d6724e1b-d64c-574b-b147-76d53b31ba76)

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):

(#ulink_4ef3d895-70bf-5af1-89e0-7bdd42255491)

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.

(#ulink_ea869b95-2a5f-50d0-bf9a-13e549f30623)

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?

(#ulink_ac73bf97-52a4-51b4-9e0d-7bee8afcae12)

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.