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Title: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Date of first publication: 1964

Author: Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

Date first posted: June 5, 2015

Date last updated: June 5, 2015

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LETTERS TO MALCOLM:

CHIEFLY ON PRAYER

by

C. S. LEWIS

GEOFFREY BLES • LONDON

© C. S. LEWIS, 1963, 1964

Printed in Great Britain

by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., Glasgow

and published by

GEOFFREY BLES LTD

52 Doughty Street, London, W.C.1

First Published in 1964

No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publishers, except for purposes connected
with criticism in a periodical, book or
broadcast.

LETTERS TO MALCOLM:

CHIEFLY ON PRAYER

11

I

I am all in favour of your idea
that we should go back to our old plan of having a
more or less set subject—an agendum—for our letters.
When we were last separated the correspondence
languished for lack of it. How much better we did
in our undergraduate days with our interminable
letters on the Republic, and classical metres, and
what was then the “new” psychology! Nothing
makes an absent friend so present as a disagreement.

Prayer, which you suggest, is a subject that is a
good deal in my mind. I mean, private prayer. If
you were thinking of corporate prayer, I won’t play.
There is no subject in the world (always excepting
sport) on which I have less to say than liturgiology.
And the almost nothing which I have to say may
as well be disposed of in this letter.

I think our business as laymen is to take what we
are given and make the best of it. And I think we
should find this a great deal easier if what we were
given was always and everywhere the same.

To judge from their practice, very few Anglican
12
clergymen take this view. It looks as if they believed
people can be lured to go to church by incessant
brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements,
simplifications and complications of the
service. And it is probably true that a new, keen
vicar will usually be able to form within his parish
a minority who are in favour of his innovations.
The majority, I believe, never are. Those who
remain—many give up churchgoing altogether—merely
endure.

Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound?
I think not. They have a good reason for
their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can
have only an entertainment value. And they don’t
go to church to be entertained. They go to use the
service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is
a structure of acts and words through which we
receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or
adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if
you like, it “works” best—when, through long
familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long
as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are
not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good
shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading
becomes possible when you need not consciously
think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.
The perfect church service would be one we were
almost unaware of; our attention would have been
on God.

13

But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our
attention on the service itself; and thinking about
worship is a different thing from worshipping. The
important question about the Grail was “for what
does it serve?” “’Tis mad idolatry that makes the
service greater than the god.”

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix
our attention not even on the service but on the
celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may
to exclude it, the question, “What on earth is he
up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion
waste. There is really some excuse for the man who
said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to
Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on
my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new
tricks.”

Thus my whole liturgiological position really
boils down to an entreaty for permanence and
uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind
of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if
each form is snatched away just when I am beginning
to feel at home in it, then I can never make
any progress in the art of worship. You give me no
chance to acquire the trained habit—habito dell’ arte.

It may well be that some variations which seem
to me merely matters of taste really involve grave
doctrinal differences. But surely not all? For if
grave doctrinal differences are really as numerous
as variations in practice, then we shall have to
14
conclude that no such thing as the Church of
England exists. And anyway, the Liturgical Fidget
is not a purely Anglican phenomenon; I have heard
Roman Catholics complain of it too.

And that brings me back to my starting point.
The business of us laymen is simply to endure and
make the best of it. Any tendency to a passionate
preference for one type of service must be regarded
simply as a temptation. Partisan “Churchmanships”
are my bête noire. And if we avoid them, may we not
possibly perform a very useful function? The
shepherds go off, “every one to his own way” and
vanish over diverse points of the horizon. If the
sheep huddle patiently together and go on bleating,
might they finally recall the shepherds? (Haven’t
English victories sometimes been won by the rank
and file in spite of the generals?)

As to the words of the service—liturgy in the
narrower sense—the question is rather different.
If you have a vernacular liturgy you must have a
changing liturgy; otherwise it will finally be
vernacular only in name. The ideal of “timeless
English” is sheer nonsense. No living language can
be timeless. You might as well ask for a motionless
river.

I think it would have been best, if it were possible,
that necessary change should have occurred gradually
and (to most people) imperceptibly; here a
little and there a little; one obsolete word replaced
15
in a century—like the gradual change of spelling
in successive editions of Shakespeare. As things are
we must reconcile ourselves, if we can also reconcile
government, to a new Book.

If we were—I thank my stars I’m not—in a
position to give its authors advice, would you have
any advice to give them? Mine could hardly go
beyond unhelpful cautions: “Take care. It is so
easy to break eggs without making omelettes.”

Already our liturgy is one of the very few remaining
elements of unity in our hideously divided
Church. The good to be done by revision needs to
be very great and very certain before we throw that
away. Can you imagine any new Book which will
not be a source of new schism?

Most of those who press for revision seem to wish
that it should serve two purposes: that of modernising
the language in the interests of intelligibility,
and that of doctrinal improvement. Ought the two
operations—each painful and each dangerous—to
be carried out at the same time? Will the patient
survive?

What are the agreed doctrines which are to be
embodied in the new Book and how long will
agreement on them continue? I ask with trepidation
because I read a man the other day who seemed to
wish that everything in the old Book which was
inconsistent with orthodox Freudianism should be
deleted.

16

For whom are we to cater in revising the
language? A country parson I know asked his sexton
what he understood by indifferently in the phrase
“truly and indifferently administer justice”. The
man replied, “It means making no difference
between one chap and another.” “And what would
it mean if it said impartially?” asked the parson.
“Don’t know. Never heard of it,” said the sexton.
Here, you see, we have a change intended to make
things easier. But it does so neither for the educated,
who understand indifferently already, nor for the
wholly uneducated, who don’t understand impartially.
It helps only some middle area of the congregation
which may not even be a majority. Let us
hope the revisers will prepare for their work by a
prolonged empirical study of popular speech as it
actually is, not as we (a priori) assume it to be. How
many scholars know (what I discovered by accident)
that when uneducated people say impersonal they
sometimes mean incorporeal?

What of expressions which are archaic but not
unintelligible? (“Be ye lift up”). I find that people
re-act to archaism most diversely. It antagonises
some: makes what is said unreal. To others, not
necessarily more learned, it is highly numinous and
a real aid to devotion. We can’t please both.

I know there must be change. But is this the right
moment? Two signs of the right moment occur to
me. One would be a unity among us which enabled
17
the Church—not some momentarily triumphant
party—to speak through the new work with a
united voice. The other would be the manifest
presence, somewhere in the Church, of the specifically
literary talent needed for composing a good
prayer. Prose needs to be not only very good but
very good in a very special way, if it is to stand up
to reiterated reading aloud. Cranmer may have his
defects as a theologian; as a stylist, he can play all
the moderns, and many of his predecessors, off the
field. I don’t see either sign at the moment.

Yet we all want to be tinkering. Even I would
gladly see “Let your light so shine before men”
removed from the offertory. It sounds, in that
context, so like an exhortation to do our alms that
they may be seen by men.

I’d meant to follow up what you say about Rose
Macaulay’s letters, but that must wait till next
week.

18

2

I can’t understand why you
say that my view of church services is “man-centred”
and too concerned with “mere edification”.
How does this follow from anything I said?
Actually my ideas about the sacrament would
probably be called “magical” by a good many
modern theologians. Surely, the more fully one
believes that a strictly supernatural event takes
place, the less one can attach any great importance
to the dress, gestures, and position of the priest?
I agree with you that he is there not only to edify
the people but to glorify God. But how can a man
glorify God by placing obstacles in the way of the
people? Especially if the slightest element of
“clerical one-upmanship”—I owe the phrase to a
cleric—underlies some of his eccentricities? How
right is that passage in the Imitation where the
celebrant is told, “Consult not your own devotion
but the edification of your flock.” I’ve forgotten
how the Latin runs.

Now about the Rose Macaulay Letters. Like you,
19
I was staggered by this continual search for more
and more prayers. If she were merely collecting
them as objets d’art I could understand it; she was a
born collector. But I get the impression that she
collected them in order to use them; that her
whole prayer-life depended on what we may call
“ready-made” prayers—prayers written by other
people.

But though, like you, staggered, I was not, like
you, repelled. One reason is that I had—and you
hadn’t—the luck to meet her. Make no mistake.
She was the right sort; one of the most fully civilised
people I ever knew. The other reason, as I have so
often told you, is that you are a bigot. Broaden
your mind, Malcolm, broaden your mind! It takes
all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be
even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it
must expand all our natures into the full richness
of the diversity which God intended when He made
them, and heaven will display far more variety
than hell. “One fold” doesn’t mean “one pool”.
Cultivated roses and daffodils are no more alike
than wild roses and daffodils. What pleased me
most about a Greek Orthodox mass I once attended
was that there seemed to be no prescribed behaviour
for the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some
sat, some walked; one crawled about the floor like
a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody
took the slightest notice of what anyone else was
20
doing. I wish we Anglicans would follow their
example. One meets people who are perturbed
because someone in the next pew does, or does not,
cross himself. They oughtn’t even to have seen, let
alone censured. “Who art thou that judgest
Another’s servant?”

I don’t doubt, then, that Rose Macaulay’s
method was the right one for her. It wouldn’t be
for me, any more than for you.

All the same, I am not quite such a purist in this
matter as I used to be. For many years after my
conversion I never used any ready-made forms
except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray
without words at all—not to verbalise the mental
acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended
to avoid their names and substituted mental
images of them. I still think the prayer without
words is the best—if one can really achieve it. But
I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread
I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual
strength than I really have. To pray successfully
without words one needs to be “at the top of one’s
form.” Otherwise the mental acts become merely
imaginative or emotional acts—and a fabricated
emotion is a miserable affair. When the golden
moments come, when God enables one really to
pray without words, who but a fool would reject the
gift? But He does not give it—anyway not to me—day
in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if
21
I remember rightly, calls “Error of Stoicism”:
thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.

And this, you see, makes the choice between
ready-made prayers and one’s own words rather
less important for me than it apparently is for you.
For me words are in any case secondary. They are
only an anchor. Or, shall I say, they are the
movements of a conductor’s baton: not the music.
They serve to canalise the worship or penitence or
petition which might without them—such are our
minds—spread into wide and shallow puddles. It
does not matter very much who first put them
together. If they are our own words they will soon,
by unavoidable repetition, harden into a formula.
If they are someone else’s, we shall continually pour
into them our own meaning.

At present—for one’s practice changes and, I
think, ought to change—I find it best to make
“my own words” the staple but introduce a
modicum of the ready-made.

Writing to you, I need not stress the importance
of the home-made staple. As Solomon said at the
dedication of the temple, each man who prays
knows “the plague of his own heart”. Also, the
comforts of his own heart. No other creature is
identical with me; no other situation identical with
mine. Indeed, I myself and my situation are in
continual change. A ready-made form can’t serve
22
for my intercourse with God any more than it
could serve for my intercourse with you.

This is obvious. Perhaps I shan’t find it so easy
to persuade you that the ready-made modicum has
also its use: for me, I mean—I’m not suggesting
rules for any one else in the whole world.

First, it keeps me in touch with “sound doctrine”.
Left to oneself, one could easily slide away
from “the faith once given” into a phantom called
“my religion”.

Secondly, it reminds me “what things I ought
to ask” (perhaps especially when I am praying
for other people). The crisis of the present
moment, like the nearest telegraph-post, will always
loom largest. Isn’t there a danger that our great,
permanent, objective necessities—often more important—may
get crowded out? By the way, that’s
another thing to be avoided in a revised Prayer
Book. “Contemporary problems” may claim an
undue share. And the more “up to date” the Book
is, the sooner it will be dated.

Finally, they provide an element of the ceremonial.
On your view, that is just what we don’t want.
On mine, it is part of what we want. I see what you
mean when you say that using ready-made prayers
would be like “making love to your own wife out of
Petrarch or Donne”. (Incidentally might you not
quote them—to such a literary wife as Betty?) The
parallel won’t do.

23

I fully agree that the relationship between God
and a man is more private and intimate than any
possible relation between two fellow creatures. Yes,
but at the same time there is, in another way, a
greater distance between the participants. We are
approaching—well I won’t say “the Wholly Other”,
for I suspect that is meaningless, but the Unimaginably
and Insupportably Other. We ought to be—sometimes
I hope one is—simultaneously aware of
closest proximity and infinite distance. You make
things far too snug and confiding. Your erotic
analogy needs to be supplemented by “I fell at His
feet as one dead.”

I think the “low” church milieu that I grew up in
did tend to be too cosily at ease in Sion. My grandfather,
I’m told, used to say that he “looked forward
to having some very interesting conversations with
St. Paul when he got to heaven.” Two clerical
gentlemen talking at ease in a club! It never seemed
to cross his mind that an encounter with St. Paul
might be rather an overwhelming experience even
for an Evangelical clergyman of good family. But
when Dante saw the great apostles in heaven they
affected him like mountains. There’s lots to be said
against devotions to saints; but at least they keep
on reminding us that we are very small people compared
with them. How much smaller before their
Master?

A few formal, ready-made, prayers serve me as a
24
corrective of—well, let’s call it “cheek”. They keep
one side of the paradox alive. Of course it is only
one side. It would be better not to be reverent at
all than to have a reverence which denied the
proximity.

25

3

Oh for mercy’s sake. Not you
too! Why, just because I raise an objection to your
parallel between prayer and a man making love to
his own wife, must you trot out all the old rigmarole
about the “holiness” of sex and start lecturing me as
if I were a Manichaean? I know that in most circles
now-a-days one need only mention sex to set everyone
in the room emitting this gas. But, I did hope,
not you. Didn’t I make it plain that I objected to
your image solely on the ground of its nonchalance,
or presumption?

I’m not saying anything against (or for) “sex”.
Sex in itself cannot be moral or immoral any more
than gravitation or nutrition. The sexual behaviour
of human beings can. And like their economic, or
political, or agricultural, or parental, or filial behaviour,
it is sometimes good and sometimes bad.
And the sexual act, when lawful—which means
chiefly when consistent with good faith and charity—can,
like all other merely natural acts (“whether
we eat or drink etc.” as the apostle says) be done to
26
the glory of God, and will then be holy. And like
other natural acts it is sometimes so done, and sometimes
not. This may be what the poor Bishop of
Woolwich was trying to say. Anyway, what more is
there to be said? And can we now get this red herring
out of the way? I’d be glad if we could; for the
moderns have achieved the feat, which I should
have thought impossible, of making the whole subject
a bore. Poor Aphrodite! They have sandpapered
most of the Homeric laughter off her face.

Apparently I have been myself guilty of introducing
another red herring by mentioning devotions to
saints. I didn’t in the least want to go off into a discussion
on that subject. There is clearly a theological
defence for it; if you can ask for the prayers of the
living, why should you not ask for the prayers of the
dead? There is clearly also a great danger. In some
popular practice we see it leading off into an infinitely
silly picture of heaven as an earthly court
where applicants will be wise to pull the right wires,
discover the best “channels”, and attach themselves
to the most influential pressure groups. But I have
nothing to do with all this. I am not thinking of
adopting the practice myself; and who am I to judge
the practices of others? I only hope there’ll be no
scheme for canonisations in the Church of England.
Can you imagine a better hot-bed for yet more divisions
between us?

The consoling thing is that while Christendom is
27
divided about the rationality, and even the lawfulness,
of praying to the saints, we are all agreed about
praying with them. “With angels and archangels
and all the company of heaven.” Will you believe it?
It is only quite recently I made that quotation a
part of my private prayers—I festoon it round “hallowed
be Thy name”. This, by the way, illustrates
what I was saying last week about the uses of ready-made
forms. They remind one. And I have found
this quotation a great enrichment. One always
accepted this with theoretically. But it is quite different
when one brings it into consciousness at an
appropriate moment and wills the association of
one’s own little twitter with the voice of the great
saints and (we hope) of our own dear dead. They
may drown some of its uglier qualities and set off
any tiny value it has.

You may say that the distinction between the
communion of the saints as I find it in that act and
full-fledged prayer to saints is not, after all, very
great. All the better if so. I sometimes have a bright
dream of re-union engulfing us unawares, like a
great wave from behind our backs, perhaps at the
very moment when our official representatives are
still pronouncing it impossible. Discussions usually
separate us; actions sometimes unite us.

When I spoke of prayer without words I don’t
think I meant anything so exalted as what mystics
call the “prayer of silence”. And when I spoke of
28
being “at the top of one’s form” I didn’t mean it
purely in a spiritual sense. The condition of the
body comes in; for I suppose a man may be in a
state of grace and yet very sleepy.

And, talking of sleepiness, I entirely agree with
you that no one in his senses, if he has any power of
ordering his own day, would reserve his chief
prayers for bed-time—obviously the worst possible
hour for any action which needs concentration. The
trouble is that thousands of unfortunate people can
hardly find any other. Even for us, who are the
lucky ones, it is not always easy. My own plan,
when hard pressed, is to seize any time, and place,
however unsuitable, in preference to the last waking
moment. On a day of travelling—with, perhaps,
some ghastly meeting at the end of it—I’d rather
pray sitting in a crowded train than put it off till
midnight when one reaches a hotel bedroom with
aching head and dry throat and one’s mind partly
in a stupor and partly in a whirl. On other, and
slightly less crowded, days a bench in a park, or a
back street where one can pace up and down, will
do.

A man to whom I was explaining this said, “But
why don’t you turn into a church?” Partly because,
for nine months of the year, it will be freezingly cold
but also because I have bad luck with churches. No
sooner do I enter one and compose my mind than
one or other of two things happens. Either someone
29
starts practising the organ. Or else, with resolute
tread, there appears from nowhere a pious woman
in elastic-side boots, carrying mop, bucket, and
dust-pan, and begins beating hassocks and rolling
up carpets and doing things to flower vases. Of
course (blessings on her) “work is prayer,” and her
enacted oratio is probably worth ten times my spoken
one. But it doesn’t help mine to become worth
more.

When one prays in strange places and at strange
times one can’t kneel, to be sure. I won’t say this
doesn’t matter. The body ought to pray as well as
the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it.
Bless the body. Mine has led me into many scrapes,
but I’ve led it into far more. If the imagination were
obedient the appetites would give us very little
trouble. And from how much it has saved me! And
but for our body one whole realm of God’s glory—all
that we receive through the senses—would go
unpraised. For the beasts can’t appreciate it and the
angels are, I suppose, pure intelligences. They understand
colours and tastes better than our greatest
scientists; but have they retinas or palates? I fancy
the “beauties of nature” are a secret God has shared
with us alone. That may be one of the reasons why
we were made—and why the resurrection of the
body is an important doctrine.

But I’m being led into a digression; perhaps
because I am still smarting under the charge of
30
being a Manichee! The relevant point is that kneeling
does matter, but other things matter even more.
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for
better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half
asleep. Sometimes these are the only alternatives.
(Since the osteoporosis I can hardly kneel at all in
most places, myself.)

A clergyman once said to me that a railway compartment,
if one has it to oneself, is an extremely
good place to pray in “because there is just the right
amount of distraction.” When I asked him to
explain, he said that perfect silence and solitude left
one more open to the distractions which come from
within, and that a moderate amount of external
distraction was easier to cope with. I don’t find this
so myself, but I can imagine it.

The Jones boy’s name is Cyril—though why you
find it so important to pray for people by their
Christian names I can’t imagine. I always assume
God knows their surnames as well. I am afraid many
people appear in my prayers only as “that old man
at Crewe” or “the waitress” or even “that man”.
One may have lost, or may never have known, their
names and yet remember how badly they need to
be prayed for.

No letter next week. I shall be in the thick of
exams.

31

4

Of the two difficulties you mention
I think that only one is often a practical problem
for believers. The other is in my experience
usually raised by people who are attacking Christianity.

The ideal opening for their attacks—if they know
the Bible—is the phrase in Philippians about “making
your requests known to God”. I mean, the words
making known bring out most clearly the apparent
absurdity with which they charge us. We say that
we believe God to be omniscient; yet a great deal of
prayer seems to consist of giving Him information.
And indeed we have been reminded by Our Lord
too not to pray as if we forgot the omniscience—“for
your heavenly Father knows you need all these
things”.

This is final against one very silly sort of prayer.
I have heard a man offer a prayer for a sick person
which really amounted to a diagnosis followed by
advice as to how God should treat the patient. And
I have heard prayers nominally for peace, but really
32
so concerned for various devices which the petitioner
believed to be means to peace, that they were open
to the same criticism.

But even when that kind of thing is ruled out, the
unbeliever’s objection remains. To confess our sins
before God is certainly to tell Him what He knows
much better than we. And also, any petition is a
kind of telling. If it does not strictly exclude the
belief that God knows our need, it at least seems to
solicit His attention. Some traditional formulae
make that implication very clear: “Hear us, good
Lord”—“O let thine ears consider well the voice of
my complaint.” As if, though God does not need to
be informed, He does need, and even rather frequently,
to be reminded. But we cannot really
believe that degrees of attention, and therefore of
inattention, and therefore of something like forgetfulness,
exist in the Absolute Mind. I presume that
only God’s attention keeps me (or anything else) in
existence at all.

What, then, are we really doing? Our whole conception
of, so to call it, the prayer-situation depends
on the answer.

We are always completely, and therefore equally,
known to God. That is our destiny whether we like
it or not. But though this knowledge never varies,
the quality of our being known can. A school of
thought holds that “freedom is willed necessity”.
Never mind if they are right or not. I want this idea
33
only as an analogy. Ordinarily, to be known by God
is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things.
We are, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae,
objects of Divine knowledge. But when we (a)
become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the
generalisation—and (b) assent with all our will to
be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to
God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled.
Not that any veil could have baffled His sight. The
change is in us. The passive changes to the active.
Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell,
we offer ourselves to view.

To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with
God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing
but presumption and illusion. But we are taught
that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing.
For it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry “Father”.
By unveiling, by confessing our sins and “making
known” our requests, we assume the high rank of
persons before Him. And He, descending, becomes a
Person to us.

But I should not have said “becomes”. In Him
there is no becoming. He reveals Himself as Person:
or reveals that in Him which is Person. For—dare
one say it? in a book it would need pages of qualification
and insurance—God is in some measure to
a man as that man is to God. The door in God that
opens is the door he knocks at. (At least, I think so,
usually.) The Person in Him—He is more than a
34
person—meets those who can welcome or at least
face it. He speaks as “I” when we truly call Him
“Thou”. (How good Buber is!)

This talk of “meeting” is, no doubt, anthropomorphic;
as if God and I could be face to face,
like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is
above me and within me and below me and all
about me. That is why it must be balanced by all
manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions.
But never, here or anywhere else, let us think
that while anthropomorphic images are a concession
to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth.
Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading,
and the two together mutually corrective.
Unless you sit to it very lightly, continually murmuring
“Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou”,
the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives
inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The
naïf image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds
unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers,
even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever
perished for believing that God the Father really
has a beard?

Your other question is one which, I think, really
gets in pious people’s way. It was, you remember,
“How important must a need or desire be before
we can properly make it the subject of a petition?”
Properly, I take it, here means either “Without
irreverence” or “Without silliness”, or both.

35

When I’d thought about it for a bit, it seemed to
me that there are really two questions involved.

1. How important must an object be before we
can, without sin and folly, allow our desire for it to
become a matter of serious concern to us? This, you
see, is a question about what old writers call our
“frame”; that is, our “frame of mind”.

2. Granted the existence of such a serious concern
in our minds, can it always be properly laid before
God in prayer?

We all know the answer to the first of these in
theory. We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?)
calls “ordinate loves”. Our deepest concern should
be for first things, and our next deepest for second
things, and so on down to zero—to total absence
of concern for things that are not really good, nor
means to good, at all.

Meantime, however, we want to know not how
we should pray if we were perfect but how we should
pray being as we now are. And if my idea of prayer
as “unveiling” is accepted, we have already
answered this. It is no use to ask God with factitious
earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality
filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him
what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

Even an intimate human friend is ill-used if we
talk to him about one thing while our mind is really
on another, and even a human friend will soon
become aware when we are doing so. You yourself
36
came to see me a few years ago when the great blow
had fallen upon me. I tried to talk to you as if
nothing were wrong. You saw through it in five
minutes. Then I confessed. And you said things
which made me ashamed of my attempt at concealment.

It may well be that the desire can be laid before
God only as a sin to be repented; but one of the best
ways of learning this is to lay it before God. Your
problem, however, was not about sinful desires in
that sense; rather about desires, intrinsically innocent
and sinning, if at all, only by being stronger
than the triviality of their object warrants. I have
no doubt at all that if they are the subject of our
thoughts they must be the subject of our prayers—whether
in penitence or in petition or in a little of
both: penitence for the excess, yet petition for the
thing we desire.

If one forcibly excludes them, don’t they wreck
all the rest of our prayers? If we lay all the cards on
the table, God will help us to moderate the excesses.
But the pressure of things we are trying to keep out
of our mind is a hopeless distraction. As someone
said, “No noise is so emphatic as one you are trying
not to listen to.”

The ordinate frame of mind is one of the blessings
we must pray for, not a fancy-dress we must put
on when we pray.

And perhaps, as those who do not turn to God in
37
petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help
them when the great trials come, so those who have
not learned to ask Him for childish things will have
less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must
not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes
be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own
dignity rather than of God’s.

38

5

I don’t very much like the job
of telling you “more about my festoonings”—the
private overtones I give to certain petitions. I make
two conditions: (a) That you will in return tell me
some of yours. (b) That you will understand I am
not in the least recommending mine either to you or to
anyone else. There could be many better; and my
present festoons will very probably change.

I call them “festoons”, by the way, because they
don’t (I trust) obliterate the plain, public sense of
the petition but are merely hung on it.

What I do about “hallowed be Thy name” I told
a fortnight ago.

Thy kingdom come. That is, may your reign be
realised here, as it is realised there. But I tend to
take there on three levels. First, as in the sinless world
beyond the horrors of animal and human life; in the
behaviour of stars and trees and water, in sunrise
and wind. May there be here (in my heart) the
beginning of a like beauty. Secondly, as in the best
human lives I have known: in all the people who
39
really bear the burdens and ring true, the people
we call bricks, and in the quiet, busy, ordered life of
really good families and really good religious houses.
May that too be “here”. Finally, of course, in the
usual sense: as in heaven, as among the blessed
dead.

And here can of course be taken not only for “in
my heart”, but for “in this college”—in England—in
the world in general. But prayer is not the time
for pressing our own favourite social or political
panacea. Even Queen Victoria didn’t like “being
talked to as if she were a public meeting”.

Thy will be done. My festoons on this have been
added gradually. At first I took it exclusively as an
act of submission, attempting to do with it what Our
Lord did in Gethsemane. I thought of God’s will
purely as something that would come upon me,
something of which I should be the patient. And I
also thought of it as a will which would be embodied
in pains and disappointments. Not, to be sure, that
I suppose God’s will for me to consist entirely of disagreeables.
But I thought it was only the disagreeables
that called for this preliminary submission—the
agreeables could look after themselves for the
present. When they turned up, one could give
thanks.

This interpretation is, I expect, the commonest.
And so it must be. And such are the miseries of
human life that it must often fill our whole mind.
40
But at other times other meanings can be added.
So I added one more.

The peg for it is, I admit, much more obvious in
the English version than in the Greek or Latin. No
matter: this is where the liberty of festooning comes
in. “Thy will be done”. But a great deal of it is to be
done by God’s creatures; including me. The petition,
then, is not merely that I may patiently suffer
God’s will but also that I may vigorously do it.
I must be an agent as well as a patient. I am asking
that I may be enabled to do it. In the long run I am
asking to be given “the same mind which was also
in Christ”.

Taken this way, I find the words have a more
regular daily application. For there isn’t always—or
we don’t always have reason to suspect that there
is—some great affliction looming in the near future,
but there are always duties to be done; usually,
for me, neglected duties to be caught up with. “Thy
will be done—by me—now” brings one back to
brass tacks.

But more than that, I am at this very moment
contemplating a new festoon. Tell me if you think
it a vain subtlety. I am beginning to feel that we
need a preliminary act of submission not only
towards possible future afflictions but also towards
possible future blessings. I know it sounds fantastic;
but think it over. It seems to me that we often,
almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us
41
because, at that moment, we expected some other
good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of
our life—in our religious experience, in our gastronomic,
erotic, aesthetic and social experience—we
are always harking back to some occasion which
seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as
a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by
comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect,
are often full of their own new blessings if only
we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a
new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it
because we’re still looking for the old one. And of
course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth
reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas
for the first time. But what you do get can be in its
own way as good.

This applies especially to the devotional life.
Many religious people lament that the first fervours
of their conversion have died away. They think—sometimes
rightly, but not, I believe always—that
their sins account for this. They may even try by
pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have
been the golden days. But were those fervours—the
operative word is those—ever intended to
last?

It would be rash to say that there is any prayer
which God never grants. But the strongest candidate
is the prayer we might express in the single word
encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself?
42
All space and time are too little for Him to utter
Himself in them once.

And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these
golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting
if we erect them into a norm, are entirely
nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are
content to accept them for what they are, for
memories. Properly bedded down in a past which
we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will
send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone,
and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up
and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last
year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a
seed die . . .”

I expect we all do much the same with the prayer
for our daily bread. It means, doesn’t it, all we need
for the day—“things requisite and necessary as well
for the body as for the soul.” I should hate to make
this clause “purely religious” by thinking of
“spiritual” needs alone. One of its uses, to me, is to
remind us daily that what Burnaby calls the naïf
view of prayer is firmly built into Our Lord’s
teaching.

Forgive us . . . as we forgive. Unfortunately there’s
no need to do any festooning here. To forgive for the
moment is not difficult. But to go on forgiving, to
forgive the same offence again every time it recurs
to the memory—there’s the real tussle. My resource
is to look for some action of my own which is open
43
to the same charge as the one I’m resenting. If I
still smart to remember how A let me down, I must
still remember how I let B down. If I find it difficult
to forgive those who bullied me at school, let me,
at that very moment, remember, and pray for, those
I bullied. (Not that we called it bullying of course.
That is where prayer without words can be so useful.
In it there are no names; therefore no aliases.)

I was never worried myself by the words lead
us not into temptation, but a great many of my
correspondents are. The words suggest to them what
some one has called “a fiend-like conception of
God,” as one who first forbids us certain fruits and
then lures us to taste them. But the Greek
word (πειρασμός) means “trial”—“trying circumstances”—of
every sort; a far larger word than
English “temptation”. So that the petition essentially
is, “Make straight our paths. Spare us, where
possible, from all crises, whether of temptation or
affliction.” By the way, you yourself, though you’ve
doubtless forgotten it, gave me an excellent gloss on
it: years ago in the pub at Coton. You said it added
a sort of reservation to all our preceding prayers.
As if we said, “In my ignorance I have asked for A,
B and C. But don’t give me them if you foresee that
they would in reality be to me either snares or
sorrows.” And you quoted Juvenal, numinibus vota
exaudita malignis, “enormous prayers which heaven
in vengeance grants”. For we make plenty of such
44
prayers. If God had granted all the silly prayers
I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?

I don’t often use the kingdom, the power, and the
glory. When I do, I have an idea of the kingdom as
sovereignty de jure; God, as good, would have a
claim on my obedience even if He had no power.
The power is the sovereignty de facto—He is omnipotent.
And the glory is—well, the glory; the
“beauty so old and new”, the “light from behind
the sun.”

45

6

I can’t remember exactly what
I said about not making the petition for our daily
bread too “religious”, and I’m not quite sure what
you mean—nor how ironically—by asking if I’ve
become “one of Vidler’s young men.”!

About Vidler. I never heard the programme
which created all that scandal, and naturally one
wouldn’t condemn a dog on newspaper extracts. But
I have now read his essay in Soundings and I believe
I go a good deal further with him than you would.
Much of what he quotes from F. D. Maurice and
Bonhoeffer seems to me very good; and so, I think,
are his own arguments for the Establishment.

At any rate I can well understand how a man
who is trying to love God and his neighbour should
come to dislike the very word religion; a word, by
the way, which hardly ever appears in the New
Testament. Newman makes my blood run cold,
when he says in one of the Parochial and Plain Sermons
that Heaven is like a church because in both, “one
single sovereign subject—religion—is brought before
46
us”. He forgets that there is no temple in the new
Jerusalem.

He has substituted religion for God—as if navigation
were substituted for arrival, or battle for victory,
or wooing for marriage, or in general the
means for the end. But even in this present life, there
is danger in the very concept of religion. It carries the
suggestion that this is one more department of life,
an extra department added to the economic, the
social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the
rest. But that whose claims are infinite can have no
standing as a department. Either it is an illusion or
else our whole life falls under it. We have no non-religious
activities; only religious and irreligious.

Religion, nevertheless, appears to exist as a
department, and, in some ages, to thrive as such.
It thrives partly because there exists in many people
a “love of religious observances”, which I think
Simone Weil is quite right in regarding as a merely
natural taste. There exists also—Vidler is rather
good on this—the delight in religious (as in any
other) organisation. Then all sorts of aesthetic, sentimental,
historical, political interests are drawn in.
Finally sales of work, the parish magazine, and bell-ringing,
and Santa Claus.

None of them bad things. But none of them is necessarily
of more spiritual value than the activities
we call secular. And they are infinitely dangerous
when this is not understood. This department of life,
47
labelled “sacred”, can become an end in itself; an
idol that hides both God and my neighbours.
(“When the means are autonomous they are
deadly”.) It may even come about that a man’s
most genuinely Christian actions fall entirely outside
that part of his life which he calls religious.

I read in a religious paper, “Nothing is more
important than to teach children to use the sign of
the cross.” Nothing? Not compassion, nor veracity,
nor justice? Voilà l’ennemi.

One must, however, walk warily, for the truth
that religion as a department has really no right to
exist can be misunderstood. Some will conclude
that this illegitimate department ought to be abolished.
Others will think, coming nearer to the truth,
that it ought to cease to be departmental by being
extended to the whole of life, but will misinterpret
this. They will think it means that more and more of
our secular transactions should be “opened with
prayer”, that a wearisomely explicit pietism should
infest our talk, that there should be no more cakes
and ale. A third sort, well aware that God still rules
a very small part of their lives, and that “a departmental
religion” is no good, may despair. It would
have to be carefully explained to them that to be “still
only a part” is not the same as being a permanent
department. In all of us God “still” holds only a
part. D-Day is only a week ago. The bite so far taken
out of Normandy shows small on the map of Europe.
48
The resistance is strong, the casualties heavy, and
the event uncertain. There is, we have to admit, a
line of demarcation between God’s part in us and
the enemy’s region. But it is, we hope, a fighting
line; not a frontier fixed by agreement.

But I suspect the real misunderstanding of
Vidler’s talk lay elsewhere. We have been speaking
of religion as a pattern of behaviour—which, if contentedly
departmental, cannot really be Christian
behaviour. But people also, and more often, use
religion to mean a system of beliefs. When they heard
that Vidler wanted a church with “less religion”,
they thought he meant that the little—the very
little—which liberal theology has still left of the
“faith once given” was to be emptied out. Hence
some one asked, “Is he a Theist?”

Well, he certainly is. He wants—I think he wants
very earnestly—to retain some Christian doctrines.
But he is prepared to scrap a good deal. “Traditional
doctrines” are to be tested. Many things will
have to be “outgrown” or “survive chiefly as venerable
archaisms or as fairy-stories”. He feels quite
happy about this undefined programme of jettison
because he trusts in the continued guidance of the
Holy Spirit. A noble faith; provided, of course,
there is any such being as the Holy Spirit. But I
suppose His existence is itself one of the “traditional
doctrines” which, on Vidler’s premises, we might
any day find we had outgrown. So with the doctrine—Vidler
49
calls it “the fact”—that man is “a two-fold
creature—not only a political creature, but also a
spiritual being”. Vidler and you and I (and Plato)
think it a fact. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions,
think it a fantasy. The neutral description of it is
“a traditional doctrine”. Do you think he means
that these two doctrines—and why just these two?—are
the hard core of his belief, exempt from the
threat of rejection which overhangs all other doctrines?
Or would he say that, as the title of the book
implies, he is only “taking soundings”—and if the
line is not long enough to reach bottom, soundings
can yield only negative information to the navigator?

I was interested in the things you said about
forgive us our trespasses. Often, to be sure, there is
something definite for which to ask forgiveness. This
is plain sailing. But, like you, I often find one or
other of two less manageable states: either a vague
feeling of guilt or a sly, and equally vague, self-approval.
What are we to do with these?

Many modern psychologists tell us always to distrust
this vague feeling of guilt, as something purely
pathological. And if they had stopped at that, I
might believe them. But when they go on, as some
do, to apply the same treatment to all guilt-feelings
whatever, to suggest that one’s feeling about a particular
unkind act or a particular insincerity is also
and equally untrustworthy—I can’t help thinking
50
they are talking nonsense. One sees this the moment
one looks at other people. I have talked to some who
felt guilt when they jolly well ought to have felt it;
they have behaved like brutes and know it. I’ve also
met others who felt guilty and weren’t guilty by any
standard I can apply. And thirdly, I’ve met people
who were guilty and didn’t seem to feel guilt. And
isn’t this what we should expect? People can be
malades imaginaires who are well and think they are
ill; and others, especially consumptives, are ill and
think they are well; and thirdly—far the largest
class—people are ill and know they are ill. It would
be very odd if there were any region in which all
mistakes were in one direction.

Some Christians would tell us to go on rummaging
and scratching till we find something specific.
We may be sure, they say, that there are real sins
enough to justify the guilt-feeling or to overthrow
the feeling that all is well. I think they are right in
saying that if we hunt long enough we shall find, or
think we have found, something. But that is just
what wakens suspicion. A theory which could never
by any experience be falsified can for that reason
hardly be verified. And just as, when we are yielding
to temptation, we make ourselves believe that what
we have always thought a sin will on this occasion,
for some strange reason, not be a sin, shan’t we persuade
ourselves that something we have always
(rightly) thought to be innocent was really wrong?
51
We may create scruples. And scruples are always a
bad thing—if only because they usually distract us
from real duties.

I don’t at all know whether I’m right or not, but
I have, on the whole, come to the conclusion that
one can’t directly do anything about either feeling.
One is not to believe either—indeed, how can one
believe a fog? I come back to St. John: “if our
heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.”
And equally, if our heart flatter us, God is greater
than our heart. I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge
in general but for just so much self-knowledge
at the moment as I can bear and use at the
moment; the little daily dose.

Have we any reason to suppose that total self-knowledge,
if it were given us, would be for our
good? Children and fools, we are told, should never
look at half-done work; and we are not yet, I trust,
even half-done. You and I wouldn’t, at all stages,
think it wise to tell a pupil exactly what we thought
of his quality. It is much more important that he
should know what to do next.

If one said this in public one would have all the
Freudians on one’s back. And, mind you, we are
greatly indebted to them. They did expose the
cowardly evasions of really useful self-knowledge
which we had all been practising from the beginning
of the world. But there is also a merely morbid
and fidgety curiosity about one’s self—the slop-over
52
from modern psychology—which surely does no
good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump
off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis
doesn’t cure that. We all know people who have
undergone it and seem to have made themselves a
lifelong subject of research ever since.

If I am right, the conclusion is that when our
conscience won’t come down to brass-tacks but will
only vaguely accuse or vaguely approve, we must
say to it, like Herbert, “Peace, prattler”—and
get on.

53

7

If you meant in your last letter
that we can scrap the whole idea of petitionary
prayer—prayer which, as you put it, calls upon God
to “engineer” particular events in the objective
world—and confine ourselves to acts of penitence
and adoration, I disagree with you. It may be true
that Christianity would be, intellectually, a far
easier religion if it told us to do this. And I can
understand the people who think it would also be a
more high-minded religion. But remember the
psalm: “Lord, I am not high minded.” Or better
still, remember the New Testament. The most unblushingly
petitionary prayers are there recommended
to us both by precept and example. Our
Lord in Gethsemane made a petitionary prayer
(and did not get what He asked for).

You’ll remind me that He asked with a reservation—“nevertheless,
not my will but thine.” This
makes an enormous difference. But the difference
which it precisely does not make is that of removing
the prayer’s petitionary character. When poor Bill,
54
on a famous occasion, asked us to advance him
£100, he said, “If you are sure you can spare it,”
and, “I shall quite understand if you’d rather not.”
This made his request very different from the nagging
or even threatening request which a different
sort of man might have made. But it was still a
request.

The servant is not greater, and must not be more
high-minded than the master. Whatever the theoretical
difficulties are, we must continue to make
requests of God. And on this point we can get no
help from those who keep on reminding us that this
is the lowest and least essential kind of prayer. They
may be right; but so what? Diamonds are more
precious than cairngorms, but the cairngorms still
exist and must be taken into account like anything
else.

But don’t let us be too easily brow-beaten. Some
of the popular objections to petitionary prayer, if
they are valid against it, are equally valid against
other things which we all do whether we are Christians
or not, and have done ever since the world
began, and shall certainly continue to do. I don’t
think the burden of answering these rests especially
on us.

There is, for example, the Determinism which,
whether under that name or another, seems to be
implicit in a scientific view of the world. Determinism
does not deny the existence of human behaviour.
55
It rejects as an illusion our spontaneous conviction
that our behaviour has its ultimate origin in ourselves.
What I call “my act” is the conduit-pipe
through which the torrent of the universal process
passes, and was bound to pass, at a particular time
and place. The distinction between what we call
the “voluntary” and the “involuntary” movements
of our own bodies is not obliterated, but turns out
(on this view) to be not exactly the sort of difference
we supposed. What I call the “involuntary” movements
necessarily—and, if we know enough, predictably—result
from mechanical causes outside my
body or from pathological or organic processes
within it. The “voluntary” ones result from conscious
psychological factors which themselves result
from unconscious psychological factors dependent
on my economic situation, my infantile and prenatal
experience, my heredity . . . and so on back to
the beginnings of organic life and beyond. I am a
conductor, not a source. I never make an original
contribution to the world-process. I move with that
process not even as a floating log moves with the
river but as a particular pint of the water itself
moves.

But even those who believe this will, like anyone
else, ask you to hand them the salt. Every form of
behaviour, including speech, can go on just the
same, and will. If a strict Determinist believed in
God (and I think he might) petitionary prayer
56
would be no more irrational in him than in anyone
else.

Another argument, put up (but not accepted) by
Burnaby in Soundings, is this. If man’s freedom is to
be of any value, if he is to have any power of planning
and of adapting means to ends, he must live in
a predictable world. But if God alters the course of
events in answer to prayer, then the world will be
unpredictable. Therefore, if man is to be effectively
free, God must be in this respect un-free.

But is it not plain that this predictable world,
whether it is necessary to our freedom or no, is not
the world we live in? This is a world of bets and
insurance policies, of hopes and anxieties, where
“nothing is certain but the unexpected” and prudence
lies in “the masterly administration of the
unforeseen”. Nearly all the things people pray
about are unpredictable: the result of a battle or
an operation, the losing or getting of a job, the
reciprocation of a love. We don’t pray about
eclipses.

But, you will reply, we once did. Every advance
of science makes predictable something that was
formerly unpredictable. It is only our ignorance that
makes petitionary prayer possible. Would it not be
rational to assume that all those events we now
pray about are in principle just as predictable—though
we don’t yet know enough to predict them—as
things like eclipses? But that is no answer to the
57
point I’m making. I am not now trying to refute
Determinism. I am only arguing that a world where
the future is unknown cannot be inconsistent with
planned and purposive action since we are actually
planning and purposing in such a world now and
have been doing so for thousands of years.

Also, between ourselves, I think this objection
involves a false idea of what the sciences do. You
are here a better judge than I, but I give it for what
it may be worth. It is true in one sense that the
mark of a genuine science is its power to predict.
But does this mean that a perfected science, or a
perfected synthesis of all the sciences, would be able
to write reliable histories of the future? And would
the scientists even want to do so? Doesn’t science
predict a future event only in so far as, and only
because, that event is the instance of some universal
law? Everything that makes the event unique—in
other words, everything that makes it a concrete
historical event—is deliberately ruled out; not only
as something which science can’t, or can’t yet,
include, but also as something in which science, as
such, has no interest. No one sunrise has ever been
exactly like another. Take away from the sunrises
that in which they differ and what is left will be
identical. Such abstracted identicals are what
science predicts. But life as we live it is not reducible
to such identities. Every real physical event, much
more every human experience, has behind it, in the
58
long run, the whole previous history of the real
universe—which is not itself an “instance” of anything—and
is therefore always festooned with those
particularities which science for her own purposes
quite rightly discounts. Doesn’t the whole art of
contriving a good experiment consist in devising
means whereby the irrelevancies—that is, the historical
particularities—can be reduced to the
minimum?

Later in his essay Burnaby seems to suggest that
human wills are the only radically unpredictable
factor in history. I’m not happy about this. Partly
because I don’t see how the gigantic negative which
it involves could be proved; partly because I agree
with Bradley that unpredictability is not the essence,
nor even a symptom, of freedom. (Did you see
they’ve reprinted Ethical Studies? The baiting of
Arnold, wholly just and in Arnold’s own manner,
is exquisite.) But suppose it were true. Even then,
it would make such a huge rent in the predictability
of events that the whole idea of predictability as
somehow necessary to human life would be in
ruins. Think of the countless human acts, acts of
copulation, spread over millennia, that led to the
birth of Plato, Attila, or Napoleon. Yet it is on these
unpredictables that human history largely depends.
Twenty-five years ago you asked Betty to marry
you. And now, as a result, we have young George,
(I hope he’s got over his gastric flu?) A thousand
59
years hence he might have a good many descendants,
and only modesty could conceal from you the
possibility that one of these might have as huge a
historical effect as Aristotle—or Hitler!

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8

What froth and bubble my last
letter must have seemed to you! I had hardly
posted it when I got Betty’s card with the disquieting
news about George—turning my jocular reference
to his descendants into a stab (at least I suppose
it did) and making our whole discussion on prayer
seem to you, as it now does to me, utterly unreal.
The distance between the abstract, “Does God hear
petitionary prayers?” and the concrete, “Will He—can
He—grant our prayers for George?” is apparently
infinite.

Not of course that I can pretend for a moment to
be able to feel it as you do. If I did, you would say
to yourself (like the man in Macbeth) “He has no
children.” A few years ago when I was in my own
trouble you said as much to me. You wrote, “I know
I’m outside. My voice can hardly reach you.” And
that was one reason why your letter was more like
the real grasp of a real hand than any other I
got.

The temptation is to attempt reassurances: to
61
remind you how often a G.P.’s preliminary diagnosis
is wrong, that the symptoms are admittedly
ambiguous, that threatened men sometimes live
to a ripe old age. And it would all in fact be true.
But what, in that way, could I say which you are
not saying to yourself every hour? And you would
know my motive. You’d know how little real
scientific candour—or knowledge—lay behind my
words. And if, which God forbid, your suspense
ended as terribly as mine did, these reassurances
would sound like mockeries. So at least I found. The
memory of the false hopes was an additional torment.
Even now certain remembered moments of
fallacious comfort twist my heart more than the
remembered moment of despair.

All may yet be well. This is true. Meanwhile you
have the waiting—waiting till the X-rays are developed
and till the specialist has completed his
observations. And while you wait, you still have to
go on living—if only one could go underground,
hibernate, sleep it out. And then (for me—I believe
you are stronger) the horrible by-products of
anxiety; the incessant, circular movement of the
thoughts, even the Pagan temptation to keep watch
for irrational omens. And one prays; but mainly
such prayers as are themselves a form of anguish.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and
regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all.
They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions,
62
they are, if we can so take them, our share in the
Passion of Christ. For the beginning of the Passion—the
first move, so to speak—is in Gethsemane.
In Gethsemane a very strange and significant thing
seems to have happened.

It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord
had long foreseen His death. He knew what conduct
such as His, in a world such as we have made of this,
must inevitably lead to. But it is clear that this
knowledge must somehow have been withdrawn
from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane. He
could not, with whatever reservation about the
Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass
and simultaneously known that it would not. That
is both a logical and a psychological impossibility.
You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident
to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope—of
suspense, anxiety—were at the last moment
loosed upon Him—the supposed possibility that,
after all, He might, He just conceivably might, be
spared the supreme horror. There was precedent.
Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment,
he also against all apparent probability. It was not
quite impossible . . . and doubtless He had seen
other men crucified . . . a sight very unlike most of
our religious pictures and images.

But for this last (and erroneous) hope against
hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the
sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been
63
very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is
not to be a man.

At the end, I know, we are told that an angel
appeared “comforting” him. But neither comforting
in Sixteenth Century English nor ἐννισχύων in
Greek means “consoling”. “Strengthening” is more
the word. May not the strengthening have consisted
in the renewed certainty—cold comfort this—that
the thing must be endured and therefore could be?

We all try to accept with some sort of submission
our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the
prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding
anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our
human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it.
And the servant is not greater than the master. We
are Christians, not Stoics.

Does not every movement in the Passion write
large some common element in the sufferings of our
race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted.
Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep—as
ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or
preoccupied. Then He faces the Church; the very
Church that He brought into existence. It condemns
Him. This is also characteristic. In every Church,
in every institution, there is something which sooner
or later works against the very purpose for which it
came into existence. But there seems to be another
chance. There is the State; in this case, the Roman
state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the
64
Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be
free from local fanaticisms. It claims to be just, on
a rough, worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent
with political expediency and raison d’état.
One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But
even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to
the People—the poor and simple whom He had
blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught,
to whom He himself belongs. But they have become
over-night (it is nothing unusual) a murderous
rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing
left but God. And to God, God’s last words are,
“Why hast thou forsaken me?”

You see how characteristic, how representative,
it all is. The human situation writ large. These are
among the things it means to be a man. Every rope
breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed
shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end
of the run; the earths all staked.

As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either
understand or endure it? Is it that God Himself
cannot be Man unless God seems to vanish at His
greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder
if we have even begun to understand what is
involved in the very concept of creation. If God will
create, He will make something to be, and yet to be
not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be
ejected or separated. Can it be that the more perfect
the creature is, the further this separation must at
65
some point be pushed? It is saints, not common
people, who experience the “dark night”. It is men
and angels, not beasts, who rebel. Inanimate matter
sleeps in the bosom of the Father. The “hiddenness”
of God perhaps presses most painfully on those
who are in another way nearest to Him, and therefore
God Himself, made man, will of all men be by
God most forsaken? One of the Seventeenth Century
divines says: “By pretending to be visible God
could only deceive the world.” Perhaps He does
pretend just a little to simple souls who need a full
measure of “sensible consolation”. Not deceiving
them, but tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.
Of course I’m not saying like Niebühr that evil is
inherent in finitude. That would identify the
creation with the fall and make God the author of
evil. But perhaps there is an anguish, an alienation,
a crucifixion involved in the creative act. Yet He
who alone can judge judges the far-off consummation
to be worth it.

I am, you see, a Job’s comforter. Far from lightening
the dark valley where you now find yourself, I
blacken it. And you know why. Your darkness has
brought back my own. But on second thoughts I
don’t regret what I have written. I think it is only
in a shared darkness that you and I can really meet
at present; shared with one another and, what
matters most, with our Master. We are not on an
untrodden path. Rather, on the main-road.

66

Certainly we were talking too lightly and easily
about these things a fortnight ago. We were playing
with counters. One used to be told as a child:
“Think what you’re saying.” Apparently we need
also to be told: “Think what you’re thinking.”
The stakes have to be raised before we take the
game quite seriously. I know this is the opposite of
what is often said about the necessity of keeping
all emotion out of our intellectual processes—“You
can’t think straight unless you are cool.” But
then neither can you think deep if you are. I suppose
one must try every problem in both states. You
remember that the ancient Persians debated everything
twice: once when they were drunk and once
when they were sober.

I know one of you will let me have news as soon
as there is any.

67

9

Thank God. What a mare’s nest!
Or, more grimly, what a rehearsal! It is only
twenty-four hours since I got Betty’s wire, and
already the crisis seems curiously far away. Like
at sea. Once you have doubled the point and got
into smooth water, the point doesn’t take long to
hide below the horizon.

And now, your letter. I’m not at all surprised
at your feeling flattened rather than joyful. That
isn’t ingratitude. It’s only exhaustion. Weren’t
there moments even during those terrible days
when you glided into a sort of apathy—for the same
reason? The body (bless it) will not continue
indefinitely supplying us with the physical media of
emotion.

Surely there’s no difficulty about the prayer in
Gethsemane on the ground that if the disciples were
asleep they couldn’t have heard it and therefore
couldn’t have recorded it? The words they did
record would hardly have taken three seconds to
utter. He was only “a stone’s throw” away. The
68
silence of night was around them. And we may
be sure He prayed aloud. People did everything
aloud in those days. You remember how astonished
St. Augustine was—some centuries later in a far
more sophisticated society—to discover that when
St. Ambrose was reading (to himself) you couldn’t
hear the words even if you went and stood just
beside him? The disciples heard the opening words
of the prayer before they went to sleep. They
record those opening words as if they were the
whole.

There is a rather amusing instance of the same
thing in Acts XXIV. The Jews had got down a
professional orator called Tertullos to conduct the
prosecution of St. Paul. The speech as recorded by
St. Luke takes eighty-four words in the Greek, if
I’ve counted correctly. Eighty-four words are
impossibly short for a Greek advocate on a full-dress
occasion. Presumably, then, they are a précis?
But of those eighty-odd words forty are taken up
with preliminary compliments to the bench—stuff,
which, in a précis on that tiny scale, ought not to
have come in at all. It is easy to guess what has
happened. St. Luke, though an excellent narrator,
was no good as a reporter. He starts off by trying to
memorise, or to get down, the whole speech
verbatim. And he succeeds in reproducing a certain
amount of the exordium (The style unmistakable.
Only a practising rhetor ever talks that way). But
69
he is soon defeated. The whole of the rest of the
speech has to be represented by a ludicrously
inadequate abstract. But he doesn’t tell us what
has happened, and thus seems to attribute to Tertullos
a performance which would have spelled
professional ruin.

As you say, the problems about prayer which
really press upon a man when he is praying for
dear life are not the general and philosophical ones;
they are those that arise within Christianity itself.
At least, this is so for you and me. We have long
since agreed that if our prayers are granted at all
they are granted from the foundation of the world.
God and His acts are not in time. Intercourse
between God and man occurs at particular moments
for the man, but not for God. If there is—as
the very concept of prayer presupposes—an adaptation
between the free actions of men in prayer and
the course of events, this adaptation is from the
beginning inherent in the great single creative act.
Our prayers are heard—don’t say “have been
heard” or you are putting God into time—not only
before we make them but before we are made
ourselves.

The real problems are different. Is it our faith
that prayers, or some prayers, are real causes? But
they are not magical causes: they don’t, like spells,
act directly on nature. They act, then, on nature
through God? This would seem to imply that they
70
act on God. But God, we believe, is impassible. All
theology would reject the idea of a transaction in
which a creature was the agent and God the
patient.

It is quite useless to try to answer this empirically
by producing stories—though you and I could tell
strange ones—of striking answers to prayer. We
shall be told, reasonably enough, that post hoc is not
propter hoc. The thing we prayed for was going to
happen anyway. Our action was irrelevant. Even a
fellow-creature’s action which fulfils our request
may not be caused by it; he does what we ask, but
perhaps he would equally have done so without
our asking. Some cynics will tell us that no woman
ever married a man because he proposed to her: she
always elicits the proposal because she has determined
to marry him.

In these human instances we believe, when we
do believe, that our request was the cause, or a
cause, of the other party’s action, because we have
from deep acquaintance a certain impression of
that party’s character. Certainly not by applying
the scientific procedures—control experiments, etc.—for
establishing causes. Similarly we believe,
when we do believe, that the relation between our
prayer and the event is not a mere coincidence only
because we have a certain idea of God’s character.
Only faith vouches for the connection. No empirical
proof could establish it. Even a miracle, if one
71
occurred, “might have been going to happen
anyway.”

Again, in the most intimate human instances
we really feel that the category of cause and effect
will not contain what actually happens. In a real
“proposal”—as distinct from one in an old-fashioned
novel—is there any agent-patient relation?
Which drop on the window pane moves to
join the other?

Now I am going to suggest that strictly causal
thinking is even more inadequate when applied to
the relation between God and man. I don’t mean
only when we are thinking of prayer, but whenever
we are thinking about what happens at the Frontier,
at the mysterious point of junction and separation
where absolute being utters derivative being.

One attempt to define causally what happens
there has led to the whole puzzle about Grace and
free will. You will notice that Scripture just sails
over the problem. “Work out your own salvation in
fear and trembling”—pure Pelagianism. But why?
“For it is God who worketh in you”—pure Augustinianism.
It is presumably only our presuppositions
that make this appear nonsensical. We profanely
assume that divine and human action exclude one
another like the actions of two fellow-creatures so
that “God did this” and “I did this” cannot both
be true of the same act except in the sense that each
contributed a share.

72

In the end we must admit a two-way traffic at the
junction. At first sight no passive verb in the world
would seem to be so utterly passive as “to be
created”. Does it not mean “to have been nonentity”?
Yet, for us rational creatures, to be created also
means “to be made agents”. We have nothing that
we have not received; but part of what we have
received is the power of being something more than
receptacles. We exercise it, no doubt, chiefly by our
sins. But they, for my present argument, will do as
well as anything else. For God forgives sins. He
would not do so if we committed none—“whereto
serves Mercy but to confront the visage of offence?”
In that sense the Divine action is consequent upon,
conditioned by, elicited by, our behaviour. Does
this mean that we can “act upon” God? I suppose
you could put it that way if you wanted. If you
do, then we must interpret His “impassibility” in a
way which admits this; for we know that God
forgives much better than we know what “impassible”
means. I would rather say that from before
all worlds His providential and creative act (for
they are all one) takes into account all the situations
produced by the acts of His creatures. And if He
takes our sins into account, why not our petitions?

73

10

I see your point. But you must
admit that Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pains
to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We
are constantly represented as exciting the Divine
wrath or pity—even as “grieving” God. I know
this language is analogical. But when we say that,
we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw
the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to
a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute
for the analogical expression is some theological
abstraction. And the abstraction’s value is almost
entirely negative. It warns us against drawing
absurd consequences from the analogical expression
by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction
“impassible” can get us nowhere. It might even
suggest something far more misleading than the
most naïf Old Testament picture of a stormily
emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or
something which was “Pure Act” in such a sense
that it could take no account of events within the
universe it had created.

74

I suggest two rules for exegetics. (1) Never take
the images literally. (2) When the purport of the
images—what they say to our fear and hope and
will and affections—seems to conflict with the
theological abstractions, trust the purport of the
images every time. For our abstract thinking is
itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of
spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical
terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than
the sensuous, organic, and personal images of
scripture—light and darkness, river and well, seed
and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens,
father and child? The footprints of the Divine are
more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or
slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “de-mythologising”
Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising”
it—and substituting a poorer mythology
for a richer.

I agree that my deliberately vague expression
about our prayers being “taken into account” is a
retreat from Pascal’s magnificent dictum (“God
has instituted prayer so as to confer upon His
creatures the dignity of being causes”). But Pascal
really does suggest a far too explicit agent-and-patient
relation, with God as the patient. And I
have another ground for preferring my own more
modest formula. To think of our prayers as just
“causes” would suggest that the whole importance
of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the
75
thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life
as a whole, the “being taken into account”, or
“considered”, matters more than the being granted.
Religious people don’t talk about the “results”
of prayer; they talk of its being “answered” or
“heard”. Someone said “A suitor wants his suit to
be heard as well as granted.” In suits to God, if they
are really religious acts at all and not merely
attempts at magic, this is even more so. We can
bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other
words, our faith can survive many refusals if they
really are refusals and not mere disregards. The
apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that
a Father’s hand put it into ours, in mercy or in
justice or even in rebuke. It is hard and bitter, yet
it can be chewed and swallowed. But if, having
prayed for our heart’s desire and got it, we then
became convinced that this was a mere accident—that
providential designs which had only some quite
different end just couldn’t help throwing out this
satisfaction for us as a by-product—then the apparent
bread would become a stone. A pretty stone, perhaps,
or even a precious stone. But not edible to the soul.

What we must fight against is Pope’s maxim:

the first Almighty Cause

Acts not by partial, but by general laws.

The odd thing is that Pope thought, and all who
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agree with him think, that this philosophical
theology is an advance beyond the religion of the
child and the savage (and the New Testament). It
seems to them less naïf and anthropomorphic. The
real difference, however, is that the anthropomorphism
is more subtly hidden and of a far more
disastrous type.

For the implication is that there exists on the
Divine level a distinction with which we are very
familiar on our own: that between the plan (or the
main plan) and its unintended but unavoidable by-products.
Whatever we do, even if it achieves its
object, will also scatter round it a spray of consequences
which were not its object at all. This is
so even in private life. I throw out crumbs for the
birds and provide, incidentally, a breakfast for the
rats. Much more so in what may be called managerial
life. The governing body of the college alters
the time of dinner in hall; our object being to let
the servants get home earlier. But by doing so we
alter the daily pattern of life for every undergraduate.
To some the new arrangement will be
a convenience, to others the reverse. But we had
no special favour for the first lot and no spite against
the second. Our arrangement drags these unforeseen
and undesired consequences after it. We can’t
help this.

On Pope’s view God has to work in the same
way. He has His grand design for the sum of things.
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Nothing we can say will deflect it. It leaves Him
little freedom (or none?) for granting, or even for
deliberately refusing, our prayers. The grand design
churns out innumerable blessings and curses for individuals.
God can’t help that. They’re all by-products.

I suggest that the distinction between plan and
by-product must vanish entirely on the level of
omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness.
I believe this because even on the human level it
diminishes the higher you go. The better a human
plan is made, the fewer unconsidered by-products
it will have and the more birds it will kill with one
stone, the more diverse needs and interests it will
meet; the nearer it will come—it can never come
very near—to being a plan for each individual. Bad
laws make hard cases. But let us go beyond the
managerial altogether. Surely a man of genius
composing a poem or symphony must be less unlike
God than a ruler? But the man of genius has no
mere by-products in his work. Every note or word
will be more than a means, more than a consequence.
Nothing will be present solely for the sake
of other things. If each note or word were conscious
it would say: “The maker had me myself in view
and chose for me, with the whole force of his genius,
exactly the context I required.” And it would be
right—provided it remembered that every other
note or word could say no less.

How should the true Creator work by “general
78
laws”? “To generalise is to be an idiot,” said Blake.
Perhaps he went too far. But to generalise is to be a
finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which
our intellects have to manage. How should God
sully the infinite lucidity of this vision with such
makeshifts? One might as well think He had to consult
books of reference, or that, if He ever considered
me individually, He would begin by saying, “Gabriel,
bring me Mr. Lewis’s file.”

The God of the New Testament who takes into
account the death of every sparrow is not more, but
far less, anthropomorphic than Pope’s.

I will not believe in the Managerial God and his
general laws. If there is Providence at all, everything
is providential and every providence is a
special providence. It is an old and pious saying that
Christ died not only for Man but for each man, just
as much as if each had been the only man there was.
Can I not believe the same of this creative act—which,
as spread out in time, we call destiny or
history? It is for the sake of each human soul. Each
is an end. Perhaps for each beast. Perhaps even each
particle of matter—the night sky suggests that the
inanimate also has for God some value we cannot
imagine. His ways are not (not there, anyway) like
ours.

If you ask why I believe all this, I can only reply
that we are taught, both by precept and example, to
pray, and that prayer would be meaningless in the
79
sort of universe Pope pictured. One of the purposes
for which God instituted prayer may have been to
bear witness that the course of events is not governed
like a state but created like a work of art to which
every being makes its contribution and (in prayer)
a conscious contribution, and in which every being
is both an end and a means. And since I have momentarily
considered prayer itself as a means let me
hasten to add that it is also an end. The world was
made partly that there might be prayer; partly that
our prayers for George might be answered. But let’s
have finished with “partly”. The great work of art
was made for the sake of all it does and is, down to
the curve of every wave and the flight of every
insect.

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11

I see you won’t let me off. And
the longer I look at it the less I shall like it. I must
face—or else explicitly decline—the difficulties that
really torment us when we cry for mercy in earnest.
I have found no book that helps me with them all.
I have so little confidence in my own power to
tackle them that, if it were possible, I would let
sleeping dogs lie. But the dogs are not sleeping. They
are awake and snapping. We both bear the marks
of their teeth. That being so, we had better share
our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other
we should not hide them from ourselves.

The New Testament contains embarrassing promises
that what we pray for with faith we shall
receive. Mark XI, 24 is the most staggering. Whatever
we ask for, believing that we’ll get it, we’ll get.
No question, it seems, of confining it to spiritual
gifts; whatever we ask for. No question of a merely
general faith in God, but a belief that you will get
the particular thing you ask. No question of getting
either it or else something that is really far better
81
for you; you’ll get precisely it. And to heap paradox
on paradox, the Greek doesn’t even say “believing
that you will get it”. It uses the aorist, ἑλάβετε,
which one is tempted to translate “believing that
you got it”. But this final difficulty I shall ignore.
I don’t expect Aramaic had anything which we—brought
up on Latin grammar—would recognise as
tenses at all.

How is this astonishing promise to be reconciled—

(a) With the observed facts?

(b) With the prayer in Gethsemane, and (as a
result of that prayer) the universally accepted view
that we should ask everything with a reservation
(“if it be Thy will”)?

As regards (a), no evasion is possible. Every war,
every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is
the monument to a petition that was not granted.
At this very moment thousands of people in this one
island are facing as a fait accompli, the very thing
against which they have prayed night and day,
pouring out their whole soul in prayer, and, as they
thought, with faith. They have sought and not
found. They have knocked and it has not been
opened. “That which they greatly feared has come
upon them.”

But (b) though much less often mentioned, is
surely an equal difficulty. How is it possible at one
and the same moment to have a perfect faith—an
untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says
82
(I, 6)—that you will get what you ask and yet also
prepare yourself submissively in advance for a
possible refusal? If you envisage a refusal as
possible, how can you have simultaneously a perfect
confidence that what you ask will not be refused?
If you have that confidence, how can you take
refusal into account at all?

It is easy to see why so much more is written about
worship and contemplation than about “crudely”
or “naïvely” petitionary prayer. They may be—I
think they are—nobler forms of prayer. But they
are also a good deal easier to write about.

As regards the first difficulty, I’m not asking why
our petitions are so often refused. Anyone can see
in general that this must be so. In our ignorance we
ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even
intrinsically possible. Or again, to grant one man’s
prayer involves refusing another’s. There is much
here which it is hard for our will to accept but
nothing that is hard for our intellect to understand.
The real problem is different; not why refusal is so
frequent, but why the opposite result is so lavishly
promised.

Shall we then proceed on Vidler’s principles and
scrap the embarrassing promises as “venerable
archaisms” which have to be “outgrown”? Surely,
even if there were no other objection, that method is
too easy. If we are free to delete all inconvenient
data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties;
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but for the same reason no solutions and no
progress. The very writers of the “Tekkies”, not to
mention the scientists, know better. The troublesome
fact, the apparent absurdity which can’t be
fitted into any synthesis we have yet made, is precisely
the one we must not ignore. Ten to one, it’s
in that covert the fox is lurking. There is always
hope if we keep an unsolved problem fairly in view;
there’s none if we pretend it’s not there.

Before going any further, I want to make two
purely practical points: 1. These lavish promises
are the worst possible place at which to begin
Christian instruction in dealing with a child or a
Pagan. You remember what happened when the
Widow started Huck Finn off with the idea he could
get what he wanted by praying for it. He tried the
experiment and then, not unnaturally, never gave
Christianity a second thought; we had better not
talk about the view of prayer embodied in Mark XI,
24 as “naïf” or “elementary”. If that passage contains
a truth, it is a truth for very advanced pupils
indeed. I don’t think it is “addressed to our condition”
(yours and mine) at all. It is a coping-stone,
not a foundation. For most of us the prayer in
Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains
can wait.

2. We must not encourage in ourselves or others
any tendency to work up a subjective state which,
if we succeeded, we should describe as “faith”, with
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the idea that this will somehow ensure the granting
of our prayer. We have probably all done this as
children. But the state of mind which desperate
desire working on a strong imagination can manufacture
is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat
of psychological gymnastics.

It seems to me we must conclude that such promises
about prayer with faith refer to a degree or
kind of faith which most believers never experience.
A far inferior degree is, I hope, acceptable to God.
Even the kind that says, “Help thou my unbelief”,
may make way for a miracle. Again, the absence of
such faith as ensures the granting of the prayer is not
even necessarily a sin; for Our Lord had no such
assurance when He prayed in Gethsemane.

How or why does such faith occur sometimes, but
not always, even in the perfect petitioner? We, or I,
can only guess. My own idea is that it occurs only
when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow-worker,
demanding what is needed for the joint
work. It is the prophet’s, the apostle’s, the missionary’s,
the healer’s prayer that is made with this confidence
and finds the confidence justified by the
event. The difference, we are told, between a servant
and a friend is that a servant is not in his master’s
secrets. For him, “orders is orders”. He has only
his own surmises as to the plans he helps to execute.
But the fellow-worker, the companion or (dare we
say?) the colleague of God is so united with Him at
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certain moments that something of the divine foreknowledge
enters his mind. Hence his faith is the
“evidence”—that is, the evidentness, the obviousness—of
things not seen.

As the friend is above the servant, the servant is
above the suitor, the man praying on his own behalf.
It is no sin to be a suitor. Our Lord descends into the
humiliation of being a suitor, of praying on His own
behalf, in Gethsemane. But when He does so the
certitude about His Father’s will is apparently
withdrawn.

After that it would be no true faith—it would be
idle presumption—for us, who are habitually suitors
and do not often rise to the level of servants, to
imagine that we shall have any assurance which is
not an illusion—or correct only by accident—about
the event of our prayers. Our struggle is, isn’t it?—to
achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To
believe that, whether He can grant them or not,
God will listen to our prayers, will take them into
account. Even to go on believing that there is a
Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and
more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only
talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The
silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so
much already.

What do you think about these things? I have
offered only guesses.

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12

My experience is the same as
yours. I have never met a book on prayer which was
much use to people in our position. There are many
little books of prayers, which may be helpful to those
who share Rose Macaulay’s approach, but you and
I wouldn’t know what to do with them. It’s not
words we lack! And there are books on prayer, but
they nearly all have a strongly conventual background.
Even the Imitation is sometimes, to an almost
comic degree, “not addressed to my condition”. The
author assumes that you will want to be chatting
in the kitchen when you ought to be in your cell.
Our temptation is to be in our studies when we
ought to be chatting in the kitchen. (Perhaps if our
studies were as cold as those cells it would be
different.)

You and I are people of the foothills. In the
happy days when I was still a walker, I loved the
hills, and even mountain walks, but I was no
climber. I hadn’t the head. So now, I do not attempt
the precipices of mysticism. On the other hand,
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there is, apparently, a level of prayer-life lower even
than ours. I don’t mean that the people who occupy
it are spiritually lower than we. They may far excel
us. But their praying is of an astonishingly undeveloped
type.

I have only just learned about it—from our Vicar.
He assures me that, so far as he has been able to
discover, the overwhelming majority of his parishioners
mean by “saying their prayers” repeating
whatever little formula they were taught in childhood
by their mothers. I wonder how this can come
about. It can’t be that they are never penitent or
thankful—they’re dear people, many of them—or
have no needs. Is it that there is a sort of water-tight
bulk-head between their “religion” and their “real
life”, in which case the part of their life which they
call “religious” is really the irreligious part?

But however badly needed a good book on prayer
is, I shall never try to write it. Two people on the
foothills comparing notes in private are all very
well. But in a book one would inevitably seem to be
attempting, not discussion, but instruction. And for
me to offer the world instruction about prayer would
be impudence.

About the higher level—the crags up which the
mystics vanish out of my sight—the glaciers and the
aiguilles—I have only two things to say. One is that
I don’t think we are all “called” to that ascent.
“If it were so, He would have told us.”

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The second is this. The following position is gaining
ground and is extremely plausible. Mystics (it
is said) starting from the most diverse religious
premises all find the same things. These things have
singularly little to do with the professed doctrines
of any particular religion—Christianity, Hinduism,
Buddhism, Neo-Platonism, etc. Therefore, mysticism
is, by empirical evidence, the only real contact
Man has ever had with the unseen. The agreement
of the explorers proves that they are all in touch
with something objective. It is therefore the one
true religion. And what we call the “religions” are
either mere delusions or, at best, so many porches
through which an entrance into transcendent
reality can be effected—

And when he hath the kernel eate,

Who doth not throw away the shell?

I am doubtful about the premises. Did Plotinus
and Lady Julian and St. John of the Cross really
find “the same things”? But even admitting some
similarity. One thing common to all mysticisms is
the temporary shattering of our ordinary spatial and
temporal consciousness and of our discursive intellect.
The value of this negative experience must
depend on the nature of that positive, whatever it is,
for which it makes room. But should we not expect
that the negative would always feel the same? If
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wine-glasses were conscious, I suppose that being
emptied would be the same experience for each, even
if some were to remain empty and some to be filled
with wine and some broken. All who leave the
land and put to sea will “find the same things”—the
land sinking below the horizon, the gulls dropping
behind, the salty breeze. Tourists, merchants,
sailors, pirates, missionaries—it’s all one. But this
identical experience vouches for nothing about the
utility or lawfulness or final event of their voyages—

It may be that the gulfs will wash them down,

It may be they will touch the Happy Isles.

I do not at all regard mystical experience as an
illusion. I think it shows that there is a way to go,
before death, out of what may be called “this
world”—out of the stage set. Out of this; but into
what? That’s like asking an Englishman, “Where
does the sea lead to?” He will reply “To everywhere
on earth, including Davy Jones’s locker,
except England.” The lawfulness, safety, and utility
of the mystical voyage depends not at all on its
being mystical—that is, on its being a departure—but
on the motives, skill, and constancy of the
voyager, and on the grace of God. The true religion
gives value to its own mysticism; mysticism does not
validate the religion in which it happens to occur.

I shouldn’t be at all disturbed if it could be shown
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that a diabolical mysticism, or drugs, produced
experiences indistinguishable (by introspection)
from those of the great Christian mystics. Departures
are all alike; it is the landfall that crowns the
voyage. The saint, by being a saint, proves that his
mysticism (if he was a mystic; not all saints are) led
him aright; the fact that he has practised mysticism
could never prove his sanctity.

You may wonder that my intense desire to peep
behind the scenes has not led me to attempt the
mystic way. But would it not be the worst of all
possible motives? The saint may win “a mortal
glimpse of death’s immortal rose”, but it is a by-product.
He took ship simply in humble and selfless
love.

There can be a desire (like mine) with no carnal
element in it at all which is nevertheless, in St.
Paul’s sense, “flesh” and not “spirit”. That is, there
can be a merely impulsive, headstrong, greedy
desire even for spiritual things. It is, like our other
appetites, “cross-fodder”. Yet, being crucified, it
can be raised from the dead, and made part of our
bliss.

Turning now to quite a different point in your
letter. I too had noticed that our prayers for others
flow more easily than those we offer on our own
behalf. And it would be nice to accept your view
that this just shows we are made to live by charity.
I’m afraid, however, I detect two much less attractive
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reasons for the ease of my own intercessory
prayers. One is that I am often, I believe, praying
for others when I should be doing things for them.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and
see him. And the other is like unto it. Suppose I
pray that you may be given grace to withstand your
besetting sin (short list of candidates for this post
will be forwarded on demand). Well, all the work
has to be done by God and you. If I pray against
my own besetting sin there will be work for me. One
sometimes fights shy of admitting an act to be a sin
for this very reason.

The increasing list of people to be prayed for is,
nevertheless, one of the burdens of old age. I have
a scruple about crossing anyone off the list. When I
say a scruple, I mean precisely a scruple. I don’t
really think that if one prays for a man at all it is a
duty to pray for him all my life. But when it comes
to dropping him now, this particular day, it somehow
goes against the grain. And as the list lengthens,
it is hard to make it more than a mere string of
names. But here—in some measure—a curious law
comes into play. Don’t you find that, if you keep
your mind fixed upon God, you will automatically
think of the person you are praying for; but that
there is no tendency for it to work the other way
round?

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13

I’ve just found in an old note-book
a poem, with no author’s name attached,
which is rather relevant to something we were talking
about a few weeks ago—I mean, the haunting
fear that there is no-one listening, and that what we
call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself.
This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in
effect: “Very well, suppose it is”, and gets a surprising
result. Here is the poem:

They tell me, Lord that when I seem

To be in speech with you,

Since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,

One talker aping two.

Sometimes it is, yet not as they

Conceive it. Rather, I

Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,

But lo!, my wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake

The listener’s role and through

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My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake

The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply

Nor can; thus, while we seem

Two talkers, thou are One forever, and I

No dreamer, but thy dream.

Dream makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps
dragged in for the rhyme. But is he not right in
thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a
soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then
in prayer God speaks to God. But the human petitioner
does not therefore become a “dream”. As
you said the other day, God and man cannot
exclude one another, as man excludes man, at the
point of junction, so to call it, between Creator and
creature; the point where the mystery of creation—timeless
for God, and incessant in time for us—is
actually taking place. “God did (or said) it” and
“I did (or said) it” can both be true.

You remember the two maxims Owen [Barfield]
lays down in Saving the Appearances? On the one
hand, the man who does not regard God as other
than himself cannot be said to have a religion at all.
On the other hand, if I think God other than myself
in the same way in which my fellow-men, and
objects in general, are other than myself, I am
beginning to make Him an idol. I am daring to
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treat His existence as somehow parallel to my own.
But He is the ground of our being. He is always
both within us and over against us. Our reality is
so much from His reality as He, moment by moment,
projects into us. The deeper the level within
ourselves from which our prayer, or any other act,
wells up, the more it is His, but not at all the less
ours. Rather, most ours when most His. Arnold
speaks of us as “enisled” from one another in “the
sea of life”. But we can’t be similarly “en-isled”
from God. To be discontinuous from God as I am
discontinuous from you would be annihilation.

A question at once arises. Is it still God speaking
when a liar or a blasphemer speaks? In one sense,
almost Yes. Apart from God he could not speak at
all; there are no words not derived from the Word;
no acts not derived from Him who is Actus purus.
And indeed the only way in which I can make real
to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness
of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion
of an energy breathed into us—an energy
which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed
into one of those holy acts whereof “God did it”
and “I did it” are both true descriptions. We poison
the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody
He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature
the self-portrait He would paint. Hence all
sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

We must, no doubt, distinguish this ontological
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continuity between Creator and creature which is,
so to speak, “given” by the relation between them,
from the union of wills which, under Grace, is
reached by a life of sanctity. The ontological continuity
is, I take it, unchangeable, and exists
between God and a reprobate (or a devil) no less
than between God and a saint. “Whither shall I go
then from thy presence? If I go down to hell, thou
art there also.”

Where there is prayer at all we may suppose that
there is some effort, however feeble, towards the
second condition, the union of wills. What God
labours to do or say through the man comes back
to God with a distortion which at any rate is not
total.

Do you object to the apparent “roundaboutness”—it
could easily be made comic—of the whole picture?
Why should God speak to Himself through
man? I ask, in reply, why should He do anything
through His creatures? Why should He achieve,
the long way round, through the labours of angels,
men (always imperfectly obedient and efficient),
and the activity of irrational and inanimate beings,
ends which, presumably, the mere fiat of omnipotence
would achieve with instantaneous perfection?

Creation seems to be delegation through and
through. He will do nothing simply of Himself
which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is
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because He is a giver. And He has nothing to give
but Himself. And to give Himself is to do His deeds—in
a sense, and on varying levels to be Himself—through
the things He has made.

In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of
creation surely is that He was not content to be all.
He intends to be “all in all”.

One must be careful not to put this in a way which
would blur the distinction between the creation of a
man and the Incarnation of God. Could one, as a
mere model, put it thus? In creation God makes—invents—a
person and “utters”—injects—him into
the realm of Nature. In the Incarnation, God the
Son takes the body and human soul of Jesus, and,
through that, the whole environment of Nature,
all the creaturely predicament, into His own being.
So that “He came down from Heaven” can almost
be transposed into “Heaven drew earth up into it,”
and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness,
frustration, pain, doubt and death, are, from
before all worlds, known by God from within. The
pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received
into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up.
Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness
be drowned?

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14

I won’t admit without a struggle
that when I speak of God “uttering” or “inventing”
the creatures I am “watering down the concept of
creation.” I am trying to give it, by remote analogies,
some sort of content. I know that to create is
defined as “to make out of nothing,” ex nihilo. But
I take that to mean “not out of any pre-existing
material.” It can’t mean that God makes what God
has not thought of, or that He gives His creatures
any powers or beauties which He Himself does not
possess. Why, we think that even human work
comes nearest to creation when the maker has “got
it all out of his own head.”

Nor am I suggesting a theory of “emanations”.
The differentia of an “emanation”—literally an
overflowing, a trickling out—would be that it suggests
something involuntary. But my words—“uttering”
and “inventing”—are meant to suggest
an act.

This act, as it is for God, must always remain
totally inconceivable to man. For we—even our
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poets and musicians and inventors—never, in the
ultimate sense, make. We only build. We always
have materials to build from. All we can know
about the act of creation must be derived from what
we can gather about the relation of the creatures to
their Creator.

Now the very Pagans knew that any beggar at
your door might be a god in disguise: and the
parable of the sheep and the goats is Our Lord’s
comment. What you do, or don’t do, to the beggar,
you do, or don’t do, to Him. Taken at the Pantheist
extreme, this could mean that men are only appearances
of God—dramatic representations, as it were.
Taken at the Legalist extreme, it could mean that
God, by a sort of Legal fiction, will “deem” your
kindness to the beggar a kindness done to Himself.
Or again, as Our Lord’s own words suggest, that
since the least of men are His “brethren”, the whole
action is, so to speak, “within the family.” And in
what sense brethren? Biologically, because Jesus is
Man? Ontologically, because the light lightens them
all? Or simply “loved like brethren.” (It cannot
refer only to the regenerate.) I would ask first
whether any one of these formulations is “right” in
a sense which makes the others simply wrong? It
seems to me improbable. If I ever see more clearly
I will speak more surely.

Meanwhile, I stick to Owen’s view. All creatures,
from the angel to the atom, are other than God;
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with an otherness to which there is no parallel:
incommensurable. The very word “to be” cannot
be applied to Him and to them in exactly the same
sense. But also, no creature is other than He in the
same way in which it is other than all the rest. He
is in it as they can never be in one another. In each
of them as the ground and root and continual
supply of its reality. And also in good rational
creatures as light; in bad ones as fire, as at first the
smouldering unease, and later the flaming anguish,
of an unwelcome and vainly resisted presence.

Therefore of each creature we can say, “This also
is Thou: neither is this Thou.”

Simple faith leaps to this with astonishing ease.
I once talked to a Continental pastor who had seen
Hitler, and had, by all human standards, good
cause to hate him. “What did he look like?” I
asked. “Like all men,” he replied, “that is, like
Christ.”

One is always fighting on at least two fronts.
When one is among Pantheists one must emphasise
the distinctness, and relative independence, of the
creatures. Among Deists—or perhaps in Woolwich,
if the laity there really think God is to be sought in
the sky—one must emphasise the divine presence
in my neighbour, my dog, my cabbage-patch.

It is much wiser, I believe, to think of that
presence in particular objects than just of “omnipresence”.
The latter gives very naïf people (Woolwich
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again, perhaps?) the idea of something
spatially extended, like a gas. It also blurs the distinctions,
the truth that God is present in each thing
but not necessarily in the same mode; not in a man
as in the consecrated bread and wine, nor in a bad
man as in a good one, nor in a beast as in a man,
nor in a tree as in a beast, nor in inanimate matter
as in a tree. I take it there is a paradox here. The
higher the creature, the more and also the less God
is in it; the more present by grace, and the less
present (by a sort of abdication) as mere power.
By grace He gives the higher creatures power to will
His will (“and wield their little tridents”): the
lower ones simply execute it automatically.

It is well to have specifically holy places, and
things, and days, for, without these focal points or
reminders, the belief that all is holy and “big with
God” will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But
if these holy places, things, and days cease to
remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all
ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive
it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to
do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial
danger, of “religion”.

Boehme advises us once an hour “to fling ourselves
beyond every creature.” But in order to find
God it is perhaps not always necessary to leave the
creatures behind. We may ignore, but we can
nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is
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crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate.
The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact,
to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.

Oddly enough, what corroborates me in this faith
is the fact, otherwise so infinitely deplorable, that
the awareness of this presence has so often been
unwelcome. I call upon Him in prayer. Often He
might reply—I think He does reply—“But you
have been evading me for hours.” For He comes not
only to raise up but to cast down; to deny, to
rebuke, to interrupt. The prayer “prevent us in all
our doings” is often answered as if the word prevent
had its modern meaning. The presence which we
voluntarily evade is often, and we know it, His
presence in wrath.

And out of this evil comes a good. If I never fled
from His presence, then I should suspect those
moments when I seemed to delight in it of being
wish-fulfilment dreams. That, by the way, explains
the feebleness of all those watered versions of
Christianity which leave out all the darker elements
and try to establish a religion of pure consolation.
No real belief in the watered versions can last.
Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly
know at heart that nothing which is at all times and
in every way agreeable to us can have objective
reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it
should have sharp corners and rough edges, that
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it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture
is the only kind on which you never stub
your toes or bang your knee. You and I have both
known happy marriage. But how different our wives
were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent
dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to
all our wishes; and for that very reason (among
others) so incomparably better.

Servile fear is, to be sure, the lowest form of
religion. But a god such that there could never be
occasion for even servile fear, a safe god, a tame god,
soon proclaims himself to any sound mind as a
fantasy. I have met no people who fully disbelieved
in Hell and also had a living and life-giving belief
in Heaven.

There is, I know, a belief in both, which is of no
religious significance. It makes these spiritual things,
or some travesty of them, objects of purely carnal,
prudential, self-centred fear and hope. The deeper
levels, those things which only immortal spirit
can desire or dread, are not concerned at all. Such
belief is fortunately very brittle. The old divines
exhausted their eloquence especially in arousing
such fear: but, as they themselves rather naïvely
complain, the effect did not last for more than a
few hours after the sermon.

The soul that has once been waked, or stung, or
uplifted by the desire of God, will inevitably (I
think) awake to the fear of losing Him.

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15

I hadn’t realised that Betty was
the silent third in this dialogue. I ought to have
guessed it. Not that her worst enemy ever accused
her of being The Silent Woman—remember the
night at Mullingar—but that her silences during a
prolonged argument between you and me are
usually of a very emphatic, audible, and even dialectical
character. One knows she is getting her
broom ready and will soon sweep up all our breakages.
On the present point she is right. I am making
very heavy weather of what most believers find a
very simple matter. What is more natural, and
easier, if you believe in God, than to address Him?
How could one not?

Yes. But it depends who one is. For those in my
position—adult converts from the intelligentsia—that
simplicity and spontaneity can’t always be the
starting point. One can’t just jump back into one’s
childhood. If one tries to, the result will only be an
archaising revival, like Victorian Gothic—a parody
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of being born again. We have to work back to the
simplicity a long way round.

In actual practice, in my prayers, I often have to
use that long way at the very beginning of the
prayer.

St. François de Sales begins every meditation with
the command: Mettez-vous en la présence de Dieu. I
wonder how many different mental operations have
been carried out in intended obedience to that?

What happens to me if I try to take it—as Betty
would tell me—“simply”, is the juxtaposition of two
“representations” or ideas or phantoms. One is the
bright blur in the mind which stands for God. The
other is the idea I call “me”. But I can’t leave it at
that, because I know—and it’s useless to pretend I
don’t know—that they are both phantasmal. The
real I has created them both—or, rather, built them
up in the vaguest way from all sorts of psychological
odds and ends.

Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to
banish the “bright blur”—or, in statelier language,
to break the idol. Let’s get back to what has at least
some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four
walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms
are merely the façade of impenetrable mysteries.

The walls, they say, are matter. That is, as the
physicists will try to tell me, something totally
unimaginable, only mathematically describable,
existing in a curved space, charged with appalling
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energies. If I could penetrate far enough into that
mystery I should perhaps finally reach what is
sheerly real.

And what am I? The façade is what I call consciousness.
I am at least conscious of the colour of
those walls. I am not, in the same way, or to the
same degree, conscious of what I call my thoughts:
for if I try to examine what happens when I am
thinking, it stops happening. Yet even if I could
examine my thinking, it would, I well know, turn
out to be the thinnest possible film on the surface
of a vast deep. The psychologists have taught us
that. Their real error lies in underestimating the
depth and the variety of its contents. Dazzling lightness
as well as dark clouds come up. And if all the
enchanting visions are, as they rashly claim, mere
disguises for sex, where lives the hidden artist who,
from such monotonous and claustrophobic material,
can make works of such various and liberating art?
And depths of time too. All my past; my ancestral
past; perhaps my pre-human past.

Here again, if I could dive deeply enough, I
might again reach at the bottom that which simply
is.

And only now am I ready, in my own fashion,
to “place myself in the presence of God.” Either
mystery, if I could follow it far enough, would lead
me to the same point—the point where something,
in each case unimaginable, leaps forth from God’s
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naked hand. The Indian, looking at the material
world, says, “I am that.” I say, “That and I grow
from one root.” Verbum supernum prodiens, the Word
coming forth from the Father, has made both,
and brought them together in this subject-object
embrace.

And what, you ask, is the advantage of all this?
Well, for me—I am not talking about anyone else—it
plants the prayer right in the present reality. For,
whatever else is or is not real, this momentary confrontation
of subject and object is certainly occurring:
always occurring except when I am asleep.
Here is the actual meeting of God’s activity and
man’s—not some imaginary meeting that might
occur if I were an angel or if God incarnate entered
the room. There is here no question of a God “up
there” or “out there”; rather, the present operation
of God “in here”, as the ground of my own being,
and God “in there”, as the ground of the matter
that surrounds me, and God embracing and uniting
both in the daily miracle of finite consciousness.

The two façades—the “I” as I perceive myself
and the room as I perceive it—were obstacles as
long as I mistook them for ultimate realities. But
the moment I recognised them as façades, as mere
surfaces, they became conductors. Do you see? A
lie is a delusion only so long as we believe it; but a
recognised lie is a reality—a real lie—and as such
may be highly instructive. A dream ceases to be a
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delusion as soon as we wake. But it does not become
a nonentity. It is a real dream: and it also may be
instructive. A stage set is not a real wood or drawing
room: it is a real stage set, and may be a good one.
(In fact we should never ask of anything “Is it
real?”, for everything is real. The proper question
is “A real what?” e.g. a real snake or real delirium
tremens?) The objects around me, and my idea of
“me”, will deceive if taken at their face value. But
they are momentous if taken as the end-products of
divine activities. Thus and not otherwise, the
creation of matter and the creation of mind meet
one another and the circuit is closed.

Or put it this way. I have called my material
surroundings a stage set. A stage set is not a dream
nor a nonentity. But if you attack a stage house with
a chisel you will not get chips of brick or stone;
you’ll only get a hole in a piece of canvas and,
beyond that, windy darkness. Similarly, if you start
investigating the nature of matter, you will not find
anything like what imagination has always supposed
matter to be. You will get mathematics. From
that unimaginable physical reality my senses select
a few stimuli. These they translate or symbolise into
sensations, which have no likeness at all to the
reality of matter. Of these sensations my associative
power, very much directed by my practical needs
and influenced by social training, makes up little
bundles into what I call “things” (labelled by
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nouns). Out of these I build myself a neat little
box stage, suitably provided with properties such
as hills, fields, houses, and the rest. In this I can act.

And you may well say “act”. For what I call
“myself” (for all practical, everyday purposes) is
also a dramatic construction; memories, glimpses
in the shaving-glass, and snatches of the very fallible
activity called “introspection”, are the principal
ingredients. Normally I call this construction “me”,
and the stage set “the real world.”

Now the moment of prayer is for me—or involves
for me as its condition—the awareness, the reawakened
awareness, that this “real world” and
“real self” are very far from being rock-bottom
realities. I cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage,
either to go behind the scenes or to take my seat in
the pit; but I can remember that these regions
exist. And I also remember that my apparent self—this
clown or hero or super—under his grease-paint
is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic
person could not tread the stage unless he concealed
a real person: unless the real and unknown I
existed, I would not even make mistakes about the
imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to
speak, for once, from his real being, and to address,
for once, not the other actors, but—what shall I
call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The
Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience,
for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

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The attempt is not to escape from space and time
and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing
objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness
of that situation. If that can be done, there is
no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself,
is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is
the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.

Of course this attempt may be attended with
almost every degree of success or failure. The prayer
preceding all prayers is, “May it be the real I who
speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”
Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray.
Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual
depth. If we pray in terror we shall pray earnestly;
it only proves that terror is an earnest emotion.
Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the
depths in us. And, on the other side, He must constantly
work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him
we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most
blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking,
“But I never knew before. I never dreamed . . .”
I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas
Aquinas said of all his own theology: “It reminds me
of straw.”

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16

I didn’t mean that a “bright
blur” is my only idea of God. I meant that something
of that sort tends to be there when I start
praying, and would remain if I made no effort to do
better. And “bright blur” is not a very good description.
In fact you can’t have a good description
of anything so vague. If the description became good
it would become false.

Betty’s recipe—“use images as the rest of us do”—doesn’t
help me much. And which does she mean?
Images in the outer world, things made of wood or
plaster? Or mental images?

As regards the first kind, I am not, as she suggests,
suffering from a phobia about “idolatry”. I don’t
think people of our type are in any danger of that.
We shall always be aware that the image is only a
bit of matter. But its use, for me, is very limited. I
think the mere fact of keeping one’s eyes focused on
something—almost any object will do—is some help
towards concentration. The visual concentration
symbolises, and promotes, the mental. That’s one of
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the ways the body teaches the soul. The lines of a
well designed church, free from stunts, drawing
one’s eyes to the altar, have something of the same
effect.

But I think that is all an image does for me. If I
tried to get more out of it, I think it would get in
the way. For one thing, it will have some artistic
merits or (more probably) demerits. Both are a distraction.
Again, since there can be no plausible
images of the Father or the Spirit, it will usually be
an image of Our Lord. The continual and exclusive
addressing our prayers to Him surely tends to what
has been called “Jesus-worship”? A religion which
has its value; but not, in isolation, the religion Jesus
taught.

Mental images may have the same defect, but
they give rise to another problem as well.

St. Ignatius Loyola (I think it was) advised his
pupils to begin their meditations with what he called
a compositio loci. The Nativity or the Marriage At
Cana, or whatever the theme might be, was to be
visualised in the fullest possible detail. One of his
English followers would even have us look up
“what good Authors write of those places” so as to
get the topography, “the height of the hills and the
situation of the townes”, correct. Now for two different
reasons this is not “addressed to my condition.”

One is that I live in an archaeological age. We
can no longer, as St. Ignatius could, believingly
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introduce the clothes, furniture, and utensils of our
age into ancient Palestine. I’d know I wasn’t getting
them right. I’d know that the very sky and sunlight
of those latitudes were different from any my
northern imagination could supply. I could no
doubt pretend to myself a naïveté I don’t really
possess; but that would cast an unreality over the
whole exercise.

The second reason is more important. St. Ignatius
was a great master, and I am sure he knew
what his pupils needed. I conclude that they were
people whose visual imagination was weak and
needed to be stimulated. But the trouble with people
like ourselves is the exact reverse. We can say this to
one another because, in our mouths, it is not a boast
but a confession. We are agreed that the power—indeed,
the compulsion—to visualise is not “Imagination”
in the higher sense, not the Imagination
which makes a man either a great author or a
sensitive reader. Ridden on a very tight rein, this
visualising power can sometimes serve true Imagination;
very often it merely gets in the way.

If I started with a compositio loci I should never
reach the meditation. The picture would go on
elaborating itself indefinitely and becoming every
moment of less spiritual relevance.

There is indeed one mental image which does not
lure me away into trivial elaborations. I mean the
Crucifixion itself; not seen in terms of all the pictures
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and crucifixes, but as we must suppose it to have
been in its raw, historical reality. But even this is of
less spiritual value than one might expect. Compunction,
compassion, gratitude—all the fruitful
emotions—are strangled. Sheer physical horror
leaves no room for them. Nightmare. Even so, the
image ought to be periodically faced. But no-one
could live with it. It did not become a frequent
motif of Christian art until the generations which
had seen real crucifixions were all dead. As for many
hymns and sermons on the subject—endlessly harping
on blood, as if that were all that mattered—they
must be the work either of people so far above me
that they can’t reach me, or else of people with no
imagination at all. (Some might be cut off from me
by both these gulfs.)

Yet mental images play an important part in my
prayers. I doubt if any act of will or thought or
emotion occurs in me without them. But they seem
to help me most when they are most fugitive and
fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in
champagne or wheeling like rooks in a windy sky:
contradicting one another (in logic) as the crowded
metaphors of a swift poet may do. Fix on any one,
and it goes dead. You must do as Blake would do
with a joy; kiss it as it flies. And then, in their total
effect, they do mediate to me something very important.
It is always something qualitative—more like
an adjective than a noun. That, for me, gives it the
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impact of reality. For I think we respect nouns (and
what we think they stand for) too much. All my
deepest, and certainly all my earliest, experiences
seem to be of sheer quality. The terrible and the
lovely are older and solider than terrible and lovely
things. If a musical phrase could be translated into
words at all it would become an adjective. A great
lyric is very like a long, utterly adequate, adjective.
Plato was not so silly as the Moderns think when he
elevated abstract nouns—that is, adjectives disguised
as nouns—into the supreme realities—the
Forms.

I know very well that in logic God is a “substance”.
Yet my thirst for quality is authorised even
here: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.”
He is this glory. What He is (the quality) is no
abstraction from Him. A personal God, to be sure;
but so much more than personal. To speak more
soberly, our whole distinction between “things” and
“qualities”, “substances” and “attitudes”, has no
application to Him. Perhaps it has much less than
we suppose even to the created universe. Perhaps
it is only part of the stage set.

The wave of images, thrown off like a spray from
the prayer, all momentary, all correcting, refining,
“interanimating” one another, and giving a kind
of spiritual body to the unimaginable, occurs more,
I find, in acts of worship than in petitionary prayers.
Of which, perhaps, we have written enough. But
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I don’t regret it. They are the right starting point.
They raise all the problems. If anyone attempted
to practise, or to discuss, the higher forms without
going through this turnstile, I should distrust him.
“The higher does not stand without the lower.” An
omission or disdain of petitionary prayer can sometimes,
I think, spring not from superior sanctity
but from a lack of faith and a consequent preference
for levels where the question: “Am I only doing
things to myself?” does not jut out in such apparent
crudity.

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17

It’s comical that you, of all
people, should ask my views about prayer as worship
or adoration. On this subject you yourself
taught me nearly all I know. On a walk in the
Forest of Dean. Can you have forgotten?

You first taught me the great principle, “Begin
where you are.” I had thought one had to start by
summoning up what we believe about the goodness
and greatness of God, by thinking about creation
and redemption and “all the blessings of this life”.
You turned to the brook and once more splashed
your burning face and hands in the little waterfall
and said: “Why not begin with this?”

And it worked. Apparently you have never
guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness
and sound and dancing light were no doubt
very minor blessings compared with “the means
of grace and the hope of glory.” But then they were
manifest. So far as they were concerned, sight had
replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory,
they were an exposition of the glory itself.

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Yet you were not—or so it seemed to me—telling
me that “Nature”, or “the beauties of Nature”,
manifest the glory. No such abstraction as “Nature”
comes into it. I was learning the far more secret
doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it
strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or
our understanding, we give it different names—goodness
or truth or the like. But its flash upon our
senses and mood is pleasure.

But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly
there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures”
I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean
“pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the
stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness.
The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does
not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is
sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing.

I have tried, since that moment, to make every
pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean
simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course
give thanks, but I mean something different. How
shall I put it?

We can’t—or I can’t—hear the song of a bird
simply as a sound. Its meaning or message (“That’s
a bird”) comes with it inevitably—just as one can’t
see a familiar word in print as a merely visual
pattern. The reading is as involuntary as the seeing.
When the wind roars I don’t just hear the roar; I
“hear the wind.” In the same way it is possible
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to “read” as well as to “have” a pleasure. Or not
even “as well as.” The distinction ought to become,
and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it and to
recognise its divine source are a single experience.
This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the
orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of
the country from whence it blows. It is a message.
We know we are being touched by a finger of that
right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore.
There need be no question of thanks or praise
as a separate event, something done afterwards. To
experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.

Gratitude exclaims, very properly: “How good
of God to give me this.” Adoration says: “What
must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and
momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind
runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no
pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such
reception; from the first taste of the air when I look
out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a
sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention.
Another is the wrong kind of attention. One
could, if one practised, hear simply a roar and not
the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far
too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as
an event in one’s own nervous system—subjectify
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it—and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it.
A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying: “This
also is Thou”, one may say the fatal word Encore.
There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that
not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread
and butter, or that others would condemn as simply
“grey” the sky in which I am delightedly observing
such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.

You notice that I am drawing no distinction
between sensuous and aesthetic pleasures. But why
should I? The line is almost impossible to draw and
what use would it be if one succeeded in drawing it?

If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous
discipline. But it is worth some labour: for in so far
as it succeeds, almost every day furnishes us with
so to speak, “bearings” on the Bright Blur. It
becomes brighter but less blurry.

William Law remarks that people are merely
“amusing themselves” by asking for the patience
which a famine or a persecution would call for if,
in the meantime, the weather and every other
inconvenience sets them grumbling. One must learn
to walk before one can run. So here. We—or at
least I—shall not be able to adore God on the
highest occasions if we have learned no habit of
doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason
will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not
have found Him so, not have “tasted and seen.” Any
patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something
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about the sun which you could never get from reading
books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous
pleasures are “patches of Godlight” in the
woods of our experience.

Of course one wants the books too. One wants a
great many things besides this “adoration in infinitesimals”
which I am preaching. And if I were
preaching it in public, instead of feeding it back to
the very man who taught it me (though he may by
now find the lesson nearly unrecognisable?), I
should have to pack it in ice, enclose it in barbed-wire
reservations, and stick up warning notices in
every direction.

Don’t imagine I am forgetting that the simplest
act of mere obedience is worship of a far more
important sort than what I’ve been describing (to
obey is better than sacrifice). Or that God, besides
being the Great Creator, is the Tragic Redeemer.
Perhaps the Tragic Creator too. For I am not sure
that the great canyon of anguish which lies across
our lives is solely due to some pre-historic catastrophe.
Something tragic may, as I think I’ve said
before, be inherent in the very act of creation. So
that one sometimes wonders why God thinks the
game worth the candle. But then we share, in some
degree, the cost of the candle and have not yet seen
the “game”.

There! I’ve done it again. I know that my tendency
to use images like play and dance for the
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highest things is a stumbling-block to you. You
don’t, I admit, accuse it of profanity, as you used
to—like the night we nearly came to blows at Edinburgh.
You now, much more reasonably, call it
“heartless”. You feel it a brutal mockery of every
martyr and every slave that a world-process which
is so desperately serious to the actors should, at
whatever celestial apex, be seen in terms of frivolities.
And you add that it comes with a ludicrously
ill grace from me who never enjoyed any game and
can dance no better than a centipede with wooden
legs. But I still think you don’t see the real point.

I do not think that the life of Heaven bears any
analogy to play or dance in respect of frivolity. I do
think that while we are in this “valley of tears”,
cursed with labour, hemmed round with necessities,
tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual
plannings, puzzlings, and anxieties, certain qualities
that must belong to the celestial condition have
no chance to get through, can project no image of
themselves, except in activities which, for us here
and now, are frivolous. For surely we must suppose
the life of the blessed to be an end in itself, indeed
The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the complete
reconciliation of boundless freedom with
order—with the most delicately adjusted, supple,
intricate, and beautiful order? How can you find
any image of this in the “serious” activities either
of our natural or of our (present) spiritual life?—either
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in our precarious and heart-broken affections
or in the Way which is always, in some degree, a
via crucis: No, Malcolm. It is only in our “hours-off”,
only in our moments of permitted festivity, that we
find an analogy. Dance and game are frivolous,
unimportant down here; for “down here” is not
their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest
from the life we were placed here to live. But in this
world everything is upside down. That which, if it
could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is
likest that which in a better country is the End of
ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

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18

I plead guilty. When I was
writing about pleasures last week I had quite forgotten
about the mala mentis gaudia—the pleasures of
the mind which are intrinsically evil. The pleasure,
say, of having a grievance. What a disappointment
it is—for one self-revealing moment—to discover
that the other party was not really to blame? And
how a resentment, while it lasts, draws one back and
back to nurse and fondle and encourage it! It
behaves just like a lust. But I don’t think this leaves
my theory (and experience) of ordinary pleasures in
ruins. Aren’t these intrinsically vicious pleasures, as
Plato said, “mixed”. To use his own image, given the
itch, one wants to scratch it. And if you abstain, the
temptation is very severe, and if you scratch there is
a sort of pleasure in the momentary and deceptive
relief. But one didn’t want to itch. The scratch is
not a pleasure simply, but only by comparison with
the context. In the same way, resentment is pleasant
only as a relief from, or alternative to, humiliation.
I still think that those experiences which are
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pleasures in their own right can all be regarded as
I suggest.

The mere mention of the horrible pleasures—the
dainties of Hell—very naturally led you away from
the subject of adoration to that of repentance. I’m
going to follow you into your digression, for you
said something I disagreed with.

I admit of course, that penitential prayers—“acts”
of penitence, as I believe they are called—can
be on very different levels. At the lowest, what
you call “Pagan penitence”, there is simply the
attempt to placate a supposedly angry power—“I’m
sorry. I won’t do it again. Let me off this time.” At
the highest level, you say, the attempt is rather to
restore an infinitely valued and vulnerable personal
relation which has been shattered by an action of
one’s own, and if forgiveness, in the “crude” sense
of remission of penalty, comes in, this is valued
chiefly as a symptom or seal or even by-product of
the reconciliation. I expect you are right about that.
I say “expect” because I can’t claim to know much
by experience about the highest level either of
penitence or of anything else. The ceiling, if there
is one, is a long way off.

All the same, there is a difference between us.
I can’t agree to call your lowest level “Pagan penitence”.
Doesn’t your description cover a great deal
of Old Testament penitence? Look at the Psalms.
Doesn’t it cover a good deal of Christian penitence—a
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good deal that is embodied in Christian liturgies?
“Neither take thou vengeance for our sins . . .
be not angry with us forever . . . neque secundum
iniquitates nostras retribuas nobis.”

Here, as nearly always, what we regard as
“crude” and “low”, and what presumably is in fact
lowest, spreads far further up the Christian life than
we like to admit. And do we find anywhere in Scripture
or in the Fathers that explicit and resounding
rejection of it which would be so welcome?

I fully grant you that “wrath” can be attributed
to God only by an analogy. The situation of the
penitent before God isn’t, but is somehow like, that
of one appearing before a justly angered sovereign,
lover, father, master, or teacher. But what more can
we know about it than just this likeness? Trying to
get in behind the analogy, you go further and fare
worse. You suggest that what is traditionally
regarded as our experience of God’s anger would
be more helpfully regarded as what inevitably happens
to us if we behave inappropriately towards a
reality of immense power. As you say, “The live
wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder
against it we get a shock.”

My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have
gained by substituting the image of a live wire for
that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up
in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity
can’t.

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And you give as your reason that “even by analogy
the sort of pardon which arises because a fit of
temper is spent cannot worthily be attributed to God
nor gratefully accepted by man.” But the belittling
words “fit of temper” are your own choice. Think
of the fullest reconciliation between mortals. Is cool
disapproval coolly assuaged? Is the culprit let down
lightly in a view of “extenuating circumstances”?
Was peace restored by a moral lecture? Was the
offence said not to “matter”? Was it hushed up or
passed over? Blake knew better:

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath. My wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe;

I hid my wrath. My wrath did grow.

You too know better. Anger—no peevish fit of
temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes
(not necessarily at once) into embracing,
exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends
and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love.
Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you
cut it. The angers, not the measured remonstrances,
of lovers are love’s renewal. Wrath and pardon are
both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong
together to the same circle of analogy—the circle
of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships.
All the liberalising and “civilising” analogies only
127
lead us astray. Turn God’s wrath into mere
enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love
into mere humanitarianism. The “consuming fire”
and the “perfect beauty” both vanish. We have,
instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious
magistrate. It comes of being high-minded.

I know that “the wrath of man worketh not the
righteousness of God.” That is not because wrath is
wrath but because man is (fallen) man.

But perhaps I’ve already said too much. All that
any imagery can do is to facilitate, or at least not to
impede, man’s act of penitence and reception of
pardon. We cannot see the matter “from God’s
side.”

The crude picture of penitence as something like
apology or even placation has, for me, the value of
making penitence an act. The more high-minded
views involve some danger of regarding it simply as
a state of feeling. Do you agree that this would be
unwholesome?

The question is before my mind at present because
I’ve been reading Alexander Whyte. Morris lent
him to me. He was a Presbyterian divine of the last
century, whom I’d never heard of. Very well worth
reading, and strangely broad-minded—Dante, Pascal,
and even Newman, are among his heroes. But
I mention him at the moment for a different reason.
He brought me violently face to face with a characteristic
of Puritanism which I had almost forgotten.
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For him, one essential symptom of the regenerate life
is a permanent, and permanently horrified, perception
of one’s natural and (it seems) unalterable
corruption. The true Christian’s nostril is to be
continually attentive to the inner cess-pool. I knew
that the experience was a regular feature of the old
conversion stories. As in Grace Abounding: “But my
inward and original corruption . . . that I had the
guilt of to amazement . . . I was more loathsome in
mine own eyes than was a toad . . . sin and corruption,
I said, would as naturally bubble out of my
heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain.”
Another author, quoted in Haller’s Rise of Puritanism
says that when he looked into his heart, it was “as
if I had in the heat of summer lookt down into the
Filth of a Dungeon, where I discerned Millions of
crawling living things in the midst of that Sink and
liquid Corruption.”

I won’t listen to those who describe that vision
as merely pathological. I have seen the “slimy things
that crawled with legs” in my own dungeon. I
thought the glimpse taught me sense. But Whyte
seems to think it should be not a glimpse but a daily,
lifelong scrutiny. Can he be right? It sounds so very
unlike the New Testament fruits of the spirit—love,
joy, peace. And very unlike the Pauline programme;
“forgetting those things which are behind
and reaching forth unto those things that are
before.” And very unlike St. François de Sales’
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green, dewy chapter on la douceur towards one’s self.
Anyway, what’s the use of laying down a programme
of permanent emotions? They can be permanent
only by being factitious.

What do you think? I know that a spiritual emetic,
at the right moment, may be needed. But not a
regular diet of emetics! If one survived, one would
develop a “tolerance” of them. This poring over the
“sink” might breed its own perverse pride

over-just and self-displeased

For self-offence more than for God offended.

Anyway, in solitude, and also in confession, I have
found (to my regret) that the degrees of shame and
disgust which I actually feel at my own sins do not
at all correspond to what my reason tells me about
their comparative gravity. Just as the degree to
which, in daily life, I feel the emotion of fear has
very little to do with my rational judgment of the
danger. I’d sooner have really nasty seas when I’m
in an open boat than look down in perfect (actual)
safety from the edge of a cliff. Similarly, I have confessed
ghastly uncharities with less reluctance than
small unmentionables—or those sins which happen
to be ungentlemanly as well as un-Christian. Our
emotional reactions to our own behaviour are of
limited ethical significance.

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19

Tell Betty that it you hadn’t
whisked me off onto the subject of repentance, I
was just going to say the very thing she blames me
for not saying. I was going to say that in adoration,
more than in any other kind of prayer, the public
or communal act is of the utmost importance. One
would lose incomparably more by being prevented
from going to Church on Easter than on Good
Friday. And, even in private, adoration should be
communal—“with angels and archangels and all
the company”, all the transparent publicity of
Heaven. On the other hand, I find that the prayers
to which I can most fully attend in church are
always those I have most often used in my bedroom.

I deny, with some warmth, the charge of being
“choosy about services.” My whole point was that
any form will do me if only I’m given time to get
used to it. The idea of allowing myself to be put off
by mere inadequacy—an ugly church, a gawky
server, a badly turned out celebrant—is horrible.
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On the contrary, it constantly surprises me how
little these things matter, as if

never anything can be amiss.

When simpleness and duty tender it.

One of the golden Communions of my life was in a
Nissen hut. Sometimes the cockney accent of a choir
has a singularly touching quality. A tin mug for a
chalice, if there were good reason for it, would not
distress me in the least. (I wonder what sort of
crockery was used at the Last Supper?)

You ask me why I’ve never written anything
about the Holy Communion. For the very simple
reason that I am not good enough at Theology. I
have nothing to offer. Hiding any light I think I’ve
got under a bushel is not my besetting sin! I am
much more prone to prattle unseasonably. But there
is a point at which even I would gladly keep silent.
The trouble is that people draw conclusions even
from silence. Someone said in print the other day
that I seemed to “admit rather than welcome” the
sacraments.

I wouldn’t like you and Betty to think the same.
But as soon as I try to tell you anything more, I see
another reason for silence. It is almost impossible
to state the negative effect which certain doctrines
have on me—my failure to be nourished by them—without
seeming to mount an attack against them.
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But the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in
the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination,
the concepts—for him traditional—by which
he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is
happening when he receives the bread and wine.
I could wish that no definitions had even been felt
to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been
allowed to make divisions between churches.

Some people seem able to discuss different
theories of this act as if they understood them all
and needed only evidence as to which was best. This
light has been withheld from me. I do not know and
can’t imagine what the disciples understood Our
Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and
His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and
wine, saying they were His body and blood. I can
find within the forms of my human understanding
no connection between eating a man—and it is as
Man that the Lord has flesh—and entering into any
spiritual oneness or community or κοινωνίχ with
him. And I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense),
when stripped of its own accidents and endowed
with the accidents of some other substance, an
object I cannot think. My effort to do so produces
mere nursery-thinking—a picture of something like
very rarefied Plasticine. On the other hand, I get on
no better with those who tell me that the elements
are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically
to remind me of the death of Christ. They are, on
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the natural level, such a very odd symbol of that.
But it would be profane to suppose that they are as
arbitrary as they seem to me. I well believe there is
in reality an appropriateness, even a necessity, in
their selection. But it remains, for me, hidden. Again,
if they are, if the whole act is, simply memorial, it
would seem to follow that its value must be purely
psychological, and dependent on the recipient’s
sensibility at the moment of reception. And I
cannot see why this particular reminder—a hundred
other things may, psychologically, remind me of
Christ’s death, equally, or perhaps more—should
be so uniquely important as all Christendom (and
my own heart) unhesitatingly declare.

However, then, it may be for others, for me the
something which holds together and “informs” all
the objects, words, and actions of this rite, is
unknown and unimaginable. I am not saying to any
one in the world: “Your explanation is wrong.”
I am saying: “Your explanation leaves the mystery
for me still a mystery.”

Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil
between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque
to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable
to divine operation. Here a hand from the
hidden country touches not only my soul but my
body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me
have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here
is big medicine and strong magic. Favete linguis.

134

When I say “Magic” I am not thinking of the
paltry and pathetic techniques by which fools
attempt and quacks pretend to control Nature. I
mean rather what is suggested by fairy-tale sentences
like: “This is a magic flower, and if you carry it the
seven gates will open to you of their own accord”,
or: “This is a magic cave and those who enter it will
renew their youth.” I should define magic in this
sense as “objective efficacy which cannot be further
analysed.”

Magic, in this sense, will always win a response
from a normal imagination because it is in principle
so “true to nature.” Mix these two powders and
there will be an explosion. Eat a grain of this and
you will die. Admittedly, the “magical” element
in such truths can be got rid of by explanation; that
is, by seeing them to be instances or consequences
of larger truths. Which larger truths remain “magical”
till they also are, in the same way, explained.
In that fashion, the sciences are always pushing
further back the realm of mere “brute fact.” But no
scientist, I suppose, believes that the process could
ever reach completion. At the very least, there must
always remain the utterly “brute” fact, the completely
opaque datum, that a universe—or rather
this universe with its determinate character—exists;
as “magical” as the magic flower in the fairy tale.

Now the value, for me, of the magical element in
Christianity is this. It is a permanent witness that
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the heavenly realm, certainly no less than the
natural universe and perhaps very much more, is
a realm of objective facts—hard, determinate facts,
not to be constructed a priori, and not to be dissolved
into maxims, ideals, values, and the like. One cannot
conceive a more completely “given”, or, if you
like, a more “magical”, fact than the existence of
God as causa sui.

Enlightened people want to get rid of this magical
element in favour of what they would call the
“spiritual” element. But the spiritual, conceived as
something thus antithetical to “magical”, seems to
become merely the psychological or ethical. And
neither that by itself, nor the magical by itself, is a
religion. I am not going to lay down rules as to the
share—quantitatively considered—which the magical
should have in anyone’s religious life. Individual
differences may be permissible. What I insist on is
that it can never be reduced to zero. If it is, what
remains is only morality, or culture, or philosophy.

What makes some theological works like sawdust
to me is the way the authors can go on discussing
how far certain positions are adjustable to contemporary
thought, or beneficial in relation to
social problems, or “have a future” before them,
but never squarely ask what grounds we have for
supposing them to be true accounts of any objective
reality. As if we were trying to make rather than to
learn. Have we no Other to reckon with?

136

I hope I do not offend God by making my communions
in the frame of mind I have been describing.
The command, after all, was Take, eat: not
Take, understand. Particularly, I hope I need not
be tormented by the question “What is this?”—this
wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect
on me. It invites me to take “this” out of its holy
context and regard it as an object among objects,
indeed as part of nature. It is like taking a red coal
out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal.
To me, I mean. All this is autobiography, not
theology.

137

20

I really must digress to tell you
a bit of good news. Last week, while at prayer, I
suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had
forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for
over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might.
When the thing actually happened—sudden as the
longed-for cessation of one’s neighbour’s radio—my
feeling was “But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do
it ages ago?” So many things are done easily the
moment you can do them at all. But till then, sheerly
impossible, like learning to swim. There are months
during which no efforts will keep you up; then
comes the day and hour and minute after which,
and ever after, it becomes almost impossible to sink.
It also seemed to me that forgiving (that man’s
cruelty) and being forgiven (my resentment) were
the very same thing. “Forgive and you shall be
forgiven” sounds like a bargain. But perhaps it is
something much more. By heavenly standards, that
is, for pure intelligence, it is perhaps a tautology—forgiving
and being forgiven are two names for the
138
same thing. The important thing is that a discord
has been resolved, and it is certainly the great
Resolver who has done it. Finally, and perhaps best
of all, I believed anew what is taught us in the parable
of the Unjust Judge. No evil habit is so ingrained
nor so long prayed against (as it seemed)
in vain, that it cannot, even in dry old age, be
whisked away.

I wonder, do the long dead know it when we at
last, after countless failures, succeed in forgiving
them? It would be a pity if they don’t. A pardon
given but not received would be frustrated. Which
brings me to your question.

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so
spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the
most compulsive theological case against it would
deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my
prayers would survive if those for the dead were
forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love
best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God
could I have if what I love best were unmentionable
to Him?

On the traditional Protestant view, all the dead
are damned or saved. If they are damned, prayer
for them is useless. If they are saved, it is equally
useless. God has already done all for them. What
more should we ask?

But don’t we believe that God has already done
and is already doing all that He can for the living?
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What more should we ask? Yet we are told to ask.

“Yes,” it will be answered, “but the living are
still on the road. Further trials, developments, possibilities
of error, await them. But the saved have
been made perfect. They have finished the course.
To pray for them presupposes that progress and
difficulty are still possible. In fact, you are bringing
in something like Purgatory.”

Well, I suppose I am. Though even in Heaven
some perpetual increase of beatitude, reached by a
continually more ecstatic self-surrender, without the
possibility of failure but not perhaps without its own
ardours and exertions—for delight also has its
severities and steep ascents, as lovers know—might
be supposed. But I won’t press, or guess, that side
for the moment. I believe in Purgatory.

Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons for
throwing doubt on “the Romish doctrine concerning
Purgatory” as that Romish doctrine had then
become. I don’t mean merely the commercial
scandal. If you turn from Dante’s Purgatorio to the
Sixteenth Century you will be appalled by the
degradation. In Thomas More’s Supplication of Souls
Purgatory is simply temporary Hell. In it the souls
are tormented by devils, whose presence is “more
horrible and grievous to us than is the pain itself.”
Worse still, Fisher, in his Sermon on Psalm VI, says
the tortures are so intense that the spirit who suffers
them cannot, for pain, “remember God as he ought
140
to do.” In fact, the very etymology of the word
purgatory has dropped out of sight. Its pains do not
bring us nearer to God, but make us forget Him. It
is a place not of purification but purely of retributive
punishment.

The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s
Dream. There, if I remember it rightly, the
saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be
taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a
moment longer “With its darkness to affront that
light.” Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.

Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it
not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my
son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with
mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no
one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw
away from you. Enter into the joy.”? Should we
not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no
objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt,
you know”—“Even so, sir.”

I assume that the process of purification will normally
involve suffering. Partly from tradition;
partly because most real good that has been done
me in this life has involved it. But I don’t think
suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well
believe that people neither much worse nor much
better than I will suffer less than I or more. “No
nonsense about merit.” The treatment given will be
the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

141

My favourite image on this matter comes from
the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of
life is drawn and I am “coming round”, a voice will
say, “Rinse your mouth out with this.” This will be
Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can
now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery
and astringent than my present sensibility could
endure. But More and Fisher shall not persuade me
that it will be disgusting and unhallowed.

Your own peculiar difficulty—that the dead are
not in time—is another matter.

How do you know they are not? I certainly
believe that to be God is to enjoy an infinite present,
where nothing has yet passed away and nothing is
still to come. Does it follow that we can say the same
of saints and angels? Or at any rate exactly the
same? The dead might experience a time which
was not quite so linear as ours—it might, so to
speak, have thickness as well as length. Already in
this life we get some thickness whenever we learn
to attend to more than one thing at once. One can
suppose this increased to any extent, so that though,
for them as for us, the present is always becoming
the past, yet each present contains unimaginably
more than ours.

I feel—can you work it out for me and tell me if
it is more than a feeling—that to make the life of
the blessed dead strictly timeless is inconsistent with
the resurrection of the body.

142

Again, as you and I have agreed, whether we
pray on behalf of the living or the dead, the causes
which will prevent or exclude the events we pray
for are in fact already at work. Indeed they are part
of a series which, I suppose, goes back as far as the
creation of the universe. The causes which made
George’s illness a trivial one were already operating
while we prayed about it; if it had been what we
feared, the causes of that would have been operative.
That is why, as I hold, our prayers are granted,
or not, in eternity. The task of dovetailing the spiritual
and physical histories of the world into each
other is accomplished in the total act of creation
itself. Our prayers, and other free acts, are known
to us only as we come to the moment of doing them.
But they are eternally in the score of the great symphony.
Not “pre-determined”; the syllable pre lets
in the notion of eternity as simply an older time.
For though we cannot experience our life as an
endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes; that
is, in our deepest reality. When I say we are “in
time” I don’t mean that we are, impossibly, outside
the endless present in which He beholds us as He
beholds all else. I mean, our creaturely limitation
is that our fundamentally timeless reality can be
experienced by us only in the mode of succession.

In fact we began by putting the question wrongly.
The question is not whether the dead are part of
timeless reality. They are; so is a flash of lightning.
143
The question is whether they share the divine perception
of timelessness.

Tell George I should be delighted. Rendez-vous in
my rooms at 7.15. We do not dress for dinner on
ordinary nights.

144

21

Betty is quite right—“all this
about prayer and never a word on the practical
problem: its irksomeness.” And she sees fit to add,
“Anyone might think it was a correspondence
between two saints!”

That was a barbed shaft and went home. And
yet I don’t really think we were being hypocritical.
Doesn’t the mere fact of putting something into
words of itself involve an exaggeration? Prose words,
I mean. Only poetry can speak low enough to catch
the faint murmur of the mind, the “litel winde,
unethe hit might be lesse.” The other day I tried
to describe to you a very minimal experience—the
tiny wisps of adoration with which (sometimes) I
salute my pleasures. But I now see that putting it
down in black and white made it sound far bigger
than it really is. The truth is, I haven’t any language
weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual
life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be
language at all. Like when you try to turn the gas-ring
a little lower still, and it merely goes out.

145

Then again, by talking at this length about prayer
at all, we seem to give it a much bigger place in our
lives than, I’m afraid, it has. For while we talk about
it, all the rest of our experience, which in reality
crowds our prayer into the margin or sometimes
off the page altogether, is not mentioned. Hence,
in the talk, an error of proportion which amounts to,
though it was not intended for, a lie.

Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer
is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome.
When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and
holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant
to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are
at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or
solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough
to distract us.

And we know that we are not alone in this. The
fact that prayers are constantly set as penances tells
its own tale.

The odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is
not confined to periods of dryness. When yesterday’s
prayers were full of comfort and exaltation, today’s
will still be felt as, in some degree, a burden.

Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we
skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really
disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered
among duties at all. For we believe that we were
created “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
And if the few, the very few, minutes we now spend
146
on intercourse with God are a burden to us rather
than a delight, what then? If I were a Calvinist this
symptom would fill me with despair. What can be
done for—or what should be done with—a rose-tree
that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to
want to?

Much of our backwardness in prayer is no doubt
due to our sins, as every teacher will tell us; to our
avoidable immersion in the things of this world, to
our neglect of mental discipline. And also to the
very worst kind of “fear of God.” We shrink from
too naked a contact, because we are afraid of the
divine demands upon us which it might make too
audible. As some old writer says, many a Christian
prays faintly “lest God might really hear him, which
he, poor man, never intended.” But sins—at any
rate, our actual and individual sins—are not perhaps
the only cause.

By the very constitution of our minds as they now
are—whatever they may have been when God first
made man—it is difficult for us to concentrate on
anything which is neither sensible (like potatoes)
nor abstract (like numbers). What is concrete but
immaterial can be kept in view only by painful
effort. Some would say, “Because it does not exist.”
But the rest of our experience cannot accept that
solution. For we ourselves, and all that we most
care about, seem to come in the class “concrete
(that is, individual) and insensible.” If reality
147
consists of nothing but physical objects and abstract
concepts, then reality has, in the last resort, nothing
to say to us. We are in the wrong universe. Man is
a passion inutile; and so, good night. And yet, the
supposedly real universe has been quarried out of
man’s sensuous experiences.

The painful effort which prayer involves is no
proof that we are doing something we were not
created to do.

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty,
it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be.
The same is true of many other behaviours which
now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbour as
myself, most of the actions which are now my moral
duty would flow out of me as spontaneously as song
from a lark or fragrance from a flower. Why is this
not so yet? Well, we know, don’t we? Aristotle has
taught us that delight is the “bloom” on an unimpeded
activity. But the very activities for which
we were created are, while we live on earth, variously
impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others.
Not to practise them is to abandon our humanity.
To practise them spontaneously and delightfully is
not yet possible. This situation creates the category
of duty, the whole specifically moral realm.

It exists to be transcended. Here is the paradox
of Christianity. As practical imperatives for here
and now the two great commandments have to be
translated “Behave as if you loved God and man.”
148
For no man can love because he is told to. Yet
obedience on this practical level is not really obedience
at all. And if a man really loved God and man,
once again this would hardly be obedience; for if
he did, he would be unable to help it. Thus the
command really says to us, “Ye must be born again.”
Till then, we have duty, morality, the Law. A
schoolmaster, as St. Paul says, to bring us to Christ.
We must expect no more of it than of a schoolmaster;
we must allow it no less. I must say my
prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that
is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to
read the poets.

But the school-days, please God, are numbered.
There is no morality in Heaven. The angels never
knew (from within) the meaning of the word ought,
and the blessed dead have long since gladly forgotten
it. This is why Dante’s Heaven is so right,
and Milton’s, with its military discipline, so silly.
This also explains—to pick up an earlier point—why
we have to picture that world in terms which
seem almost frivolous. In this world our most momentous
actions are impeded. We can picture unimpeded,
and therefore delighted, action only by the
analogy of our present play and leisure. Thus we
get the notion that what is as free as they would
have to matter as little.

I said, mind you, that “most” of the behaviour
which is now duty would be spontaneous and
149
delightful if we were, so to speak, good rose-trees.
Most, not all. There is, or might be, martyrdom.
We are not called upon to like it. Our Master didn’t.
But the principle holds, that duty is always conditioned
by evil. Martyrdom, by the evil in the persecutor;
other duties, by lack of love in myself or
by the general diffused evil of the world. In the
perfect and eternal world the Law will vanish. But
the results of having lived faithfully under it will
not.

I am therefore not really deeply worried by the
fact that prayer is at present a duty, and even an
irksome one. This is humiliating. It is frustrating.
It is terribly time-wasting—the worse one is praying,
the longer one’s prayers take. But we are still only
at school. Or, like Donne, “I tune my instrument
here at the door.” And even now—how can I
weaken the words enough, how speak at all without
exaggeration?—we have what seem rich moments.
Most frequently, perhaps, in our momentary, only
just voluntary, ejaculations; refreshments “unimplored,
unsought, Happy for man so coming.”

But I don’t rest much on that; nor would I if it
were ten times as much as it is. I have a notion that
what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s
eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported
by devotional feeling and contend with the
greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being
nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling.
150
In feeling there is so much that is really not ours—so
much that comes from weather and health or
from the last book read. One thing seems certain.
It is no good angling for the rich moments. God
sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately
when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our
preparations to receive Him sometimes have the
opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere
that “the altar must often be built in one
place in order that the fire from heaven may descend
somewhere else.”?

151

22

By not belonging to a press-cutting
agency I miss most of the bouquets and
brickbats which are aimed at me. So I never saw
the article you write about. But I have seen others
of that kind, and they’ll break no bones of mine.
Don’t, however, misjudge these “liberal Christians.”
They genuinely believe that writers of my
sort are doing a great deal of harm.

They themselves find it impossible to accept most
of the articles of the “faith once given to the saints.”
They are nevertheless extremely anxious that some
vestigial religion which they (not we) can describe
as “Christianity” should continue to exist and make
numerous converts. They think these converts will
come in only if this religion is sufficiently “de-mythologised”.
The ship must be lightened if she is to
keep afloat.

It follows that, to them, the most mischievous
people in the world are those who, like myself, proclaim
that Christianity essentially involves the
supernatural. They are quite sure that belief in the
152
supernatural never will, nor should, be revived, and
that if we convince the world that it must choose
between accepting the supernatural and abandoning
all pretence of Christianity, the world will
undoubtedly choose the second alternative. It will
thus be we, not the liberals, who have really sold the
pass. We shall have re-attached to the name
Christian a deadly scandal from which, but for us,
they might have succeeded in decontaminating it.

If, then, some tone of resentment creeps into their
comments on our work, can you blame them? But
it would be unpardonable if we allowed ourselves
any resentment against them. We do in some measure
queer their pitch. But they make no similar
contribution to the forces of secularism. It has
already a hundred champions who carry far more
weight than they. Liberal Christianity can only
supply an ineffectual echo to the massive chorus of
agreed and admitted unbelief. Don’t be deceived
by the fact that this echo so often “hits the headlines.”
That is because attacks on Christian doctrine
which would pass unnoticed if they were launched
(as they are daily launched) by anyone else, become
News when the attacker is a clergyman; just as a
very commonplace protest against make-up would
be News if it came from a film star.

By the way, did you ever meet, or hear of, anyone
who was converted from scepticism to a “liberal”
or “de-mythologised” Christianity? I think that
153
when unbelievers come in at all, they come in a good
deal further.

Not, of course, that either group is to be judged
by its success, as if the question were one of tactics.
The liberals are honest men and preach their version
of Christianity, as we preach ours, because they
believe it to be true. A man who first tried to guess
“what the public wants,” and then preached that
as Christianity because the public wants it, would be
a pretty mixture of fool and knave.

I am enlarging on this because even you, in your
last letter, seemed to hint that there was too much
of the supernatural in my position; especially in the
sense that “the next world” loomed so large. But
how can it loom less than large if it is believed in
at all?

You know my history. You know why my withers
are quite unwrung by the fear that I was bribed—that
I was lured into Christianity by the hope of
everlasting life. I believed in God before I believed
in Heaven. And even now, even if—let’s make an
impossible supposition—His voice, unmistakably
His, said to me, “They have misled you. I can do
nothing of that sort for you. My long struggle with
the blind forces is nearly over. I die, children. The
story is ending”—would that be a moment for
changing sides? Would not you and I take the
Viking way: “The Giants and Trolls win. Let us die
on the right side, with Father Odin.”

154

But if it is not so, if that other world is once
admitted, how can it, except by sensual or bustling
pre-occupations, be kept in the background of our
minds? How can the “rest of Christianity”—what
is this “rest”?—be disentangled from it? How can
we untwine this idea, if once admitted, from our
present experience, in which, even before we
believed, so many things at least looked like “bright
shoots of everlastingness”?

And yet . . . after all. I know. It is a venture. We
don’t know it will be. There is our freedom, our
chance for a little generosity, a little sportsmanship.

Isn’t it possible that many “liberals” have a highly
illiberal motive for banishing the idea of Heaven?
They want the gilt-edged security of a religion so
contrived that no possible fact could ever refute it.
In such a religion they have the comfortable feeling
that, whatever the real universe may be like, they
will not have “been had” or “backed the wrong
horse”. It is close to the spirit of the man who hid his
talent in a napkin—“I know you are a hard man
and I’m taking no risks”. But surely the sort of
religion they want would consist of nothing but
tautologies?

About the resurrection of the body. I agree with
you that the old picture of the soul reassuming the
corpse—perhaps blown to bits or long since usefully
dissipated through nature—is absurd. Nor is it what
St. Paul’s words imply. And I admit that if you ask
155
what I substitute for this, I have only speculations to
offer.

The principle behind these speculations is this.
We are not, in this doctrine, concerned with matter
as such at all: with waves and atoms and all that.
What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the
senses. Even in this life matter would be nothing to
us if it were not the source of sensations.

Now we already have some feeble and intermittent
power of raising dead sensations from their
graves. I mean, of course, memory.

You see the way my thought is moving. But don’t
run away with the idea that when I speak of the
resurrection of the body I mean merely that the
blessed dead will have excellent memories of their
sensuous experiences on earth. I mean it the other
way round: that memory as we now know it is a
dim foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the
soul, or rather Christ in the soul (he “went to prepare
a place for us”) will exercise hereafter. It need
no longer be intermittent. Above all, it need no
longer be private to the soul in which it occurs.
I can now communicate to you the vanished fields
of my boyhood—they are building-estates today—only
imperfectly by words. Perhaps the day is
coming when I can take you for a walk through
them.

At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow
“inside” the body. But the glorified body of the
156
resurrection as I conceive it—the sensuous life
raised from its death—will be inside the soul. As
God is not in space but space is in God.

I have slipped in “glorified” almost unawares.
But this glorification is not only promised, it is
already foreshadowed. The dullest of us knows how
memory can transfigure; how often some momentary
glimpse of beauty in boyhood is

a whisper

Which memory will warehouse as a shout.

Don’t talk to me of the “illusions” of memory. Why
should what we see at the moment be more “real”
than what we see from ten years’ distance? It is
indeed an illusion to believe that the blue hills on
the horizon would still look blue if you went to them.
But the fact that they are blue five miles away, and
the fact that they are green when you are on them,
are equally good facts. Traherne’s “orient and immortal
wheat” or Wordsworth’s landscape “apparelled
in celestial light” may not have been so radiant
in the past when it was present as in the remembered
past. That is the beginning of the glorification.
One day they will be more radiant still. Thus in
the sense-bodies of the redeemed the whole New
Earth will arise. The same yet not the same as this.
It was sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption.

157

I dare not omit, though it may be mocked and
misunderstood, the extreme example. The strangest
discovery of a widower’s life is the possibility, sometimes,
of recalling with detailed and uninhibited
imagination, with tenderness and gratitude, a
passage of carnal love, yet with no re-awakening of
concupiscence. And when this occurs (it must not
be sought) awe comes upon us. It is like seeing
Nature itself rising from its grave. What was sown
in momentariness is raised in still permanence.
What was sown as a becoming rises as being. Sown
in subjectivity, it rises in objectivity. The transitory
secret of two is now a chord in the ultimate music.

“But this,” you protest, “is no resurrection of the
body. You have given the dead a sort of dream world
and dream bodies. They are not real.” Surely
neither less nor more real than those you have
always known: you know better than I that the
“real world” of our present experience (coloured,
resonant, soft or hard, cool or warm, all corseted
by perspective) has no place in the world described
by physics or even physiology. Matter enters our
experience only by becoming sensation (when we
perceive it) or conception (when we understand it).
That is, by becoming soul. That element in the soul
which it becomes will, in my view, be raised and
glorified; the hills and valleys of Heaven will be to
those you now experience not as a copy is to an
original, nor as a substitute to the genuine article,
158
but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the
coal. It will be eternally true that they originate
with matter; let us therefore bless matter. But in
entering our soul as alone it can enter—that is, by
being perceived and known—matter has turned into
soul (like the Undines who acquired a soul by marriage
with a mortal).

I don’t say the resurrection of this body will
happen at once. It may well be that this part of us
sleeps in death and the intellectual soul is sent to
Lenten lands where she fasts in naked spirituality—a
ghostlike and imperfectly human condition.
I don’t imply that an angel is a ghost. But naked
spirituality is in accordance with his nature: not, I
think, with ours. (A two-legged horse is maimed
but not a two-legged man.) Yet from that fact my
hope is that we shall return and re-assume the
wealth we laid down.

Then the new earth and sky, the same yet not the
same as these, will rise in us as we have risen in
Christ. And once again, after who knows what
aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing
out and the waters flow, and lights and shadows
move across the hills and the faces of our friends
laugh upon us with amazed recognition.

Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not
true, something better will be. For we know that
we shall be made like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is.

159

Thank Betty for her note. I’ll come by the later
train, the 3.40. And tell her not to bother about a
bed on the ground floor. I can manage stairs again
now, provided I take them “in bottom.” Till
Saturday.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE FOUR LOVES

REFLECTIONS ON THE PSALMS

TILL WE HAVE FACES

SURPRISED BY JOY

THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS AND SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

MERE CHRISTIANITY

MIRACLES

TRANSPOSITION AND OTHER ADDRESSES

CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR

BEYOND PERSONALITY

THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS

THE GREAT DIVORCE

GEORGE MACDONALD • AN ANTHOLOGY

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

For Children

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

PRINCE CASPIAN

THE VOYAGE OF THE ‘DAWN TREADER’

THE SILVER CHAIR

THE HORSE AND HIS BOY

Fiction

TILL WE HAVE FACES

Transcriber’s Notes

- Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.

- Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.

- Provided an original cover image, for free and unrestricted use with this Distributed Proofreaders-Canada eBook.

- Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)

[The end of Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by Clive Staples Lewis]