Barry's Blog

I've been slowing making my way through The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III, edited by Walter Hooper, which includes the correspondence of Lewis from the time of his writing the Chronicles of Narnia, his time at Cambridge, and his marriage to Joy Gresham,  spanning the years from 1950-1963. In the 44 years since Hooper served briefly as Lewis' secretary, he has steadily accumulated from all over the world the personal correspondence that comprises these three volumes, namely, 3,228 separate items of correspondence. Hooper's lifetime work on the Lewis letters (and bringing other works of Lewis to publication) demonstrates his painstaking scholarship, as he not only had to collect and in many cases decipher many letters, but also had to labor to discover the actual people and reconstruct the conversation behind the letters. There was also the matter of tracking down the sources of the quotations Lewis so liberally sprinkled throughout his correspondence. From Euripides to the Second Book of Kings, or a Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and the frequent translation of Latin, Greek, French, or Italian, Hooper has devoted many years of his life conducting his research at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where so many of the original Lewis letters are housed.

While the letters vary a great deal in their content (some negotiating contracts with publishers, others exchanging ideas with scholarly colleagues), some of the most rewarding letters show the "pastoral" side of Lewis, the saintly sage who gives encouragement and advice to fellow pilgrims on their spiritual journey. What is clear is that with the passing of years,  Lewis becomes more reflective and mellow than in the previous volumes.

A letter that I recently came upon in Volume III was to a Mrs. Johnson, who had asked Lewis a series of questions (some rather inane, like, "Do you like sweets?" "Are you handsome?"). In Lewis' reply to Mrs. Johnson, posted on November 8th, 1952, from Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis literally numbered his replies to correspond to her questions. One question caught my attention, as she asked Lewis, "If Wayne didn't go to Heaven I wouldn't want to either. Would his name be erased from my brain?"

While Lewis treats this matter quite brilliantly in his theological fantasy, The Great Divorce, his answer here is instructive. He writes: "Whatever the answer is, I'm sure it is not that ('erased from the brain'). When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. If you and I ever come to love God perfectly, the answer to this tormenting question will then become clear, and will be far more beautiful than we cd. ever imagine. We can't have it now."

Some ten years earlier, Lewis had similarly observed this principle of First and Second Things when he wrote in the Time and Tide, which was later published in the collection of essays, God in the Dock, with the title, "First and Second Things," that: "The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication. It is a glorious thing to feel for a moment or two that the whole meaning of the universe is summed up in one woman - glorious so long as other duties and pleasures keep tearing you away from her. But clear the decks and so arrange your life (it is sometimes feasible) that you will have nothing to do but contemplate her, and what happens?...Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made."

Elsewhere, Lewis writes to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, "Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy."

All too often, we put second things ahead of first things, namely God. Someone has observed that in worship, "We bring the gods we have made before the God who has made us."

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow