The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’ Most Moving Addresses

The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’ Most Moving Addresses C. S. Lewis Selected from sermons delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, these nine addresses show the beloved author and theologian bringing hope and courage in a time of great doubt.Addressing some of the most difficult issues we face in our day-to-day lives, C.S. Lewis’s ardent and timeless words provide an unparalleled path to greater spiritual understanding.Considered by many to be Lewis’s finest sermon of all, and his most moving address, ‘The Weight of Glory’ extols a compassionate vision of Christianity an dincludes lucid and compelling discussions on faith.Also included in this volume are "Transposition," "On Forgiveness," "Why I Am Not a Pacifist," and "Learning in War-Time". CONTENTS Cover (#u0adf0deb-1FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474) Title Page (#u0adf0deb-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474) Introduction by Walter Hooper (#) Preface to the Original Edition by the Author (#) The Weight of Glory (#) Learning in War-Time (#) Why I Am Not a Pacifist (#) Transposition (#) Is Theology Poetry? (#) The Inner Ring (#) Membership (#) On Forgiveness (#) A Slip of the Tongue (#) About the Author Also by C. S. Lewis (#) Copyright (#) About the Publisher (#) INTRODUCTION (#) In his beautiful peroration at the end of his sermon “The Weight of Glory”, C. S. Lewis, after commenting on the immortality of the human soul, says, “This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously.” I believe that this and similar encouragements by Lewis contribute significantly to the subject of what constitutes Christian behaviour. Having done the best we can to perform whatever God demands, should we not at least enjoy the good He sends us? Willing ourselves to be “perpetually solemn” when there is no reason for it seems to me not only a rejection of the happiness we could have on earth, but also to jeopardise our capacity to enjoy it in the future when every possible reason for unhappiness has been finally swept away. We know from his earliest writings that Lewis was born with a sense of fun, and that it was considerably maimed by an entanglement of atheism and ambition. Perhaps a fiercely serious ambition for whatever it might be can never live in harmony with the merriment he describes. Certainly, Lewis could write no great works until he was converted to Christianity in 1931, after which he ceased to take much interest in himself. If it is objected by those of a lugubrious disposition that the Christian religion is serious and of great solemnity, then my answer is, “Yes, of course. And not taken seriously enough.” But Lewis comes to our rescue at this point by showing us in his book The Four Loves how easily things can become other than they should be through the wrong kind of seriousness. In editing these essays I have been led to reflect on that ever mysterious, but instinctive notion we seem to be born with that tells us just how merry, how serious, how whatever you will, we know we can be with someone else. My relation to Lewis may be similar to that of others, but it can’t be exactly like. As this book is being edited primarily for Americans, I should explain that after I had corresponded with Lewis for some years, he invited me to come over in the spring of 1963 from my native United States for what I hoped would be as much as a single conversation over a cup of tea. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in angels, and the coveted tea party turned out to be (if it needs a name) “The Observations of a Late Arrival” or “A Single Summer with C.S.L.” In any event, as the sources of our firsthand evidence about him decrease with the years, I hope that mine will be of some interest to those who feel as I do about that merriment “of the merriest kind” of which there seems no abundance these days. It took some time for an American, such as myself, to adapt to English “conveniences”. I see, for instance, from my diary of 7 June 1963 that during a longish visit with Lewis we drank what seemed gallons of tea. After a while I asked to be shown the “bathroom”, forgetting that in most homes the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms. With a kind of mock formality, Lewis showed me to the bathroom, pointed to the tub, flung down a pile of towels, and closed the door behind me. I returned to his sitting-room to say that it was not a bath I wanted but … “Well, sir, ‘choose you this day,’” said Lewis, bursting with laughter as he quoted the prophet Joshua, “that will break you of those silly American euphemisms. And now, where is it you wanted to go?” I see from other entries I made that Lewis—or “Jack” as he preferred to be called by his friends—and I were meeting at least three or four times a week, sometimes at his house, at other times in a pub with a group of friends called “The Inklings”. I knew that he was ill, indeed, that he had been so since 1961 when the troubles with his health began. He, however, seemed to think little of it and, as he looked so robust, it was easy to forget it when in company with this ruddy, six-foot, genial man. Hence the surprise of finding him not well enough to attend Mass with me on July 14. He urged me to remain there with him, and this was a memorable day for me in more ways than one. It was then that he asked me to accept immediately a post as his literary assistant and personal secretary, and later, after resigning my teaching position at the University of Kentucky, to return to Oxford to resume my duties. Lewis went for a routine examination the next morning to the Acland Nursing Home, and, much to everyone’s surprise, he sank into a coma, lasting about twenty-four hours, from which the doctors did not believe he would recover. Our mutual friends, the Reverend Dr. Austin Farrer and his wife, were to be on holiday in Wales from the sixteenth through the thirty-first of July, but at Lewis’s request they remained in Oxford until the seventeenth, so that Austin Farrer could hear his confession and give him the Blessed Sacrament. Lewis wanted me to receive the Sacrament with him, but as I was not ill, this was not allowed. “In that case,” Lewis said, “you must be present to do the kneeling for me.” With so much to do for him at this time I was unable to keep a regular diary. However, I see from a letter I wrote to the Farrers on July 30 from Lewis’s home, and now part of the Farrer Papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, that I had already moved into Lewis’s home by that time. Rather than tell Lewis how close he had come to dying, the doctors appeared to leave this to me. When I judged the time to be right, I told him about the coma and the few days when his mind was disordered. Thereafter Lewis continued to believe that the Extreme Unction administered during the coma and his reception of the Blessed Sacrament had saved his life. Even before he went into the nursing home I marvelled that Lewis had lived so long without setting himself ablaze. Except when he dressed for a special occasion, he wore an old tweed jacket, the right-hand pocket of which had been patched and re-patched many times. This was because Lewis, when wearied of his pipe, would drop it into his pocket, with the result that it would burn its way through. And this happened so often that there was none of the original material left. The nurses in the Acland, having found him nodding with a cigarette in his hand, would have none of this. And so it was that, except when I was with him, they would not allow him to have any matches. What puzzled Lewis was that after I had left him with a box of matches, a nurse would, as soon as I left, rush in and take them away. “How do they know?” he asked me one morning. “Give me a box I can hide under my bedclothes.” I had then to confess that while I was the supplier, I was also the informer. “Informer!” roared Lewis. “I have what no friend ever had before. I have a private traitor, my very own personal Benedict Arnold. Repent before it is too late!” I loved all the rough and tumble of this, and I fancy I pulled his leg about as often as he pulled mine. But there was the gentler side that was just as typical. There was one incident that took place in the Acland which the readers of his Narnian stories might find as endearing as I did. It occurred on one of those days when Lewis’s mind was disordered and when, as I noticed, he could not recognise any of those who dropped in to see him—not even Professor Tolkien. The last visitor of the day was his foster-sister, Maureen Moore Blake, who a few months previously, and by a very unexpected turn of events, had become Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs, with a castle and a vast estate in Scotland. She was the first woman in three centuries to succeed to a baronetcy. They had not met since this happened and, hoping to spare her any disappointment, I told her that he had not been able to recognise any of his old friends. He opened his eyes when she took his hand. “Jack,” she whispered, “it is Maureen.” “No,” replied Lewis smiling, “it is Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.” “Oh, Jack, how could you remember that?” she asked. “On the contrary,” he said. “How could I forget a fairy tale?” One day when he was obviously much better, but not completely out of danger, he asked why I looked so glum. The reason for the glumness was that, living in our neighbourhood was a fierce old atheist of about ninety-seven who went out for a brisk walk every day. Whenever we met he asked if Lewis was “still alive”, and on receiving my reply that he was indeed quite ill, he invariably said, “Nothing wrong with me! I’ve got a long time yet!” I told Lewis that I was tempted—very strongly tempted—to tell Our Lord that I thought it monstrously unfair that He should allow the naughty old atheist to seemingly go on forever and yet let Lewis, who was only sixty-four, come so close to the point of death. “Mind you,” I said, observing Lewis’s face cloud over, “I haven’t actually said it in my prayers, but I’ve come pretty close.” “And what do you think Our Lord would say to that?” Lewis said with a discouraging look. “What?” “What is that to you!” Anyone who has read St. John 21:22—Our Lord’s rebuke to St. Peter—will recognise Lewis’s application of it in this instance. And then tenderly, tenderly, Lewis comforted me in what I had imagined was his sorrow, but which he knew was mine. The worst over, there was a return of the high spirits and uproarious sense of fun that I found one of the most attractive things about Lewis. But it would take someone of Boswell’s talents to give the right idea to the completeness of this remarkable man, to show how naturally the humour blended into the more serious side, and indeed was one of the causes of his greatness of heart, his large intellect, and the most open charity I have ever found in anyone. He was a man, many of us have come to see, of common instincts combined with very uncommon abilities. Perhaps it is worth recording that I knew—I just knew—that no matter how long I lived, no matter who else I met, I should never be in the company of such a supremely good human being again. Of all my memories this is the most indelible and is certain to remain so. I brought Lewis home on 6 August, along with a male nurse, a Scotsman named Alec Ross, whose responsibility it was to stay awake nights should he be needed. Lewis and I had been together almost continuously for two months, and I was even more comfortable with him now that we were in the same house. He had not once complained about conditions in the Acland—excepting, of course, my “traitorous” behaviour over the appearing and disappearing matches. Certainly he snuggled back into his familiar surroundings with much pleasure. Sensing that he liked being left alone a little while after lunch, I asked if he ever took a nap. “Oh, no!” he replied. “But, mind you, sometime a nap takes me.” He had kept up his dictating of letters during his stay in the Acland. And although he was able to do more of this at home, he gave as well more attention to the problems which, since 1961, he knew could become worse should he die suddenly: his brother’s unfortunate problem with alcohol, and the future of his two stepsons who had, besides losing their mother in 1960, seen other sadnesses as well. But I mention these things because it was then I observed something I had never seen in anyone else (excepting, as I was to learn later, his friend Owen Barfield). Lewis had his share—some would say more than his share—of worries. But, having done all in his power to solve them, he left the matter to God and got on with his work and pleasures. Those who go on to read, for example, the additions to his sermon “Transposition” (of which more later) will perhaps understand what may sound like sweet banality but isn’t—that Lewis really wanted and liked the happiness which the Divine Son died to give all men. And this I observed at the time, some ten years before I saw in the Bodleian the whole thing put so succinctly in a letter to his brother of 28 January 1940 in which he says, “I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.” Without meaning any offence, I suspect that those who carry on about “social consciousness” or whatever the current jargon is would not understand this. Still, that is the way it was. Our nurse hardly knew what to make of Lewis. Alec was not a learned man, but he was fortunate in being one of the few male nurses at that time. And for this reason he had been able to pick and choose his patients, nearly always with an eye as to whether they were fabulously rich, famous for something or the other, and (he hoped) possessed of a Rolls Royce. He was a good nurse but he had a foul tongue. At his first sight of the kitchen he pronounced the house to be a “pig sty” and very quickly had the servants sweeping, mopping, and disinfecting as fast as it could be done. But there remained for him the mystifying contradiction of a far from attractive house presided over by a “somebody”. We were taking our tea alone one day when he asked whether—he couldn’t think of the name Who’s Who—the “great mon was in that big boke …” Lewis was coming through the door and, overhearing this, said, “Ay, ay, Alec. I am in what you in Scotland would call Wha’s Wha.” That did it. Alec was thereafter devoted to Lewis for his humour and self-forgetfulness, it now making no difference whether Lewis was famous for anything Alec thought important. In August Lewis dictated a letter announcing his retirement from Cambridge. Then, at the end of the month, with Alec left to keep an eye on Lewis, his stepson Douglas Gresham and I were sent to Cambridge to sort out his affairs and bring home many of the two thousand or so books from his Magdalene College rooms. This done, we hired a lorry to transport us and the books to Oxford. All the way home I wondered where the books could go in a house already filled to the bursting point. But Lewis had laid his plans. Alec occupied what was called the “music room”—a large room on the ground floor, empty except for a bed in one corner. Having been up all night, Alec was asleep when we arrived. As the lorry pulled into the drive, there was Lewis cautioning us to be quiet. “Where’ll we store the books?” I whispered. Lewis answered with a wink. With infinite pains so as not to waken Alec, we spent an hour or so carrying the books into the “music room” and stacking them around the nurse’s bed. He was still snoring when the last one was added to the great wall of books, which was nearly as high as the ceiling and which filled nearly every square inch of the room. About the time the nurse usually woke, Lewis and I were waiting outside for the results. Then it happened. Alec woke, found himself entombed in books, and bellowed at the top of his voice. Suddenly part of the great wall of books tumbled down, and a body scrambled out. Over drinks Alec pronounced it to be the best d—d joke he had seen played on anyone. If I have said less than some would wish about Lewis’s specifically “religious” position, that is because I assume that it is already quite clear. Rather, I have tried to indicate from personal recollections that Dr. Johnson might well have had such a man as C. S. Lewis in mind in suggesting that “the size of a man’s understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth”. If I have failed, then the splendid pieces that comprise this collection ought, as they say, “to make up for everything”. Lewis was a truly modest man. If his books came naturally into our conversation, he would talk about them with the same detachment as in discussing some stranger’s works. But he had no interest as far as I could see in his literary or theological position in the world. One evening this came up rather naturally. We had been talking about one of our favourite books, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and I mentioned how disappointed I sometimes felt when, say, Sir Launcelot went out to deliver a helpless lady from some peril or other. Then, just at that point where you can’t admire him enough for his selflessness, he explains to someone, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he is doing it to “win worship”—that is, to increase his reputation. We recognised it as an inheritance from Paganism. Without intending any embarrassment, I asked Lewis if he was ever aware of the fact that regardless of his intentions he was “winning worship” from his books. He said in a low, still voice, and with the deepest and most complete humility I’ve ever observed in anyone, “One cannot be too careful not to think of it.” The house, the garden, the whole universe seemed hushed for a moment, and then we began talking again. As those poignantly happy months drew to an end, and the time came for me to return to the United States, Lewis and I began planning for his retirement: the books he would write, the duties I would relieve him of, our study together of the old French sources that lie behind Malory’s Morte. Even now, years later, those happy prospects have the power to tease me with such hopes as Lewis’s Jill thought of in The Last Battle when “the picture of all those happy years … piled up… till it was rather like looking down from a high hill onto a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance”. But Lewis died suddenly on 22 November 1963. At times, when asked about him, I have made it clear that I was with him for “only” three months. But I think I do a disservice to both his memory and his kindness by that word only. Have we not all felt a lasting bond with someone we have known only minutes, and yet failed—for such is the nature of things—to achieve any intimacy with those we have run into for half an hour or so over a period of years? Make of it what you will. I am ashamed to admit that I once thought that because the plans Lewis and I made together did not run on into the years, I was somehow cheated. If not wicked, it is ungracious. Recently, the grandmother of one of my friends was dying, and I went with him into those delectable peaks of Derbyshire where the people are as free from cant and overstatement as any I know. It was early spring and there was nothing my friend could find for his grandmother but a few sprigs of pussy willow. As he gave them to her, minutes before she died, she pressed them to her face and whispered, “They’re grand, my love. And enough.” But of his books there never seemed enough for Lewis’s publishers. Yet much as Lewis loved to write, never was it, as it is with so many others, “zeal not according to knowledge”. He had to have something to say before he put pen to paper. Still, although he kept to deadlines set by himself regarding his books, it took the initiative of his English and American publishers to press him into preparing selections of his shorter pieces. Not because Lewis had not put all his effort into such addresses as are found here, but he needed prodding before such selections were made. This volume, consisting originally of the addresses numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7, was published by Geoffrey Bles of London in 1949 under the title Transposition and Other Addresses and later that same year by Macmillan of New York as The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Since that time the volumes of essays on the two sides of the Atlantic have differed somewhat, and this book is an attempt to put things right. What spurred me into action was a tour I made of the United States in 1979 with the film Through Joy and Beyond: The Life of C. S. Lewis. After the film I ended the evening by reading aloud a portion of Lewis’s “Transposition”. What I had forgotten, and many nice people reminded me of, was that what I considered one of the most ravishing pieces of prose Lewis ever wrote had been added later, and was not therefore in the American version. Although this in itself was enough to justify resetting the text of the book, it occurred to me that it also afforded the ideal occasion for enlarging the volume by three addresses never published in the United States and one never published anywhere before. The addresses are arranged chronologically except for (1) “The Weight of Glory” which is so magnificent that not only do I dare to consider it worthy of a place with some of the Church Fathers, but I fear I should be hanged by Lewis’s admirers if it were not given primacy of place. It was preached at the invitation of Canon T. R. Milford at Solemn Evensong in the twelfth-century Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 8 June 1941 to one of the largest congregations ever assembled there in modern times. Canon Milford, who was the Vicar of St. Mary’s, told me that the invitation sprang from his reading of Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The sermon was published first in Theology, vol. 43 (November 1941), and afterwards as a pamphlet by the S.P.C.K. in 1942. (2) “Learning in War-Time” was also preached at the invitation of Canon Milford at Evensong in St. Mary the Virgin on 22 October 1939. This, too, was owing to the Canon’s appreciation of The Pilgrim’s Regress and, as he told me, because with so much unrest caused to Oxford undergraduates by World War II, Lewis—an ex-soldier and Christian don at Magdalen College—was thought to be just the man to put things into the right perspective. It too brought a great crowd to St. Mary’s, and Canon Milford arranged for everyone present to be given a mimeographed copy of the sermon bearing the title “None Other Gods”: Culture in WarTime. Lewis took as his text for the sermon Deut. 26:5—“A Syrian ready to perish was my father.” It was published that same year, in pamphlet form under the title The Christian in Danger, by the Student Christian Movement. (3) It was while this book was in preparation that my friend, George Sayer, a pupil of Lewis’s at Magdalen during the war years and an intimate friend thereafter, sent me a copy of “Why I Am Not a Pacifist”. The talk was given to a pacifist society in Oxford sometime in 1940, and Lewis made a copy for Mr. Sayer, a most fortuitous event as the original has not survived. We know that Lewis never made any attempt to publish it, and it appears in print here for the first time. (4) “Transposition” was preached in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford—a Congregational institution—at the invitation of its Principal, Nathaniel Micklem (1888–1976), on the Feast of Pentecost, 28 May 1944. It was reported in The Daily Telegraph of 2 June 1944 under the heading “Modern Oxford’s Newman” that “in the middle of the sermon Mr. Lewis, under stress of emotion, stopped, saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and left the pulpit. Dr. Micklem, the Principal, and the chaplain went to his assistance. After a hymn was sung, Mr. Lewis returned and finished his sermon … on a deeply moving note.” Lewis has probably accomplished as much as any modern writer, both in his fiction and in his sermons, to make Heaven believable. My guess is that at sometime, but not necessarily in 1944, he may have felt that he had not succeeded as well as he might with “Transposition”. Though he was quite ill during the spring of 1961 when Jock Gibb, his publisher at Geoffrey Bles, was pressing him to edit a volume of his essays, something wonderful happened. With a simplicity that is perhaps an instance of Heaven coming to its own rescue, Lewis was shown what glories are involved by the corruptible putting on incorruption, and there came from his pen an additional portion that raises that sermon to an eminence all its own. This new portion begins on p. 107 with the paragraph “I believe that this doctrine of Transposition provides …” and concludes on p. 111 with the paragraph ending, “They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal.” This extended version of the sermon first appeared in Lewis’s They Asked for a Paper (London, 1962). (5) “Is Theology Poetry?” was read to the Oxford University Socratic Club on 6 November 1944 and was first published in The Socratic Digest, vol. 3 (1945). (6) “The Inner Ring” was the annual “Commemoration Oration” given at King’s College, University of London, on 14 December 1944. (7) “Membership” was read to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius, Oxford, on 10 February 1945 at the invitation of Miss Anne Spalding, an old friend of Charles Williams, as it was in Miss Spalding’s parents’ home that Williams lived when he moved to Oxford at the outbreak of World War II. The paper was originally published in Sobornost, no. 31 (June 1945). (8) “On Forgiveness” was written at the request of Father Patrick Kevin Irwin (1907–1965) and sent to him on 28 August 1947 for inclusion in Father Irwin’s parish magazine of the Church of St. Mary, Sawston, Cambridgeshire. However, Father Irwin was transferred to the Church of St. Augustine, Wisbech, before it could be published, and I first heard of the essay in 1975 when members of the priest’s family deposited the manuscript in the Bodleian Library. It was first pub lished in Lewis’s Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity (London: Fount/Collins, 1975). (9) “A Slip of the Tongue” was the last sermon Lewis preached. It was given at the invitation of the Chaplain of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Father C. A. Pierce, in the college chapel at Evensong on 29 January 1956. Unlike Magdalen College, Oxford, the Cambridge college is quite small, and its chapel, a perfect little gem by candlelight, is indeed tiny. Even so, the Chapel Register reveals that it was crowded with so many people—one hundred—that extra seats had to be brought in. The sermon was published in Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (London: Fount/Collins, 1965), which volume Lewis was helping his publisher plan just before he died. I am grateful to Collins Publishers for permission to reprint “Is Theology Poetry?” “On Forgiveness”, and “A Slip of the Tongue”, and to Mr. Sayer for providing me with a copy of “Why I Am Not a Pacifist”. My thanks also to Owen Barfield for permitting me to edit this book and for all the other things that cause me to regard him as one of those friends who, by any reckoning, is one of the most obvious boasts of our fallen race. Walter Hooper 7 March 1980 Oxford PREFACE (#) This book contains a selection of the too numerous addresses which I was induced to give during the late war and the years that immediately followed it. All were composed in response to personal requests and for particular audiences, without thought of subsequent publication. As a result, in one or two places they seem to repeat, though they really anticipated, sentences of mine which have already appeared in print. When I was asked to make this collection I supposed that I could remove such overlappings, but I was mistaken. There comes a time (and it need not always be a long one) when a composition belongs so definitely to the past that the author himself cannot alter it much without the feeling that he is producing a kind of forgery. The period from which these pieces date was, for all of us, an exceptional one; and though I do not think I have altered any belief that they embody I could not now recapture the tone and temper in which they were written. Nor would those who wanted to have them in a permanent form be pleased with a patchwork. It has therefore seemed better to let them go with only a few verbal corrections. I have to thank the S.P.C.K., the S.C.M., and the proprietors of Sobornost for their kind permission to reprint Weight of Glory, Learning in War-Time, and Membership, respectively. The Inner Ring here appears in print for the first time. A different version of Transposition, written expressly for that purpose and then translated into Italian, has appeared in the Rivista of Milan. C.S.L. THE WEIGHT OF GLORY (#) If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward. The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognised as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy, he will, quite probably, be revelling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in [Greek]. Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find. No doubt there is one point in which my analogy of the schoolboy breaks down. The English poetry which he reads when he ought to be doing Greek exercises may be just as good as the Greek poetry to which the exercises are leading him, so that in fixing on Milton instead of journeying on to Aeschylus his desire is not embracing a false object. But our case is very different. If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson’s remark that the ?lan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics. Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world. Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolical account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewellery any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff”. Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple. The first question I ask about these promises is “Why any one of them except the first?” Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols. For though it may escape our notice at first glance, yet it is true that any conception of being with Christ which most of us can now form will be not very much less symbolical than the other promises; for it will smuggle in ideas of proximity in space and loving conversation as we now understand conversation, and it will probably concentrate on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of His deity. And, in fact, we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always do fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed—in fact, with hymeneal or erotic imagery. I am not for a moment condemning such imagery. I heartily wish I could enter into it more deeply than I do, and pray that I yet shall. But my point is that this also is only a symbol, like the reality in some respects, but unlike it in others, and therefore needs correction from the different symbols in the other promises. The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love, with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and relieving each other, are supplied. I turn next to the idea of glory. There is no getting away from the fact that this idea is very prominent in the New Testament and in early Christian writings. Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendour like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect I fancy I am a typical modern. Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb? When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation” by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of selfadmiration. But I thought I could detect a moment—a very, very short moment—before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign”. I can imagine someone saying that he dislikes my idea of heaven as a place where we are patted on the back. But proud misunderstanding is behind that dislike. In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. And now notice what is happening. If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self”. You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache. And this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind and, still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialised and depraved appetites, we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading—thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark. Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. LEARNING IN WAR-TIME (#) A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns? Now it seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the side of certain other questions which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peacetime. I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns. But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention Heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tom-foolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them. The moment we do so we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to Heaven or to hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues but not under the shadow of a European war would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/c-s-lewis-3/the-weight-of-glory-a-collection-of-lewis-most-moving-addresse/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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