C. S. LEWIS AND BARON VON HÜGEL
A series of possible echoes in Lewis’s work from
Friedrich von Hügel, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (1921)
edited by Arend Smilde
January 2016
PDF version printable as A5-format
booklet
Among C. S. Lewis’s countless quotations from books he had read in the
books he wrote, those from the Austrian-born English theologian Friedrich von
Hügel (1852-1925) do not seem very prominent. As will appear from the following
sequence of quotations, however, von Hügel’s influence on Lewis’s thought may
have been greater than has been generally recognized.
As an invitation to further research of this subject, I have collected
those passages from von Hügel’s 1921 volume of Essays and Addresses which struck me for their similarity to more
or less distinctively “Lewisian” ideas. Each numbered quotation or set of
quotations from that volume is presented under a key phrase usually derived
from Lewis’s writings, and accompanied by one or more references to passages by
Lewis on the topic at hand: some may be echoes.
Explicit references to von Hügel in Lewis’s public writings are confined to
– one footnote and one
brief remark in The Problem of Pain
(1940), chapter 8, and one allusion in A
Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), chapter 8; all refer to Essays and Addresses;
– a 1939 review where von
Hügel and G. K. Chesterton are jointly contrasted to certain other authors
(Lewis, Image and Imagination, p.
153);
– two references in scholarly essays of the late 1930s to
peculiarities of von Hügel’s idiom (Lewis, Selected
Literary Essays, pp. 207 and 224).
The three volumes of Lewis’s Collected
Letters (2000-2006) contain one more reference to idiom (vol. 1, p, 933),
and five instances of Lewis mentioning von Hügel while recommending the
latter’s book Eternal Life
(1912); the last of these recommendations is found in a 1955 letter to Sheldon
Vanauken.
In addition, there are two early references to von Hügel in private
writings:
– an unpublished portion
of Lewis’s diary for 17 June 1924: “I went and sat for an hour reading Baron von
Hügel and a very silly book called Shelley and the Unromantics” (The Lewis Papers, vol. VIII, p. 244);
– “De
Bono et Malo”, dating from 1929 or 1930 and published in 2015 as part of The
“Great War” of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis (pp. 131-144).
A list
of references
to Lewis’s writings is given at the end.
1. DOG’S EYE VIEW
csl – “Fern-seed and Elephants”: Tyrrell
» von hügel:
The
source and object of religion, if religion be true and its object be real, cannot, indeed, by any possibility, be as clear to me even as I am to my dog.
––– 102,
“Preliminaries to Religious Belief” (1914)
2. CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY
csl – The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book VIII, chapters 7-8: the Hermit /
History
– The Problem of Pain, chapter 1
– Surprised by Joy, chapter 14: Chesterton and Frazer
» von hügel:
[T]hese
... writings will reveal a deep apprehension of the Unconditioned, the Abiding,
the Absolute – of our need and of our certitude of these; and especially also
of Christianity as the original awakener of the deeper Historic sense, and of
our reaching the Superhistoric with it. Nothing indeed is more striking than
the perennial affinity between Christianity and History – that History of which
indeed Christianity has itself furnished so central a part. ...
... In actual life Natural or Rational
Religion or Pure Theism exists as the mirage after the setting, or as the dawn
before the rising, of an Historical Religion. And such Historical Religion
always claims to be, not Rational but Revelational, and not Natural but
Supernatural; and such a Religion is never purely Theistic, but always clings
also to a Prophet or Revealer of God and to a Community which adores God and
worships the Revealer. And again in real life Natural Religion exists as a set
or as a system of propositions effected by philosophers who, in spite of their
frequent disdain of all Sects and Churches, derive both their materials and
their understanding of these materials from these despised positive teachings
and historical traditions. And beside those rudiments of the positive religions
and these abstractions from the positive religions there exists no such thing,
in actual life, as a Natural, Philosophical Religion.
––– xvi, Preface
3. CONDEMNING
THE UNIVERSE
csl – “De
futilitate”: Heroic Pessimism in Swinburne, Hardy, Shelley and Housman
– “The Pains of Animals”: Tennyson’s “Despair” and the
Promethean attitude in Shelley
» von hügel:
... [P]lease note well. Where does the keenness of
this our scandal come from? Why do we, in all such cases, suffer such feelings
of shock and outrage? ... The case is, I think, quite parallel with that as to
trust in reality generally. ... Why is untruthfulness so very odious? ...
Whence springs the suffering – the most keen suffering – of the thought of being
thus shut up, if we are, in fact,
thus shut up within our own purely subjective impressions and fancies? The
answer, surely, is that we thus suffer because, in fact, we are not thus shut up, because we do communicate with realities other than
ourselves ...
...
[B]oth in the matter of Truth and Reality and in the matter of Love and a
Lover, we suffer, when scepticism assails us, because we are not simply shut up within our own
fancies, because (mysteriously yet most actually) we are penetrated and moved
by God, the Ultimate Reality and Truth, the Ultimate Lover and Goodness. ...
[I]t is not Judaism, not Christianity, not any kind of Theism that bids us, or
even allows us, to hold and to accept as good in themselves the several painful
or cruel or wrong things that happen in this our complicated, difficult life.
None of these convictions worship Nature, or the World-as-a-whole; they all, on
the contrary, find much that is wrong in Nature as we know it, and in the
World-as-a-whole as we actually find it. All such believers worship and adore
not Nature but God – the love and the action of God within and from behind the
world, but not as though this love and action were everywhere equally evident,
not as though they directly willed, directly chose, all things that happen and
as they happen. On the contrary: these great religions leave such a pure
optimism to absolute Idealist philosophers, and to rhapsodising pantheists and
poets; and these religions believe such views, wheresoever they are taken as
ultimate, to be either shallow and unreal, or sorry travesties of the facts.
... Thus
my very bitterness and despair over the apparent insult flung at my love by the
world as I know it, turns out to be but one more effect of the reality and
operativeness of God, and one more reason (again not clear, not readily transferable,
but rich and fruitful) for believing and trusting in Him, in Love, the Lover.
––– 114-116,
“Preliminaries to Religious Belief”
4. CARDINAL DIFFICULTIES OF
NATURALISM
csl – The Abolition of Man, chapter 2
– Miracles, chapters 3-5
» von hügel:
The purely naturalistic view of man conceives him as a
mere superior animal, which projects its own largely fantastic wishes on to the
void or the unknown, and which then fishes them back as objective realities
distinct from itself their true creator. And this view is the more plausible,
the more quickly statable, the more vividly picturable, the alone readily
transmittable, view. But then, the view has all these qualities, precisely
because it stops short at the surface impressions of things, and remains
utterly inadequate to all the deeper and deepest implications, requirements and
ends of knowledge in general, and of art, ethics, philosophy and religion in
particular. Yet as soon as we hold the difference between various kinds of
human acts and dispositions to be always potentially, and often actually, of
essential, of ultimate, of more than simply social, simply human importance, we
are insisting upon values and realities that essentially transcend space and
even time. Every at all noble, every even tolerably adequate, outlook always
possesses some such more than merely empirical, simply contingent, or purely
material and mechanical character. ... Thus every profound search after, or
belief in, the fundamental truth or essential beauty or satisfying goodness of
anything – when we press it duly home and sincerely and delicately analyse it –
overflows the ordinary, superficially obvious, requirements of man’s knowledge,
action, life. In each case we get a scheme that looks too big and too ambitious
for us little men, and that involves alternatives too wide and deep for the
average moments of the average mortal.
––– 207-208,
“What do we mean by Heaven?
And what do we mean by
Hell?” (1917)
5. THE UNIVERSE AS A GOING CONCERN
csl – post-“Great War”
letters to Anthroposophist friends
– “Miracles” (1942 essay)
– “The Funeral of a Great
Myth”
– “The Laws of Nature”
– Miracles, chapter 15
» von hügel:
As
to Creation, it is plain that no sheer beginnings, however much we may attempt to
conceive them in terms and images of the latest Natural Science, are
picturable, or clearly thinkable, by us at all. ... Natural Science cannot
indeed start otherwise than with already extant diffused matter, and cannot but
tend to speak as though this matter, by its purely immanental forces, groups
itself into such and such combinations, and proceeds to ever more complex and
interior results. ... We thus ... get in Natural Science, if not a clear and
complete proof of an Eternal Wisdom creating and ever sustaining all things,
yet many a fact and problem which indicate how largely modal, where at all
certain, is Evolution. Evolution in reality still gives us, at most and at
best, not the ultimate why but the
intermediate how; whilst the points
of central religious importance here appear to be, not so much the
non-eternity, as the createdness, of all finite realities.
Thus St. Thomas can teach us that the
Eternity of the material universe would not be incompatible with its Creation,
and that only Creation is intrinsically essential to Theism; although the
Jewish-Christian Revelation has now taught us that, as a matter of fact, the
universe is not only a creature but a non-eternal one.
––– 48-49, “Religion
and Reality” (1909/1918)
6. CLUES TO THE MEANING OF THE
UNIVERSE
csl – The
Pilgrim’s Regress,
1943 preface
– Miracles, chapters 3-4
– Surprised
by Joy, chapters 14-15
» von hügel:
Man can never jump out of his own skin. Yet this in no
way decides how widely that skin may stretch, nor what, nor how much of,
Reality really affects man and is presumably apprehended by him with some
genuine knowledge. Indeed man is found to possess somehow, in very certain
fact, a more or less continuous, often most painful, sense of the inadequacy of
any and all merely human mode and degree both of existence and of apprehension.
And this sense is too fundamentally human, and too demonstrably impels him
towards, yet never to rest in, his noblest achievements in science and
philosophy, in art, in ethics, in life generally, for it to be anything but
suicidal for man himself ever, in the long run and deliberately, to declare
this sense to be sheer illusion, or (what is practically the same, and equally
inadequate) to find in this sense nothing but the merely human race-instinct.
There then remains no way out of scepticism, where scepticism is least
tolerable and where it is most ruinous, than to carry right up into religion
what we believe and practise in our practical life and in our science. Just as
we simply admit the existence of countless realities, more or less different
from, though only lower than or equal to ourselves; and as we frankly grant the
real influence of these realities upon ourselves and our real knowledge of
them, since such influence and knowledge are prior to, and are the material of,
our discursive reasoning about them: so also let us simply admit the existence
of a perfect Reality, sufficiently like us to be able to penetrate and to move
us through and through, the which, by so doing, is the original and persistent
cause of this our noblest dissatisfaction with anything and all things merely
human. Certainly no other explanation has ever been given which does not sooner
or later mis-state or explain away the very data, and the immense dynamic
forces of the data, to be explained. But this, the only adequate, explanation
moves us on at once, from the quicksands of religion as illusion, to the rock
of Religion as the witness and vehicle of Reality.
––– 40-41, “Religion and Illusion” (1909/1918)
7. AWE
csl – Perelandra, chapter 17: last
speech in the “Great Dance” conversation
» von hügel:
True,
philosophical reflection and natural science bring perplexities to the
religious mind, and there is some
connection between a man’s growth in such other insights and his analysis and
theory of his religious experience. Yet the influence of philosophy and of
science upon religious experience itself appears to be primarily the furnishing
of obstacles and stimulants, of tests and purifications; and certainly the
sense of awe, derived by the
religious soul from its vivid apprehension of the greatness of the Reality, a
Reality experienced as so much deeper and richer than the soul can ever
express, is specifically different from any sense of uncertainty as to the existence and the superhuman nature of the
Reality underlying and occasioning this apprehension. Healthy mysticism and
genuine scepticism are thus intrinsically opposites.
––– 41, “Religion
and Illusion”
8. “ARGUMENT” FROM DESIRE
csl – The
Pilgrim’s Regress,
1943 Preface
» von hügel:
I now propose to concentrate ... upon the Evidential,
Revelational quality of religion, intimations of Superhuman Reality, and to
meet more systematically the chief objections to the trans-human validity of
these intimations. ... The intimations we here study are of a Superhuman
Ultimate Reality; and this ultimate reality, in proportion as religion grows
deeply and delicately religious, is apprehended as good, happy and holy. ...
The argument gets under way only upon the admission that religion, in fact, is
always penetrated by these intimations; and the argument reaches port the
moment these intimations are allowed really to be what they themselves claim to
be.
––– 42,
“Religion and Reality”
9. PHILOSOPHY COMING ALIVE
csl – “Is Theism Important?”: “Thus we must admit that
Faith” etc.
– Surprised
by Joy, chapter 14: “the dry
bones in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s”
– “The Language of Religion”
» von hügel:
[I]n the Theory of Knowledge and in Logic, and again
in Æesthetics, ... the worlds of the trans-subjectively True and the
trans-subjectively Beautiful are as truly necessary presuppositions as is a
world of the trans-subjectively Good a necessary presupposition in ethics.
Now even
with these three more-than-simply-subjective worlds we have not, it is true,
yet reached the Self-conscious Spirit experienced by Religion. But we have thus
established important points. ... [H]aving got as far as those three
revelations, it is exceedingly difficult for men at large to retain a vivid
faith in those three worlds, and yet deliberately to reject the revelation of
Self-conscious Spirit offered to them by Religion. True, ... Fichte,
continuously so sure of the reality and more than human character of the Moral
World, tells us ... that “this faith is faith full and entire. ... There is no
ground in reason for going beyond such a Moral Cosmic Order, and, by means of a
conclusion from the effect to the cause, to assume, in addition, a Particular
Being as this cause.” But then we are left thus at the surely strange, highly
abstract, more or less mythical, conception of “an active Ordering”. We are
thus given an Order which is not a mere Orderedness,
in which case God and world would be one, and there would be no God; but an
Order which is an active Ordering,
which is, in so far, distinct from the world it orders; and yet an Ordering
which neither is, nor implies, an Orderer.
... But ... [i]nsistence upon this intermezzo,
as the ultimate analysis of man’s entire legitimate experience, becomes indeed
something doctrinaire and contradicts the general method and temper which have
led the mind to the point attained, if we will maintain it even after we have
been brought face to face with the massive, varied, persistent witness of the
religious sense and life. ... Fichte indeed bids us ... to beware lest, by our
hypothesis of a Personal God, we make the first of all objective cognitions,
the most certain of all certainties, to depend upon “ingenious pleadings (Klügelei).” Yet ... Fichte here
confounded philosophical thinking and the general idea of religiousness with
the specifically religious experiences themselves. Theological deductions and
speculations have indeed at times articulated or analysed, in “ingenious” ways,
the deepest and most delicate experiences of living religion. Yet these
experiences themselves always present their object as overflowingly existent;
and, in proportion as spirituality becomes more conscious of its own
requirements and more sensitively discriminating, this object is apprehended as
perfect Self-conscious Spirit, as very Source of all existence and reality.
––– 54-55,
“Religion and Reality”
10. COUNTING THE COST
csl – Mere Christianity, Book IV, chapter 9
– Surprised by Joy, chapter14: “a prodigal who is brought in kicking,
struggling, resentful”
» von hügel:
I believe that not to be aware of the costliness, to
unspiritualised man, of the change from his self-centredness, from anthropocentrism to theocentrism, means not only a want of awakeness to the central
demand of religion, but an ignorance or oblivion of the poorer, the perverse,
tendencies of the human heart.
––– 13,
“Responsibility in Religious Belief” (1920)
11. MERE SURVIVAL
csl – Surprised by Joy,
chapter 10: “human survival”
– Surprised by Joy, chapter 15: the “training of the Jews”
– Letters to Malcolm, chapter 14
» von hügel:
It
is certainly, at first sight, very remarkable that the fantastic abnormality of
the form and method, which characterises all animistic and spiritualist
practices, would habitually yield so less than a normal, so shrunken, banal,
and boring a content. Yet such a method cannot fail to reach no further than
this very little distance.
The
simple fact, assuredly, is that the soul, qua
religious, has no interest in just simple unending existence, of no matter what
kind or of a merely natural kind – an existence with God at most as the dim
background to a vivid experience of its own unending natural existence. The
specifically religious desire of Immortality begins, not with Immortality, but
with God; it rests upon God; and it ends in God. The religious soul does not
seek, find or assume its own Immortality; and thereupon seek, find, or assume
God. But it seeks, finds, experiences, and loves God; and because of God, and
of this, its very real though still very imperfect, intercourse with God –
because of these experiences which lie right within the noblest joys, fears,
hopes, necessities, certainties which emerge within any and every field of its
life here below – it finds, rather than seeks, Immortality of a certain kind.
The very slow but solidly sure, the very sober but severely spiritual, growth
of the belief in Immortality amongst the Jews, a belief fully endorsed and
greatly developed by our Lord, was entirely thus – not from Immortality of no
matter what kind to God, but from God to a special kind of Immortality.
Especially does Christ always keep God and the Kingdom of God central, as the
beginning and end of all, and the Immortality peripheral, as but the extension
and full establishment of the soul’s supernatural union with, and of its
supernatural activity towards, God and man.
––– 196-197, “What
do we mean by Heaven / Hell?”
12. FREEDOM OR
NECESSITY?
csl – Surprised
by Joy, chapter 15
– Collected
Letters II, 464
» von hügel:
... something beyond responsibility. Nothing is
grander, in the development of the human outlook, so long as such development
is fully, finely Christian ... than the ineradicable implication, and the
growing articulation, of the difference between Imperfect and Perfect Liberty.
All through the great movement we can trace the operation of the twin facts
that man is by his Nature constituted in Imperfect liberty, but that the same
man is called by Grace to the love of, and the indefinite approximation to, the
Perfect Liberty of God. ... Thus the Liberty of Choice is an imperfect kind of
liberty, and Perfect Liberty consists in willing fully and spontaneously the
behests of a perfect nature, and in the incapacity to will otherwise. Hence the
more arbitrary an act, the less really free it is.
––– 16-17,
“Responsibility in Religious Belief”
13. ETERNAL NOW
csl – Mere
Christianity, Book IV, chapter 3
– Miracles,
Appendix B
»
von hügel:
A man’s religion, in proportion to its depth, will
move in a Concrete Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And
these his depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully
Simultaneous God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of
mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its variously
close interpenetrations of the successive parts … he can, indeed he must,
conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus not
Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room or reason
for succession and our poor need of it. … We need only persistently apprehend
this Simultaneity as essential to God, and Succession as varyingly essential to
all creatures, and there remains no difficulty – at least as regards the Time-element
– in the doctrine of Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does
Time thus arise at all – it exists only in and through them.
–– 93,
“Progress in Religion” (1916)
14. TRANSPOSITION
AND MIRACLES
csl – controversy with Owen Barfield
– “Transposition”
– Miracles, chapter 13: “If in giving such weight to the
sense of fitness...”
» von hügel:
All our previous considerations have prepared us
thus to conceive Reality as, in proportion to its depth, an ever nearer and
nearer approach to the Concrete Universal, to the unique embodiment of a
universally valuable type; to discover, in this tendency, throughout the
successive stages of realities, to ever increasing typical uniqueness, the
increasingly large operation of the actually extant Concrete Universal, God;
and to recognise, as we retrace these stages, that neither does God’s Spirit
live all aloof from man’s spirit, nor does man’s spirit live all aloof from
man’s body or from this physical body’s physical environment. On the contrary,
throughout reality, the greater works in and with and through the lesser,
affecting and transforming this lesser in various striking degrees and ways. To
at least this degree in these ways does Miracle, and the belief in Miracle,
thoroughly belong to the permanent experience of mankind, and to the adequate
analysis of this experience.
––– 58,
“Religion and Reality”
... The Unincarnate God has ... a wider
range, though a less deep message, than the Incarnate God; and these two Gods
are but one and the same God; and these two Gods are but one and the same God,
Who, mysteriously, mostly slowly and almost imperceptibly, prepares or
supplements, expresses and otherwise aids Himself, in each way by the other
way. Thus though of course far from all that passed and passes for Religion in
Paganism can be held by us to be, in its degree and manner, true and right – to
be capable of Christianisation, indeed itself to serve the fuller apprehension
and service of God and of man; yet some
of the great Greek thinkers’ thinking, of the great Roman lawyers’ legislation,
of the Græco-Roman later religious philosophies and cults, in very deed sprang
from the Unincarnate God to serve and supplement the God Incarnate. Only then
can we be freed from anxiety, and can we sincerely rejoice and be confirmed in
our faith in God the Omnipresent, when we discover how largely the Old
Testament Book of Wisdom borrows from Plato, how appreciable is St. Paul’s
indebtedness to the Greek Mysteries, how much in the form of the Fourth Gospel
comes from Philo, how greatly Tertullian learnt from Roman Law, how important
was St. Augustine’s indebtedness to Plotinus, how almost wholesale was the
Dionysian writer’s incorporation of Proclus, and how systematic and gratefully
avowed was St. Thomas of Aquino’s utilisation of Aristotle. ... Christianity
could not otherwise have lived and thriven in this world ...
––– 134-135,
“The Apocalyptic Element in the Teaching of Jesus” (1919)
To the (doubtless many) men who are not aware that they are actually
serving Christ in their heroic service of their suffering fellow-creatures, to
men, then, who presumably do not all know the historic Jesus or who do not
perceive Him to be the Christ, Christ the King says at the judgment “Come, ye
blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation
of the world. Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me” ...
––– 222-223, “What
do we mean by Heaven / Hell?”
15. PERSONALITY AND
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
csl – Mere Christianity, Book I, chapter 4,
“What lies behind the Law”
– “Dogma and the Universe”: “We
are in no position to draw up maps of God’s psychology” etc.
– “The Seeing Eye”
– Letters to Malcolm, chapter 15
» von hügel:
As to the Personal God, it has now become a prevalent
fashion angrily to proclaim, or complacently to assume, the utter absurdity of
anything Personal about the infinite; since Personality, of every degree and
kind, essentially implies, indeed largely consists of, limitations of various
kinds, and is a gross anthropomorphism the moment we apply it to anything but
man himself. Yet it is interesting to note the readiness with which these same
thinkers will hypostatise parts, or special functions, of our human
personality, and will indeed do so largely with concepts which we know to be
specially characteristic of spatially extended bodies. Thus Thought or Love or
Law, or even Substance, nothing of all this is, for such thinkers, anthropomorphic
or sub-human; but anything personal is rank anthropomorphism. Yet it is only
self-conscious spirit that we know well, since it alone do we know from within.
Self-conscious spirit is immensely rich in content; and self-conscious spirit
is by far the widest and yet deepest reality known to us at all. True, Natural
Science and even Philosophy do not, of themselves, fully find the Personal God,
since Natural Science is not, as such, busy with the like ultimate questions,
and since Philosophy (as we shall show presently) appears, of itself, to bring
us indeed to certain more than human orders or laws, but hardly fully to the
Orderer. But there is nothing intrinsically unreasonable in thinking of the
ultimate Cause, Ground and End of the world as certainly not less than, as
somehow not all unlike, what we know our own self-conscious mind, feeling and
will to be, provided we keep the sense that God is certainly not just one
Object amongst other objects, or even simply one Subject amongst other
subjects; and that, though variously present and operative in all subjects and
objects, He is not only more perfect than, but distinct and different from,
them all. In so thinking we find in, or we attribute to, the supreme Reality
what we ourselves possess that is richest in content, that is best known to us,
and that is most perfect within our own little yet real experience – we have
done what we could; and life and history abound with warnings how easy it is
here to go apparently further and to fare in fact very much worse.
––– 49-50;
“Religion and Reality”
16. HEAVEN, HELL, AND PURGATORY
csl – The
Problem of Pain, chapters 8 and 10
– Letters
to Malcolm, chapter 14: “Servile
fear is, to be sure, the lowest form” etc.
» von hügel:
The
saved spirits will thus, according to their supernatural call and of their
supernatural establishment within it, be quasi-simultaneous in their
intelligence, feeling, volition, acts, effectuations. ... The lost spirits will
persist, according to the degree of their permanent self-willed defection from their supernatural call, in the all but
mere changingness, scatteredness, distractedness, variously characteristic of
their self-elected earthly life.
... The
saved spirits will ... be supported, environed, penetrated by the Supreme
Reality and by the keenest sense of this Reality. This sense of God ... will
evoke continuous acts and habits – an entire state – of a responsive
self-givingness in the soul itself. ... The lost spirits will persist ... in
the varyingly all but complete self-centredness and subjectivity of their
self-elected earthly life. But now they will feel, far more fully than they
ever felt on earth, the stuntedness, the self-mutilation, the imprisonment
involved in this their endless self-occupation and jealous evasion of all
reality not simply their own selves.
... The
saved spirits ... will receive, exercise, enjoy, aid, and complete a richly
various, deep and tender, social life with fellow souls. ... The lost spirits
will persist, in their claimfulness and envious self-isolation, in their
niggardly pain at the sight or thought of the unmatchable greatness and
goodness of other souls.
... The
saved spirits in the Beyond will doubtless no further know suffering and pain,
temptation and risk and fall ... And yet it is not difficult to find, within
the deepest characteristics of the human soul even upon earth and the most
certain and most dominant conditions of the Other Life, operative causes for
the continuance in Heaven itself of the essentials in the nobility furnished by
devoted suffering and self-sacrifice here below. ... Hence, even in Heaven,
there remains, for the saved soul, room and the need to transcend itself, to
lose itself, that it may truly find itself. ... And ... such plunges of the
soul there into God, and the somewhat similar goings-out there of the same soul
to its fellow souls ... are the equivalents there of men’s heroic plunges here
... into the instincts and intuitions (as yet relatively obscure) of a fuller
love and service of God and men. ... The lost souls are left to the pain of
stainedness and self-contractions; they do not attain to, since they do not
really will, the suffering of purification and expansive harmonisation. For
man, once he is supernaturally awakened, cannot escape pain; he can only choose
between the pain of fruitful growth, expansion, tension ... and the aches of
fruitless stunting, contraction, relaxation, the dull and dreary, or the angry
and reckless, drifting in bitter sweet unfaithful or immoral feelings, acts,
habits, which, thus indulged, bring even-increasing spiritual blindness,
volitional paralysis and a living death. ... [E]ven in Heaven there is a
certain analogue to the genuine cost in the real gain traceable within the
deepest acts of the human soul whilst here on earth.
––– 215-219,
“What do we mean by Heaven / Hell”?
[T]he grace of God and Christ ... will, in most cases,
work slowly within innumerable new acts of mine, acts contrary in character to
those old habits, and within a long self-discipline which now, step by step,
retraces the pervious long self-dissipation of the soul. Purgatory is thus, so
far at least, a sheer fact for the soul in its relation to God during this
life. But it is not reasonable to assume a radical change or supersession of so
fundamental a spiritual law at the death of the body, except under the
constraint of some very definite and unanswerable reason. Such a reason is not
forthcoming. And hence I can find no serious ground to deny the reality of a
similar Purgatory for the same soul in face of the same God in the other life.
And if Purgatory exists also in the Beyond, then most of the supernaturally
called souls will presumably go, at death, not to Hell, nor, in the first
instance, to Heaven, but, first of all, to Purgatory.
––– 203,
“What do we mean by Heaven / Hell?”
We must first of all remember ... that the question
concerning the final destination of man, as such, is not identical with the
question concerning the final condition of particular human beings. Hence it is
quite beside the mark to bring up the cases of little children, of idiots, of
pure savages. We must also not forget that there need be no real question of
Hell even for the majority of the supernaturally awakened souls, if there
actually exists a state and process of purgation in the Beyond, as there
undoubtedly exists such a state and process here. Yet these provisos do not
eliminate the real possibility of Hell, as the general rule, wheresoever is a
real possibility of Heaven; they leave Heaven and Hell as a generally
inter-related couple.
––– 207,
“What do we mean by Heaven / Hell?”
17. GOOD AND
EVIL NOT IN BALANCE
csl – “Evil and God”
– Mere
Christianity, Book II, chapter 2
» von hügel:
Evil, and the evil effects of Evil, are, indeed, not
the mere absence of Good and of the good effects of Good; Evil is in truth a
force and positive – it is an actual perversion, and not an abolition, of the
efficacious will. Yet Evil and its effects are not as fully and concentratedly
evil, as Good and its effects are full and concentrated. If this were false,
Manichaeism would be true, and Evil would fully balance Good. According to all
Theism, and especially all Christianity, the Good, if not sheerly all-powerful,
is, at the least, more powerful for good than is the Evil for evil. No doubt,
the absolute parallelism of form present in certain of our Lord’s declarations
concerning Heaven and Hell, as these are given in St. Mark and St. Matthew, and
as they operate in practically all the popular echoes and expansions of these
declarations ever since their utterance, would, if pressed, rule out this
discrimination; yet such a discrimination cannot otherwise be seriously refuted
from any sensitively Christian premisis. We shall thus indeed admit an Evil and
a Suffering in the Lost, in correspondence to the respective Good and Happiness
of the Saved; but we shall carefully guard against finding that Evil and
Suffering to be as full and as concentrated as is this Good and Happiness.
––– 214-215,
“What do we mean by Heaven / Hell?”
18. IS PAIN A
PROBLEM?
csl – The
Problem of Pain, chapter 1
» von hügel:
... in Paper No. 4 I have attempted to show how the
reality of Evil is beyond any direct explanation by anyone – the true state of
affairs here is not that believers can explain and that unbelievers cannot
explain, still less that Christians cannot explain but that sceptics can. No:
but that Christianity does, if something other, yet something more than explain
Evil. Christianity has immensely increased the range and depth of our insight
as to Evil; and, at the same time, Christianity alone has given man the motives
and the power not only to trust on, unshaken, in the spiritual sun, in God, in
spite of these sun spots of Evil, but to transform Evil into an instrument of
Good.
––– x,
Preface
And let it be noted carefully: the greatest
theoretical difficulty against all Theism lies in the terrible reality of Evil;
and yet the deepest adequacy, in the actual toil and trouble of life, of this
same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical attitude
towards, and success against, this most real Evil. Pantheism, on the contrary,
increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical difficulty, since the
world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is here held to be
perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no
more than any other outlook, really explains Evil; but it alone, in its
fullest, Jewish-Christian forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil:
it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its
noble insistence upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome
all this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing, in
the midst of deep suffering and through a still deeper faith and love, souls
which are the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
––– 93-94,
“Progress in Religion”
Pray believe me here: it is to Christianity that we
owe our deepest insight into the wondrously wide and varied range throughout
the world, as we know it, of pain, suffering, evil; just as to Christianity we
owe the richest enforcement of the fact that, in spite of all this, God is, and that He is good and loving. And
this enforcement Christianity achieves, at its best, by actually inspiring soul
after soul, to believe, to love, to live this wondrous faith.
Hence all
attempts to teach Christianity anything on this central matter of pain and
suffering would be, very literally, to “teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs.”
For the very existence of the problem – I mean man’s courage to face it,
together with sensitiveness as to its appalling range and its baffling mystery
– we owe, not to philosophy nor to science, still less to their won untutored
hearts, but to religion – above all to the Jewish and Christian religion.
––– 113,
“Preliminaries to Religious Belief”
19. APOCALYPSE
NOT NOW
csl – “The World’s Last Night”
– “Some Thoughts”
– Mere
Christianity, Book III, chapter 10,
“Hope”
» von hügel:
The more ancient is a New Testament document, the more
clearly does it announce, or the more intimately does it imply, such a keen
expectation of a Proximate Second Coming of Christ; indeed the Synoptic Gospels
report words of Our Lord himself, of a lapidary emphasis, which His hearers
evidently took in the same sense. I have ventured here to study this difficult
question, because, although, as with the problem of Evil, I do not know any
direct and simple solution of it, yet I stoutly believe in the solidity of the
delimitations and of the utilisations proposed, and that the full and vivid,
operative faith in Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, remain as
genuinely grounded in reason and as entirely possible to feeling, after
recognition of the facts concerned with the Parousia, as does the faith in God,
the all powerful and all good, remain well grounded and entirely possible, in
full confrontation of the still wider and deeper facts concerning Evil.
––– x-xi,
Preface
Religion achieves its fullest power and balance only
in the completest interaction of God, Christ, Church; and yet each of these
great sides and stages of religion contains severally a difficulty so profound
and obstinate as to be, in strictness, capable only of delimitation and
discrimination – of being rendered bearable for the sake of the light and the
power which surround the burden and the darkness; but incapable, I believe, of
any quite direct and entirely clear, easy and readily transferable solution.
... [As regards the second “great side and stage of religion”, Christ,] there stands
the reality of Jesus and of His immense attraction and beneficence; but there
stands at this place also the reality of the Parousia – of all the fantastic-seeming teaching concerning a very
near universal cataclysm and cosmic regeneration, with Jesus Himself as the
visible centre of overwhelming power. ...
... [A]t and after Caesarea Philippi
[Mark 8:27 and parallels] Jesus, with ever increasing clearness, implies or
insists upon three distinct and several
cataclysms; historical criticism is doubtless right in refusing to identify
any two of them. ... [first,] His own resurrection after His own passion and
death ... [secondly,] the early destruction of the Temple ... [thirdly,] a
proximate, sudden, God-worked end of the then extant world generally, with
Himself descending from heaven as judge of all mankind at this great assize.
Now this Second Coming is an entirely
original conception of Jesus Himself ... No Jew had ever before Jesus applied
Daniel 7:13 to a personal Messiah ... The personal application is the original
work of Jesus, and of the Jesus of the second period. So far all the critics
agree with emphasis. There is, however, another doctrine which Jesus launches
simultaneously ... which, I know not really why, is less confidently held, by
these same critics, to be Jesus’s own discovery – the doctrine of the Suffering
Messiah. Nevertheless it is certain that the first Jewish attribution known to
us of Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant) to a Personal Messiah is that of Trypho
in St. Justin’s dialogue, written not before a.d.
155 ...
––– 119-124, “The
Apocalyptic Element in the Teaching of Jesus” (1919)
We
have now accumulated a mass of pressing difficulties, of poignant questions. At
bottom they raise the problem not merely of Jesus’s Divinity, or at least of
His Inerrancy even with regard to matters of directly religious import, but
primarily of the soundness and sanity of His human mind. And even if we succeed
in finding room for such teaching within His mind, as the convictions of a
supremely sane Jew of well-nigh two thousand years ago, what possible use, what
present-day appeal, can we unforcedly still discover in these strange-sounding
propositions? And if we do not make some such discovery, is not even the simply
human attraction of Jesus ruined, for ourselves, in these our days, beyond all
hope repair?
[1]
... a real Incarnation of God in man can only mean Incarnation in some
particular human nature. ... [T]he Revealer could not but imagine, think, feel
and will the deepest truths and facts of His mission with Jewish categories,
images, emotions.
[2]
... A proximate sharp testing awaits His hearers; but it will be a testing of,
at best, an entire long life of persistent faithfulness.
[3]
... [T]he Kingdom, with its categories of intense proximity, suddenness and
cataclysm, soon ceased to be central, even in the minds of Christians, for the
simple reason that the given visible world persisted in lasting; that the
vehemence of this group of teachings could not be maintained for long, if the
gentler characteristics of the other group of teaching – equally the utterance
of Jesus Himself – were to have their full realisation: and that Jesus Himself
had given unequivocal indications as to how he would envisage, how He would
organise, permanent Christian institutions, did the permanence of the world
require – as, in fact, it was now requiring – a corresponding permanence of the
Christian organisation.
[4]
...[T]he Suffering of the Messiah, and the Return of this same Messiah in Power
and Majesty ... first appear at Caesarea Philippi in a close interconnection;
let us always keep them thus, as but two constituents of one great fact and law
...Without the Cross, Jesus could not ask as much of us, His followers, as He
actually does; without the Crown, He would but teach an heroic Stoicism.
––– 124-130, “The
Apocalyptic Element”
...
Doubtless God, in His intrinsic nature, is non-successive, is outside Time;
doubtless men themselves, in rare moments, can and do experience something like
an arrest, an overleaping of succession; and indeed unless man possessed some
such faculty, he could not so vividly apprehend God and religions as do all the
Mystics. But ... [M]an never does nor can get away, for long, from all
succession ...
... [N]othing could be more anti-mystical
than is the Proximate Futurism of the authentic Jesus. This Proximate Futurism
stands out massively against all pure Immanentism, all Evolution taken as final
cause and not merely as instrument and method. ... [T]he magnificent
massiveness of the anti-Pantheism here, is a permanent service to religion of
the very first magnitude.
... There is God, at bottom unchanging,
an overflowing richness of ever simultaneous life. And there is man capable of,
called to, about to be tested concerning, stability – a persistent
successiveness of devoted life. The suddenness is only in the testing and in
conversions to a persistent devotedness; and the very Suddenness, in these
cases, springs from the need to express a junction between the Simultaneity of
God and the Successiveness, however steady, of man. Thus the two points
essential to every real Mysticism are secured, but this in such a combination
with other conditions as to render impossible all direct derivation of pure
Mysticism or Pantheism from the historical Jesus.
... The Unincarnate God has ... a wider
range, though a less deep message, than the Incarnate God; and these two Gods
are but one and the same God ... [This affords] a full Christian justification
for the successive enlargements of man’s conception of the world of time and
space, and of man’s own and of God’s own relation to this same world. ... Such
an expansion appears imperative if the deep and tender universalism of the
Gospel is not itself to come to appear a parochial sentimentalism. ...
[S]urely, a religion is doomed which can furnish no emotion appropriate to what
I see and surmise every time I look up at the stars at night. ... Even in the
Synoptic Gospels alone we get adumbrations and pictures of differing historical
provenance and which are more or less incapable of complete harmonisation ...
We see from these facts how wide was the freedom and how rich the choice for
the Christian Church in its development of a Christian Eschatology.
We can, next, note that all the
Christian Eschatological views fall, roughly, into two classes – the Renovated
Earth, the Millennarian Expectation; and Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, which, more and more in the great
orthodox Christian bodies, have, in practice, supplanted the former. ... The
Heaven class has more and more come to be felt by Christians of delicate
spirituality and wide general cultivation to be the simpler, the more spiritual
view, indeed to be the one which most adequately draws out the deepest
implications and needs of Theism in general and of Jesus’s own great central
teachings in particular. ...
As with the change from Kingdom to
Church, so with that from a Renovated Earth to Heaven, we may rest very sure
that the deepest reasons and needs slowly determined the Church in this
direction. In both, closely interrelated, cases we can, by living the spirit of
Jesus, discover how preservative of precisely this spirit are these
modifications of the letter. And especially does the great alternative of
Heaven-Hell remain true to the whole gist and drift of Jesus’s teaching and to
the growth of this teaching from first to last, since this teaching was never
simply a revelation of a divine cosmic process of universal redemption, but
always a warning, an awakening to, a costly, profound alternative of, right or
wrong self-determination in view of God’s gift and God’s call and testing. ...
[T]he Millennarianisms of the last sixty years or so, have practically all been
without precisely what gave greatness and depth to Jesus’s entire Eschatology.
... [W]e will not wish, even if we could, to encourage an Immanentist
Millennarianism, an outlook from which have disappeared Alternative, Choice,
Preparation, Gift and God.
Indeed even the religiously intended,
religious coloured Millennarianism, will not really work. ... Dr. F. Bradley
has acutely pointed out that Human Perfection, taken thus absolutely, as a
condition attainable suddenly, completely: that such an idea of progress is not
a cause of an effect of Theism properly understood, but always its substitute.
You can have as your centre God; or you can have as your centre such sudden and
complete human Progress and Perfection: you cannot have both. But Theism
remains fully compatible with man’s indefinite improveableness, indeed
improvement. Religious men, provided they care still more for direct spiritual
conditions, cannot care too much for the social, earthly betterment of their
fellows ... In this way our religion will be also thoroughly social; but it
will bring to this its social outlook a special balance and sanity, a freedom
from exaltations and cynicisms, and indestructible, sober, and laborious
hopefulness, which, surely, constitute exactly the combination so much required
and so rare to find.
––– 131-140, “The
Apocalyptic Element”
20. THE IRISHMAN’S STOVE
csl – The Abolition of Man, chapter 3
» von hügel:
...
[L]ater stages of religion do generally look upon the earlier stages as so many
sheer idolatries; and ... the strongly religious man, as such, is generally
reluctant to concede an element of truth to those earlier stages. ... Yet it is
plain that, unless the Irishman’s argument be sound that, because a certain
stove will save him half his fuel, therefore two such stoves will save it all,
there is no necessary consequence from such admixture of illusion with truth to
the negation of every and all truth ...
––– 35, “Religion
and Illusion”
21. REGENERATE SCIENCE
csl – The Abolition of Man, chapter 3
» von hügel:
...
much in recent science and philosophy, and in the general movement of men’s
minds and requirements, points to future developments when men at large will
again see in Nature (now encouraged to do so by science and philosophy
themselves) not finally a mechanism, nor a blind impulsion and warfare of
forces, but once again, yet now much more deeply than ever, a world which (in
proportion to its degree and scale of reality) is purposive – a world
indicative of, because preparatory for, mind, love and will.
––– 35, “Religion and Illusion”
22. THE SALVATION OF EMETH THE
CALORMENE
csl – The
Last Battle, chapter 10
» von hügel:
We religious men again will have to develop, as part
of our religion, a sense, not simply of the error and evil, but also of the
truth and the good, in any and every man’s religion. We will have to realise,
with Cardinal John de Lugo, SJ, (who died in 1660), that the members of the
various Christian sects, of the Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the
non-Christian philosophies, who achieved and achieve their salvation, did and
do so in general simply by God’s grace aiding their good faith instinctively to
concentrate itself upon, and to practise, those elements in the cultus and
teaching of their respective sect, communion or philosophy, which are true and
good and originally revealed by God. And, finally, we religious men, especially
we Catholic Christians, will indeed never drop the noble truth and ideal of a
universal unity of cultus and belief, of one single world-wide Church, but we
will conceive this our deathless faith in religious unity as being solidly
realisable only if we are able and glad to recognise the rudimentary,
fragmentary, relative, paedagogic truth and worth in religions other than our
own, – a worth which, as regards at least Judaism and Hellenism, the Roman
Church has never ceased to practise and to proclaim.
––– 63, “Religion
and Reality”
________________________________
REFERENCES TO C. S. LEWIS’S WRITINGS
CR first published in Christian
Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper, 1967
GD first published in God in the Dock
(American edition), ed. Walter Hooper, 1970
All
essays listed were republished in one comprehensive volume called Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces in 2000. For more
details about Lewis’s shorter writings see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
The Abolition of Man, 1943.
Collected Letters, ed. Walter Hooper, three volumes, 2000-2006.
“De futilitate”, c. 1943, CR.
“Dogma and
the Universe”, 1943, GD.
“Evil and
God”, 1941, GD.
“Fern-seed and Elephants”, 1959, CR.
“The Funeral of a Great Myth”, c. 1944, CR.
Image
and Imagination: Essays and Reviews, ed. Walter Hooper, 2013.
“Is Theism
Important?”, 1952, GD.
“The
Language of Religion”, 1960, CR.
The Last Battle: A Story for Children, 1956.
“The Laws of Nature”, 1945, GD.
Letters to Malcolm, 1964.
The Lewis Papers, ed. W. H. Lewis, eleven
volumes, unpublished. Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton, Illinois, U.S.A.
Mere Christianity, 1952.
“Miracles”, 1942, GD.
Miracles,
1947/1960.
“The Pains
of Animals”, 1950, GD.
Perelandra: A Novel, 1943.
The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933/1943.
The Problem of Pain, 1940.
“The Seeing Eye”, 1958, CR.
Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, 1969.
“Some
Thoughts”, 1948, GD.
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, 1955.
“Transposition”,
1944, first published in Transposition
and Other Addresses, 1949.
“The World’s
Last Night”, 1951, first published in The
World’s Last Night and Other Essays, 1960.
Controversy
with Owen Barfield: see The Great War of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis:
Philosophical Writings 1927-1930, ed. Norbert Feinendegen & Arend Smilde (2015), and letters to Barfield in Collected Letters.
Post-“Great
War” letters to Anthroposophist friends:
these letters include those to Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood and Daphne Harwood
as published in Collected Letters.