Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

  CONTENTS

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  About the Author

  Also by C. S. Lewis

  Further Reading

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  III

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

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