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Title: Transposition and other Addresses
Alternate title [U.S.]:
   The Weight of Glory, and other Addresses
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: 1949
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949
Date first posted: 26 November 2014
Date last updated: 26 November 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1218

This ebook was produced by
Marcia Brooks, Mark Akrigg, Stephen Hutcheson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
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                    TRANSPOSITION AND OTHER ADDRESSES




                          _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_


                               _Theology_
                                MIRACLES
                         THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS
                          THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
                         THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
                            BROADCAST TALKS
                          CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
                           THE GREAT DIVORCE
                      GEORGE MACDONALD: ANTHOLOGY
                           BEYOND PERSONALITY

                            _Social Theory_
                          THE ABOLITION OF MAN

                          _Literary Criticism_
                          THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE
                            REHABILITATIONS
                          THE PERSONAL HERESY
                (_in collaboration with M. W. Tillyard_)
                       PREFACE TO "PARADISE LOST"

                               _Fiction_
                        OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET
                               PERELANDRA
                         THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH








                             TRANSPOSITION
                         _And other Addresses_


                                   by
                              C. S. LEWIS
                   FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD


                             GEOFFREY BLES
                       52 DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON


                      _Printed in Great Britain by
                  Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome & London
                         for Geoffrey Bles Ltd.
                    52 Doughty Street, London, W.C.1

                        First published in 1949_




                                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 re-print _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.




                                CONTENTS


        I Transposition
       II The Weight of Glory
      III Membership
       IV Learning in War-Time
        V The Inner Ring




                                   I
                            _TRANSPOSITION_
 _A sermon preached on Whit-Sunday in Mansfield College Chapel, Oxford_


In the church to which I belong this day is set apart for commemorating
the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the first Christians shortly after
the Ascension. I want to consider one of the phenomena which
accompanied, or followed, this descent; the phenomenon which our
translation calls "speaking with tongues" and which the learned call
_glossolalia_. You will not suppose that I think this the most important
aspect of Pentecost, but I have two reasons for selecting it. In the
first place it would be ridiculous for me to speak about the nature of
the Holy Ghost or the modes of His operation: that would be an attempt
to teach where I have nearly all to learn. In the second place,
_glossolalia_ has often been a stumbling-block to me. It is, to be
frank, an embarrassing phenomenon. St. Paul himself seems to have been
rather embarrassed by it in 1 Corinthians and labours to turn the desire
and the attention of the Church to more obviously edifying gifts. But he
goes no further. He throws in almost parenthetically the statement that
he himself spoke with tongues more than anyone else, and he does not
question the spiritual, or supernatural, source of the phenomenon.

The difficulty I feel is this. On the one hand, _glossolalia_ has
remained an intermittent "variety of religious experience" down to the
present day. Every now and then we hear that in some revivalist meeting
one or more of those present has burst into a torrent of what appears to
be gibberish. The thing does not seem to be edifying, and all
non-Christian opinion would regard it as a kind of hysteria, an
involuntary discharge of nervous excitement. A good deal even of
Christian opinion would explain most instances of it in exactly the same
way; and I must confess that it would be very hard to believe that in
all instances of it the Holy Ghost is operating. We suspect, even if we
cannot be sure, that it is usually an affair of the nerves. That is one
horn of the dilemma. On the other hand, we cannot as Christians shelve
the story of Pentecost or deny that there, at any rate, the speaking
with tongues was miraculous. For the men spoke not gibberish but
languages unknown to them though known to other people present. And the
whole event of which this makes part is built into the very fabric of
the birth-story of the Church. It is this very event which the risen
Lord had told the Church to wait for--almost in the last words He uttered
before His ascension. It looks, therefore, as if we shall have to say
that the very same phenomenon which is sometimes not only natural but
even pathological is at other times (or at least at one other time) the
organ of the Holy Ghost. And this seems at first very surprising and
very open to attack. The sceptic will certainly seize this opportunity
to talk to us about Occam's razor, to accuse us of multiplying
hypotheses. If most instances of _glossolalia_ are covered by hysteria,
is it not (he will ask) extremely probable that that explanation covers
the remaining instances too?

It is to this difficulty that I would gladly bring a little ease if I
can. And I will begin by pointing out that it belongs to a class of
difficulties. The closest parallel to it within that class is raised by
the erotic language and imagery we find in the mystics. In them we find
a whole range of expressions--and therefore possibly of emotions--with
which we are quite familiar in another context and which, in that other
context, have a clear natural significance. But in the mystical writings
it is claimed that these elements have a different cause. And once more
the sceptic will ask why the cause which we are content to accept for
ninety-nine instances of such language should not be held to cover the
hundredth too. The hypothesis that mysticism is an erotic phenomenon
will seem to him immensely more probable than any other.

Put in its most general terms our problem is that of the obvious
continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which,
it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be
our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our
natural life and (it would seem) of no others. If we have really been
visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that
an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than selections from
terrestrial experience (crowns, thrones, and music), that devotion can
find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby
Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old,
familiar act of eating and drinking? And you may add that the very same
problem also breaks out on a lower level, not only between spiritual and
natural but also between higher and lower levels of the natural life.
Hence cynics very plausibly challenge our civilized conception of the
difference between love and lust by pointing out that when all is said
and done they usually end in what is, physically, the same act. They
similarly challenge the difference between justice and revenge on the
ground that what finally happens to the criminal may be the same. And in
all these cases, let us admit that the cynics and sceptics have a good
_prima facie_ case. The same acts do reappear in justice as well as in
revenge: the consummation of humanized and conjugal love is
physiologically the same as that of the merely biological lust;
religious language and imagery, and probably religious emotion too,
contains nothing that has not been borrowed from Nature.

Now it seems to me that the only way to refute the critic here is to
show that the same _prima facie_ case is equally plausible in some
instance where we all know (not by faith or by logic, but empirically)
that it is in fact false. Can we find an instance of higher and lower
where the higher is within almost everyone's experience? I think we can.
Consider the following quotation from _Pepys's Diary_:

  With my wife to the King's House to see _The Virgin Martyr_, and it is
  mighty pleasant. . . . But that which did please me beyond anything in
  the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which
  is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my
  soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when
  in love with my wife . . . and makes me resolve to practise wind
  musick and to make my wife do the like. (Feb. 27, 1668.)

There are several points here that deserve attention. Firstly that the
internal sensation accompanying intense aesthetic delight was
indistinguishable from the sensation accompanying two other experiences,
that of being in love and that of being, say, in a rough channel
crossing. (2) That of these two other experiences one at least is the
very reverse of pleasurable. No man enjoys nausea. (3) That Pepys was,
nevertheless, anxious to have again the experience whose sensational
accompaniment was identical with the very unpleasant accompaniments of
sickness. That was why he decided to take up wind music.

Now it may be true that not many of us have fully shared Pepys's
experience; but we have all experienced that sort of thing. For myself I
find that if, during a moment of intense aesthetic rapture, one tries to
turn round and catch by introspection what one is actually feeling, one
can never lay one's hand on anything but a physical sensation. In my
case it is a kind of kick or flutter in the diaphragm. Perhaps that is
all Pepys meant by "really sick". But the important point is this: I
find that this kick or flutter is exactly the same sensation which, in
me, accompanies great and sudden anguish. Introspection can discover no
difference at all between my neural response to very bad news and my
neural response to the overture of _The Magic Flute_. If I were to judge
simply by sensations I should come to the absurd conclusion that joy and
anguish are the same thing, that what I most dread is the same with what
I most desire. Introspection discovers nothing more or different in the
one than in the other. And I expect that most of you, if you are in the
habit of noticing such things, will report more or less the same.

Now let us take a step further. These sensations--Pepys's sickness and my
flutter in the diaphragm--do not merely accompany very different
experiences as an irrelevant or neutral addition. We may be quite sure
that Pepys hated that sensation when it came in real sickness: and we
know from his own words that he liked it when it came with wind music,
for he took measures to make as sure as possible of getting it again.
And I likewise love this internal flutter in one context and call it a
pleasure and hate it in another and call it misery. It is not a mere
sign of joy and anguish: it becomes what it signifies. When the joy thus
flows over into the nerves that overflow is its consummation: when the
anguish thus flows over that physical symptom is the crowning horror.
The very same thing which makes the sweetest drop of all in the sweet
cup also makes the bitterest drop in the bitter.

And here, I suggest, we have found what we are looking for. I take our
emotional life to be "higher" than the life of our sensations--not, of
course, morally higher, but richer, more varied, more subtle. And this
is a higher level which nearly all of us know. And I believe that if
anyone watches carefully the relation between his emotions and his
sensations he will discover the following facts; (1) that the nerves do
respond, and in a sense most adequately and exquisitely, to the
emotions; (2) that their resources are far more limited, the possible
variations of sense far fewer, than those of emotion; (3) and that the
senses compensate for this by using the _same_ sensation to express more
than one emotion--even, as we have seen, to express opposite emotions.

Where we tend to go wrong is in assuming that if there is to be a
correspondence between two systems it must be a one for one
correspondence--that A in the one system must be represented by _a_ in
the other, and so on. But the correspondence between emotion and
sensation turns out not to be of that sort. And there never could be
correspondence of that sort where the one system was really richer than
the other. If the richer system is to be represented in the poorer at
all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more
than one meaning. The transposition of the richer into the poorer must,
so to speak, be algebraical, not arithmetical. If you are to translate
from a language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a
small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more
than one sense. If you are to write a language with twenty-two vowel
sounds in an alphabet with only five vowel characters then you must be
allowed to give each of those five characters more than one value. If
you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an
orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one
passage must also represent violins in another.

As the examples show we are all quite familiar with this kind of
transposition or adaptation from a richer to a poorer medium. The most
familiar example of all is the art of drawing. The problem here is to
represent a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper. The
solution is perspective, and perspective means that we must give more
than one value to a two-dimensional shape. Thus in a drawing of a cube
we use an acute angle to represent what is a right angle in the real
world. But elsewhere an acute angle on the paper may represent what was
already an acute angle in the real world: for example, the point of a
spear on the gable of a house. The very same shape which you must draw
to give the illusion of a straight road receding from the spectator is
also the shape you draw for a dunces' cap. As with the lines, so with
the shading. Your brightest light in the picture is, in literal fact,
only plain white paper: and this must do for the sun, or a lake in
evening light, or snow, or human flesh.

I now make two comments on the instances of Transposition which are
already before us:

(1) It is clear that in each case what is happening in the lower medium
can be understood only if we know the higher medium. The instance where
this knowledge is most commonly lacking is the musical one. The piano
version means one thing to the musician who knows the original
orchestral score and another thing to the man who hears it simply as a
piano piece. But the second man would be at an even greater disadvantage
if he had never heard any instrument but a piano and even doubted the
existence of other instruments. Even more, we understand pictures only
because we know and inhabit the three-dimensional world. If we can
imagine a creature who perceived only two dimensions and yet could
somehow be aware of the lines as he crawled over them on the paper, we
shall easily see how impossible it would be for him to understand. At
first he might be prepared to accept on authority our assurance that
there was a world in three dimensions. But when we pointed to the lines
on the paper and tried to explain, say, that "This is a road," would he
not reply that the shape which we were asking him to accept as a
revelation of our mysterious other world was the very same shape which,
on our own showing, elsewhere meant nothing but a triangle. And soon, I
think, he would say, "You keep on telling me of this other world and its
unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn't it very suspicious
that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the
solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional
shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that
your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream
which borrows all its elements from this one?"

(2) It is of some importance to notice that the word _symbolism_ is not
adequate in all cases to cover the relation between the higher medium
and its transposition in the lower. It covers some cases perfectly, but
not others. Thus the relation between speech and writing is one of
symbolism. The written characters exist solely for the eye, the spoken
words solely for the ear. There is complete discontinuity between them.
They are not like one another, nor does the one cause the other to be.
The one is simply a _sign_ of the other and signifies it by a
convention. But a picture is not related to the visible world in just
that way. Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and
represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same
source as its. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because
real suns or lamps shine on them: that is, they seem to shine a great
deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes.
The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight
simply as written words are to spoken. It is a sign, but also something
more than a sign: and only a sign because it is also more than a sign,
because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present.
If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but
sacramental. But in the case we started from--that of emotion and
sensation--we are even further beyond mere symbolism. For there, as we
have seen, the very same sensation does not merely accompany, nor merely
signify, diverse and opposite emotions, but becomes part of them. The
emotion descends bodily, as it were, into the sensation and digests,
transforms, transubstantiates it, so that the same thrill along the
nerves _is_ delight or _is_ agony.

I am not going to maintain that what I call Transposition is the only
possible mode whereby a poorer medium can respond to a richer: but I
claim that it is very hard to imagine any other. It is therefore, at the
very least, not improbable that Transposition occurs whenever the higher
reproduces itself in the lower. Thus, to digress for a moment, it seems
to me very likely that the real relation between mind and body is one of
Transposition. We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is
intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore
is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if
so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms,
which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless
to use the words "true" or "false". We are driven then to some kind of
correspondence. But if we assume a one-for-one correspondence this means
that we have to attribute an almost unbelievable complexity and variety
of events to the brain. But I submit that a one-for-one relation is
probably quite unnecessary. All our examples suggest that the brain can
respond--in a sense, adequately and exquisitely correspond--to the
seemingly infinite variety of consciousness without providing one single
physical modification for each single modification of consciousness.

But that is a digression. Let us now return to our original question,
about Spirit and Nature, God and Man. Our problem was that in what
claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life
recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other
elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than
the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny) then
this is exactly what we should expect. And the sceptic's conclusion that
the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a
mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also
exactly what we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake
which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make
in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis
find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything
but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in
thought except twitchings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating
the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence
available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.

Everything is different when you approach the Transposition from above,
as we all do in the case of emotion and sensation or of the
three-dimensional world and pictures, and as the spiritual man does in
the case we are considering. Those who spoke with tongues, as St. Paul
did, can well understand how that holy phenomenon differed from the
hysterical phenomenon--although be it remembered, they were in a sense
exactly the same phenomenon, just as the very same sensation came to
Pepys in love, in the enjoyment of music, and in sickness. Spiritual
things are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things
and is judged of none.

But who dares claim to be a spiritual man? In the full sense, none of
us. And yet we are somehow aware that we approach from above, or from
inside, at least some of those Transpositions which embody the Christian
life in this world. With whatever sense of unworthiness, with whatever
sense of audacity, we must affirm that we know a little of the higher
system which is being transposed. In a way the claim we are making is
not a very startling one. We are only claiming to know that our apparent
devotion, whatever else it may have been, was not simply erotic, or that
our apparent desire for Heaven, whatever else it may have been, was not
simply a desire for longevity or jewelry or social splendours. Perhaps
we have never really attained at all to what St. Paul would describe as
spiritual life. But at the very least we know, in some dim and confused
way, that we were trying to use natural acts and images and language
with a new value, have at least desired a repentance which was not
merely prudential and a love which was not self-centred. At the worst,
we know enough of the spiritual to know that we have fallen short of it:
as if the picture knew enough of the three-dimensional world to be aware
that it was flat.

It is not only for humility's sake (that, of course) that we must
emphasize the dimness of our knowledge. I suspect that, save by God's
direct miracle, spiritual experience can never abide introspection. If
even our emotions will not do so, (since the attempt to find out what we
are now _feeling_ yields nothing more than a physical sensation) much
less will the operations of the Holy Ghost. The attempt to discover by
introspective analysis our own spiritual condition is to me a horrible
thing which reveals, at best, not the secrets of God's spirit and ours,
but their transpositions in intellect, emotion and imagination, and
which at worst may be the quickest road to presumption or despair.

With this my case, as the lawyers say, is complete. But I have just four
points to add:

(1) I hope it is quite clear that the conception of Transposition, as I
call it, is distinct from another conception often used for the same
purpose--I mean the conception of development. The Developmentalist
explains the continuity between things that claim to be spiritual and
things that are certainly natural by saying that the one slowly turned
into the other. I believe this view explains some facts, but I think it
has been much overworked. At any rate it is not the theory I am putting
forward. I am not saying that the natural act of eating after millions
of years somehow blossoms into the Christian sacrament. I am saying that
the Spiritual Reality, which existed before there were any creatures who
ate, gives this natural act a new meaning, and more than a new meaning:
makes it in a certain context to be a different thing. In a word, I
think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will
one day sprout out into real trees and grass.

(2) I have found it impossible, in thinking of what I call
Transposition, not to ask myself whether it may help us to conceive the
Incarnation. Of course if Transposition were merely a mode of symbolism
it could give us no help at all in this matter: on the contrary, it
would lead us wholly astray, back into a new kind of Docetism (or would
it be only the old kind?) and away from the utterly historical and
concrete reality which is the centre of all our hope, faith and love.
But then, as I have pointed out, Transposition is not always symbolism.
In varying degrees the lower reality can actually be drawn into the
higher and become part of it. The sensation which accompanies joy
becomes itself joy: we can hardly choose but say "incarnates joy". If
this is so, then I venture to suggest, though with great doubt and in
the most provisional way, that the concept of Transposition may have
some contribution to make to the theology--or at least to the
philosophy--of the Incarnation. For we are told in one of the creeds that
the Incarnation worked "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but
by taking of the Manhood into God". And it seems to me that there is a
real analogy between this and what I have called Transposition: that
humanity, still remaining itself, is not merely counted as, but
veritably drawn into, Deity, seems to me like what happens when a
sensation (not in itself a pleasure) is drawn into the joy it
accompanies. But I walk _in mirabilibus supra me_ and submit all to the
verdict of real theologians.

(3) I have tried to stress throughout the inevitableness of the error
made about every transposition by one who approaches it from the lower
medium only. The strength of such a critic lies in the words "merely" or
"nothing but". He sees all the facts but not the meaning. Quite truly,
therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. There _is_ nothing else
there; except the meaning. He is therefore, as regards the matter in
hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs
cannot understand _pointing_. You point to a bit of food on the floor:
the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A
finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no
meaning. And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find
people deliberately inducing upon themselves this dog-like mind. A man
who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to
inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this
analysis as truer than his experience. The extreme limit of this
self-blinding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have
consciousness, yet go about to study the human organism as if they did
not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to
understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible,
continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The
critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of
meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same
plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh
evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only
self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought
itself only cerebral biochemistry.

(4) Finally, I suggest that what has been said of Transposition throws a
new light on the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. For in a
sense Transposition can do anything. However great the difference
between Spirit and Nature, between aesthetic joy and that flutter in the
diaphragm, between reality and picture, yet the Transposition can be in
its own way adequate. I said before that in your drawing you had only
plain white paper for sun and cloud, snow, water, and human flesh. In
one sense, how miserably inadequate! Yet in another, how perfect. If the
shadows are properly done that patch of white paper will, in some
curious way, be very like blazing sunshine: we shall almost feel cold
while we look at the paper snow and almost warm our hands at the paper
fire. May we not, by a reasonable analogy, suppose likewise that there
is no experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no
vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and
emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence
on the sensory level? Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding
of those very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation,
of which we have here no faintest guess?




                                   II
                         _THE WEIGHT OF GLORY_
 _Preached originally as a sermon in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin,
   Oxford, on June 8, 1941: published in_ Theology, _November, 1941,
                       and by the S.P.C.K., 1942_


If you asked twenty good men to-day 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 ideal 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 reward. There is the reward which has no natural
connexion 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 in so far 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 recognized 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: mi]. 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 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 jewelry 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 must 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, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we
shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we
shall have "glory"; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or
feasted or entertained; and, finally, 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 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 self-admiration. 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 for ever 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 in so far 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 connexion 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 connexion 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 meant good report with God, acceptance by God,
response, acknowledgment, 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. viii. 3).
It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But
it is dreadfully re-echoed in another passage of the New Testament.
There we are warned that it may happen to any one 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
fountain-head 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 specialized 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 daily 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 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, civilizations--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.




                                  III
                              _MEMBERSHIP_
       _An address to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius._
                     (_Reprinted from_ Sobornost')


No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which
defines religion as "what a man does with his solitude". It was one of
the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of
solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of
ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the
earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are
members of one another.

In our own age the idea that religion belongs to our private life--that
it is, in fact, an occupation for the individual's hour of leisure--is at
once paradoxical, dangerous, and natural. It is paradoxical because this
exaltation of the individual in the religious field springs up in an age
when collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual in every other
field. I see this even in a University. When I first went to Oxford the
typical undergraduate society consisted of a dozen men, who knew one
another intimately, hearing a paper by one of their own number in a
small sitting-room and hammering out their problem till one or two in
the morning. Before the war the typical undergraduate society had come
to be a mixed audience of one or two hundred students assembled in a
public hall to hear a lecture from some visiting celebrity. Even on
those rare occasions when a modern undergraduate is not attending some
such society he is seldom engaged in those solitary walks, or walks with
a single companion, which built the minds of the previous generations.
He lives in a crowd; caucus has replaced friendship. And this tendency
not only exists both within and without the University, but is often
approved. There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of
ceremonies, whose life is devoted to destroying solitude wherever
solitude still exists. They call it "taking the young people out of
themselves", or "waking them up", or "overcoming their apathy". If an
Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne or a Wordsworth should be born in the
modern world, the leaders of a Youth Organization would soon cure him.
If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the
_Odyssey_ or the Rostovs in _War and Peace_ or any of Charlotte M.
Yonge's families, existed to-day, it would be denounced as _bourgeois_
and every engine of destruction would be levelled against it. And even
where the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself, the
wireless has seen to it that he will be--in a sense not intended by
Scipio--never less alone than when alone. We live, in fact, in a world
starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for
meditation and true friendship.

That religion should be relegated to solitude in such an age is, then,
paradoxical. But it is also dangerous for two reasons. In the first
place, when the modern world says to us aloud, "You may be religious
when you are alone," it adds under its breath, "and I will see to it
that you never are alone." To make Christianity a private affair while
banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the
Greek Calends. That is one of the enemy's stratagems. In the second
place, there is the danger that real Christians who know that
Christianity is not a solitary affair may react against that error by
simply transporting into our spiritual life that same collectivism which
has already conquered our secular life. That is the enemy's other
stratagem. Like a good chess player he is always trying to manoeuvre you
into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your
bishop. In order to avoid the trap we must insist that though the
private conception of Christianity is an error it is a profoundly
natural one, and is clumsily attempting to guard a great truth. Behind
it is the obvious feeling that our modern collectivism is an outrage
upon human nature and that from this, as from all other evils, God will
be our shield and buckler.

This feeling is just. As personal and private life is lower than
participation in the Body of Christ, so the collective life is lower
than the personal and private life and has no value save in its service.
The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for
our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the
family, and friendship, and solitude. To be happy at home, said Johnson,
is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of
natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so
good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends
talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that
interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and
institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes,
are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity
and vexation of spirit. Collective activities are, of course, necessary;
but this is the end to which they are necessary. Great sacrifices of
this private happiness by those who have it may be necessary in order
that it may be more widely distributed. All may have to be a little
hungry in order that none may starve. But do not let us mistake
necessary evils for good. The mistake is easily made. Fruit has to be
tinned if it is to be transported, and has to lose thereby some of its
good qualities. But one meets people who have learned actually to prefer
the tinned fruit to the fresh. A sick society must think much about
politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore
the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if
either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind--if either
forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think
of something else--then what was undertaken for the sake of health has
become itself a new and deadly disease.

There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the
means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve.
Thus money comes to hinder the exchange of commodities, and rules of art
to hamper genius, and examinations to prevent young men from becoming
learned. It does not, unfortunately, always follow that the encroaching
means can be dispensed with. I think it probable that the collectivism
of our life is necessary and will increase; and I think that our only
safeguard against its deathly properties is in a Christian life; for we
were promised that we could handle serpents and drink deadly things and
yet live. That is the truth behind the erroneous definition of religion
with which we started. Where it went wrong was in opposing to the
collective mass mere solitude. The Christian is called, not to
individualism but to membership in the mystical body. A consideration of
the differences between the secular collective and the mystical body is
therefore the first step to understanding how Christianity without being
individualistic can yet counteract collectivism.

At the outset we are hampered by a difficulty of language. The very word
_membership_ is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the
world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the
expression "members of a class". It must be most emphatically stated
that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost
the reverse of what St. Paul meant by _members_. By _members_
[Greek: mel] he meant what we should call _organs_, things essentially
different from, and complementary to, one another: things differing not
only in structure and function but also in dignity. Thus, in a club, the
committee as a whole, and the servants as a whole, may both properly be
regarded as "members"; what we should call the members of the club are
merely units. A row of identically dressed and identically trained
soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a
constituency, are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am
afraid that when we describe a man as "a member of the Church" we
usually mean nothing Pauline: we mean only that he is a unit--that he is
one more specimen of the some kind of thing as X and Y and Z. How true
membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen
in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up
son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic
sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous
class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in
himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter,
she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply
one unit in the class children, he is a separate estate of the realm.
The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the
dog. If you subtract any one member you have not simply reduced the
family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its
unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.

A dim perception of the richness inherent in this kind of unity is one
reason why we enjoy a book like _The Wind in the Willows_; a trio such
as Rat, Mole, and Badger symbolizes the extreme differentiation of
persons in harmonious union which we know intuitively to be our true
refuge both from solitude and from the collective. The affection between
such oddly matched couples as Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, or Mr.
Pickwick and Sam Weller, pleases in the same way. That is why the modern
notion that children should call their parents by their Christian names
is so perverse. For this is an effort to ignore the difference in kind
which makes for real organic unity. They are trying to inoculate the
child with the preposterous view that one's mother is simply a
fellow-citizen like anyone else, to make it ignorant of what all men
know and insensible to what all men feel. They are trying to drag the
featureless repetitions of the collective into the fuller and more
concrete world of the family.

A convict has a number instead of a name. That is the collective idea
carried to its extreme. But a man in his own house may also lose his
name, because he is called simply "Father". That is membership in a
body. The loss of the name in both cases reminds us that there are two
opposite ways of departing from isolation.

The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a
collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body of which the family is an
image on the natural level. If anyone came to it with the misconception
that membership of the Church was membership in a debased modern sense--a
massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters--he would
be corrected at the threshold by the discovery that the Head of this
Body is so unlike the inferior members that they share no predicate with
Him save by analogy. We are summoned from the outset to combine as
creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed
sinners with sinless Redeemer. His presence, the interaction between Him
and us, must always be the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the life we
are to lead within the Body; and any conception of Christian fellowship
which does not mean primarily fellowship with Him is out of court. After
that it seems almost trivial to trace further down the diversity of
operations to the unity of the Spirit. But it is very plainly there.
There are priests divided from the laity, catechumens divided from those
who are in full fellowship. There is authority of husbands over wives
and parents over children. There is, in forms too subtle for official
embodiment, a continual interchange of complementary ministrations. We
are all constantly teaching and learning, forgiving and being forgiven,
representing Christ to man when we intercede, and man to Christ when
others intercede for us. The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily
demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of
personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members
of one another become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why
the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost
fantastic variety of the saints. Obedience is the road to freedom,
humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.

And now I must say something that may appear to you a paradox. You have
often heard that, though in the world we hold different stations, yet we
are all equal in the sight of God. There are of course senses in which
this is true. God is no accepter of persons: His love for us is not
measured by our social rank or our intellectual talents. But I believe
there is a sense in which this maxim is the reverse of the truth. I am
going to venture to say that artificial equality is necessary in the
life of the State, but that in the Church we strip off this disguise, we
recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened.

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for
being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a
share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the
commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false,
romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe
fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any
irresponsible power over his fellows.

That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that
God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over
child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a
part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe
that if we had not fallen Filmer would be right, and patriarchal
monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned
sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that "all power corrupts, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely". The only remedy has been to take
away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The
authority of Father and Husband has been rightly abolished on the legal
plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it
is, I hold, divine in origin) but because Fathers and Husbands are bad.
Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned
priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked
men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to
be interfered with because it is constantly abused.

Equality is for me in the same position as clothes. It is a result of
the Fall and the remedy for it. Any attempt to retrace the steps by
which we have arrived at egalitarianism and to re-introduce the old
authorities on the political level is for me as foolish as it would be
to take off our clothes. The Nazi and the Nudist make the same mistake.
But it is the naked body, still there beneath the clothes of each one of
us, which really lives. It is the hierarchical world, still alive and
(very properly) hidden behind a faade of equal citizenship, which is
our real concern.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of
this egalitarian fiction which is our only defence against one another's
cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to
abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women's Property Act. But the
function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By
treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as
if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But
it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men
are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense--if we mean that
all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining--then it
is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls
then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each
human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because
of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul
considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St.
Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine
but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we
were lovable, but because He is Love. It may be that He loves all
equally--He certainly loved all to the death--and I am not certain what
the expression means. If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.

Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing
of it. Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with
delight are the very lines along which our spirits live. Even in the
life of the affections, much more in the Body of Christ, we step outside
that world which says "I am as good as you." It is like turning from a
march to a dance. It is like taking off our clothes. We become, as
Chesterton said, taller when we bow; we become lowlier when we instruct.
It delights me that there should be moments in the services of my own
Church when the priest stands and I kneel. As democracy becomes more
complete in the outer world and opportunities for reverence are
successively removed, the refreshment, the cleansing, and invigorating
returns to inequality, which the Church offers us, become more and more
necessary.

In this way then, the Christian life defends the single personality from
the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an
organ in the mystical Body. As the book of Revelation says, he is made
"a pillar in the temple of God"; and it adds, "he shall go no more out."
That introduces a new side of our subject. That structural position in
the Church which the humblest Christian occupies is eternal and even
cosmic. The Church will outlive the universe; in it the individual
person will outlive the universe. Everything that is joined to the
immortal Head will share His immortality. We hear little of this from
the Christian pulpit to-day. What has come of our silence may be judged
from the fact that recently addressing the Forces on this subject, I
found that one of my audience regarded this doctrine as "theosophical".
If we do not believe it let us be honest and relegate the Christian
faith to museums. If we do, let us give up the pretence that it makes no
difference. For this is the real answer to every excessive claim made by
the collective. It is mortal; we shall live for ever. There will come a
time when every culture, every institution, every nation, the human
race, all biological life, is extinct, and every one of us is still
alive. Immortality is promised to us, not to these generalities. It was
not for societies or states that Christ died, but for men. In that sense
Christianity must seem to secular collectivists to involve an almost
frantic assertion of individuality. But then it is not the individual as
such who will share Christ's victory over death. We shall share the
victory by being in the Victor. A rejection, or in Scripture's strong
language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to
everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected. That is
just how Christianity cuts across the antithesis between individualism
and collectivism. There lies the maddening ambiguity of our faith as it
must appear to outsiders. It sets its face relentlessly against our
natural individualism; on the other hand, it gives back to those who
abandon individualism an eternal possession of their own personal being,
even of their bodies. As mere biological entities, each with its
separate will to live and to expand, we are apparently of no account; we
are cross-fodder. But as organs in the Body of Christ, as stones and
pillars in the temple, we are assured of our eternal self-identity and
shall live to remember the galaxies as an old tale.

This may be put in another way. Personality is eternal and inviolable.
But then, personality is not a datum from which we start. The
individualism in which we all begin is only a parody or shadow of it.
True personality lies ahead--how far ahead, for most of us, I dare not
say. And the key to it does not lie in ourselves. It will not be
attained by development from within outwards. It will come to us when we
occupy those places in the structure of the eternal cosmos for which we
were designed or invented. As a colour first reveals its true quality
when placed by an excellent artist in its pre-elected spot between
certain others, as a spice reveals its true flavour when inserted just
where and when a good cook wishes among the other ingredients, as the
dog becomes really doggy only when he has taken his place in the
household of man, so we shall then first be true persons when we have
suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting
to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould. No doubt there are
already, even in the unregenerate self, faint hints of what mould each
is designed for, or what sort of pillar he will be. But it is, I think,
a gross exaggeration to picture the saving of a soul as being, normally,
at all like the development from seed to flower. The very words
repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different.
Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected. Our
Lord speaks of eyes being plucked out and hands lopped off--a frankly
Procrustean method of adaptation.

The reason we recoil from this is that we have in our day started by
getting the whole picture upside down. Starting with the doctrine that
every individuality is "of infinite value" we then picture God as a kind
of employment committee whose business it is to find suitable careers
for souls, square holes for square pegs. In fact, however, the value of
the individual does not lie in him. He is capable of receiving value. He
receives it by union with Christ. There is no question of finding for
him a place in the living temple which will do justice to his inherent
value and give scope to his natural idiosyncrasy. The place was there
first. The man was created for it. He will not be himself till he is
there. We shall be true and everlasting and really divine persons only
in Heaven, just as we are, even now, coloured bodies only in the light.

To say this is to repeat what everyone here admits already--that we are
saved by grace, that in our flesh dwells no good thing, that we are,
through and through, creatures not creators, derived beings, living not
of ourselves but from Christ. If I seem to have complicated a simple
matter, you will, I hope, forgive me. I have been anxious to bring out
two points. I have wanted to try to expel that quite unchristian worship
of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern
thought side by side with our collectivism; for one error begets the
opposite error and, far from neutralizing, they aggravate each other. I
mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each
of us starts with a treasure called "Personality" locked up inside him,
and that to expand and express this, to guard it from interference, to
be "original", is the main end of life. This is Pelagian, or worse, and
it defeats even itself. No man who values originality will ever be
original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of
work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call
originality will come unsought. Even on that level, the submission of
the individual to the function is already beginning to bring true
Personality to birth. And secondly, I have wanted to show that
Christianity is not, in the long run, concerned either with individuals
or communities. Neither the individual nor the community as popular
thought understands them can inherit eternal life: neither the natural
self, nor the collective mass, but a new creature.




                                   IV
                         _LEARNING IN WAR-TIME_
    _A sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford,
                             Autumn, 1939_


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 peace-time. 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 tomfoolery. 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.

This indeed is the case with most of us: certainly with me. For that
reason I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true
perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply
aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore
it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human
culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely
more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for
knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have
begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has
never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like
the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of
crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never
been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some
imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But
humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted
knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment
that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but,
significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different
line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the
hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They
propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct
metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds,
discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and
comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not _panache_: it is our nature.

But since we are fallen creatures the fact that this is now our nature
would not, by itself, prove that it is rational or right. We have to
inquire whether there is really any legitimate place for the activities
of the scholar in a world such as this. That is, we have always to
answer the question: "How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to
think about anything but the salvation of human souls?" and we have, at
the moment, to answer the additional question "How can you be so
frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war?" Now part of
our answer will be the same for both questions. The one implies that our
life can, and ought, to become exclusively and explicitly religious: the
other, that it can and ought to become exclusively national. I believe
that our whole life can, and indeed must, become religious in a sense to
be explained later. But if it is meant that all our activities are to be
of the kind that can be recognized as "sacred" and opposed to "secular"
then I would give a single reply to both my imaginary assailants. I
would say, "Whether it ought to happen or not, the thing you are
recommending is not going to happen." Before I became a Christian I do
not think I fully realized that one's life, after conversion, would
inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing
before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things. Before I
went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches
would, in some mysterious sense, be all war. In fact, I found that the
nearer you got to the front line the less every one spoke and thought of
the allied cause and the progress of the campaign; and I am pleased to
find that Tolstoi, in the greatest war book ever written, records the
same thing--and so, in its own way, does the Iliad. Neither conversion
nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life.
Christians and soldiers are still men: the infidel's idea of a religious
life, and the civilian's idea of active service, are fantastic. If you
attempted, in either case, to suspend your whole intellectual and
aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse
cultural life for a better. You are not, in fact, going to read nothing,
either in the Church or in the line: if you don't read good books you
will read bad ones. If you don't go on thinking rationally, you will
think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall
into sensual satisfactions.

There is therefore this analogy between the claims of our religion and
the claims of the war: neither of them, for most of us, will simply
cancel or remove from the slate the merely human life which we were
leading before we entered them. But they will operate in this way for
different reasons. The war will fail to absorb our whole attention
because it is a finite object, and therefore intrinsically unfitted to
support the whole attention of a human soul. In order to avoid
misunderstanding I must here make a few distinctions. I believe our
cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous, and I therefore believe
it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a
religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore
absolute. Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man, and perhaps,
if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn life-saving so as to be ready
for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our
own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in
the sense of giving it his total attention--so that he thought and spoke
of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities
until everyone had learned to swim--he would be a monomaniac. The rescue
of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living
for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include
military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our
country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country.
He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of
a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of
all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

It is for a very different reason that religion cannot occupy the whole
of life in the sense of excluding all our natural activities. For, of
course, in some sense, it must occupy the whole of life. There is no
question of a compromise between the claims of God and the claims of
culture, or politics, or anything else. God's claim is infinite and
inexorable. You can refuse it: or you can begin to try to grant it.
There is no middle way. Yet in spite of this it is clear that
Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St.
Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. He even assumes that
Christians may go to dinner parties, and, what is more, dinner parties
given by pagans. Our Lord attends a wedding and provides miraculous
wine. Under the aegis of His Church, and in the most Christian ages,
learning and the arts flourish. The solution of this paradox is, of
course, well known to you. "Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do,
do all to the glory of God."

All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered
to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be
sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural
life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organization which
exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials. No
doubt, in a given situation, it demands the surrender of some, or of
all, our merely human pursuits: it is better to be saved with one eye,
than, having two, to be cast into Gehenna. But it does this, in a sense,
_per accidens_--because, in those special circumstances, it has ceased to
be possible to practise this or that activity to the glory of God. There
is no essential quarrel between the spiritual life and the human
activities as such. Thus the omnipresence of obedience to God in a
Christian's life is, in a way, analogous to the omnipresence of God in
space. God does not fill space as a body fills it, in the sense that
parts of Him are in different parts of space, excluding other objects
from them. Yet He is everywhere--totally present at every point of
space--according to good theologians.

We are now in a position to answer the view that human culture is an
inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful
responsibilities as we. I reject at once an idea which lingers in the
mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own
right spiritual and meritorious--as though scholars and poets were
intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks. I
think it was Matthew Arnold who first used the English word _spiritual_
in the sense of the German _geistlich_, and so inaugurated this most
dangerous and most anti-Christian error. Let us clear it forever from
our minds. The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become
spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God,
of being done humbly "as to the Lord". This does not, of course, mean
that it is for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should sweep rooms or
compose symphonies. A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must
crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with
his own vocation. A man's upbringing, his talents, his circumstances,
are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent
us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is _prima
facie_ evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to
the glory of God at present is the learned life. By leading that life to
the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our
intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be,
as Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of
a lie. I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their
own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God's
sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God
makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such,
and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are
either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping
others to do so. Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to
concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not too much
concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God.
That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters--for men
who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in
blind and humble obedience to our vocation. This is the teleological
argument that the existence of the impulse and the faculty prove that
they must have a proper function in God's scheme--the argument by which
Thomas Aquinas proves that sexuality would have existed even without the
Fall. The soundness of the argument, as regards culture, is proved by
experience. The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the
safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road
for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure
and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the
_Theologia Germanica_ says, we may come to love knowledge--_our_
knowing--more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our
talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation
they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this
danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work.
The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

That is the essential nature of the learned life as I see it. But it has
indirect values which are especially important to-day. If all the world
were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated.
But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it
exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now--not to be able to
meet the enemies on their own ground--would be to throw down our weapons,
and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence
but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy
must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be
answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect
on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny
intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge
of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we
cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the
present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite
different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the
uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many
places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native
village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some
degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the
press and the microphone of his own age.

The learned life then is, for some, a duty. At the moment it looks as if
it were your duty. I am well aware that there may seem to be an almost
comic discrepancy between the high issues we have been considering and
the immediate task you may be set down to, such as Anglo-Saxon sound
laws or chemical formulae. But there is a similar shock awaiting us in
every vocation--a young priest finds himself involved in choir treats and
a young subaltern in accounting for pots of jam. It is well that it
should be so. It weeds out the vain, windy people and keeps in those who
are both humble and tough. On that kind of difficulty we need waste no
sympathy. But the peculiar difficulty imposed on you by the war is
another matter: and of it I would again repeat, what I have been saying
in one form or another ever since I started--do not let your nerves and
emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it
really is. Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental
exercises which may serve as defences against the three enemies which
war raises up against the scholar.

The first enemy is excitement--the tendency to think and feel about the
war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a
recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really
raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always
plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or
quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and
recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall
always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can
really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those
who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are
still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. There are, of
course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that
only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and
peace. We must do the best we can.

The second enemy is frustration--the feeling that we shall not have time
to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the
longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner,
I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and
theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to
feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle
life, we have to say "No time for that", "Too late now", and "Not for
me". But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more
Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving
futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain
it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit
your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by
the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from
moment to moment "as to the Lord". It is only our _daily_ bread that we
are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any
duty can be done or any grace received.

The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No
man--and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane--need try to
attain a stoic indifference about these things: but we can guard against
the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and
contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But
there is no question of death or life for any of us; only a question of
this death or of that--of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty
years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it
more frequent: 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be
increased. It puts several deaths earlier: but I hardly suppose that
that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make
little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our
chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what
we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering: and a
battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable
prospect of dying with no pain at all. Does it decrease our chances of
dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not
persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of
circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to
remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at
seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death
real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by
most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to
be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were
right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred
in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary
times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We
see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been
living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian
hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were
building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would
turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city
satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too
soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life
of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of
the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty
which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.




                                   V
                            _THE INNER RING_
_The Memorial Oration at King's College, the University of London, 1944_


May I read you a few lines from Tolstoi's _War and Peace_?

  When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old
  general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to
  Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple
  face. "Alright. Please wait!", he said to the general, speaking in
  Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with
  contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the
  general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard,
  while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of
  the head. Boris now clearly understood--what he had already
  guessed--that side by side with the system of discipline and
  subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there
  existed a different and a more real system--the system which compelled
  a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for
  his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere
  second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be
  guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten
  system.--Part III, Chap. 9.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must
conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste
for middle-aged moralizing. I shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in
fact give you advice about the world in which you are going to live. I
do not mean by this that I am going to attempt a talk on what are called
current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as I do. I
am not going to tell you--except in a form so general that you will
hardly recognize it--what part you ought to play in post-war
reconstruction. It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be
able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the
peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting
married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned
than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to
issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial
that no one calls them "current affairs".

And of course every one knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type
warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh,
and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with to-day.
The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and
me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some
quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of
identification. I begin to realize the truth of the old proverb that he
who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh,
you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much
about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say.

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoi, the young second
lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two
different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red
book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A
general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The
other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized
secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you
had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by
anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it
exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you
are inside it. There are what correspond to pass words, but they too are
spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular
nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is
not constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is
inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are
obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line. And if
you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade
Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six
weeks' absence, you may find this second hierarchy quite altered. There
are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it
after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been
allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really
inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders
and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be
designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called "You
and Tony and me". When it is very secure and comparatively stable in
membership it calls itself "we". When it has to be suddenly expanded to
meet a particular emergency it calls itself "All the sensible people at
this place." From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you
call it "That gang" or "They" or "So-and-so and his set" or "the Caucus"
or "the Inner Ring". If you are a candidate for admission you probably
don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would
make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man
who is inside, and who may help you in if this present conversation goes
well, would be madness.

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognized
the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the
Russian Army or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of
an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end
of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by
the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring
there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the
great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is
even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters'
Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the
onion. And here, too, at your university--shall I be wrong in assuming
that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several
rings--independent systems or concentric rings--present in this room? And
I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese,
school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find
the Rings--what Tolstoi calls the second or unwritten systems.

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my
next step, which is this. I believe that in all men's lives at certain
periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and
extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be
inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire,
in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in
literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full
of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that
particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly
understood that "Society", in that sense of the word, is merely one of a
hundred Rings and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be
inside. People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free,
from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil
superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be
the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring
which renders them immune from the allurements of high life. An
invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting
under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communist cterie.
Poor man--it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals
about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little
attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and
the delicious knowledge that we--we four or five all huddled beside this
stove--are the people who _know_. Often the desire conceals itself so
well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not
only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at
the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they
have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are
the only people left in the place who really know how things are run.
But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old
Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers "Look here, we've got to get
you in on this examination somehow" or "Charles and I saw at once that
you've got to be on this committee". A terrible bore . . . ah, but how
much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to
lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't
matter, that is much worse.

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the
sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other
foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not
been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of
the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste
are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know.
They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number who first
smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence
of Inner Rings is an evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be
confidential discussions: and it is not only not a bad thing, it is (in
itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between
those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official
hierarchy of any organization should quite coincide with its actual
workings. If the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the
highest posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be
people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower
positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would
lead you to suppose. In that way the second, unwritten system is bound
to grow up. It is necessary; and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But
the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing
may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be
dangerous. As Byron has said,

  Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet
  The unexpected death of some old lady.

The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an
evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is
not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest
attempt to expedite her departure. Let Inner Rings be an unavoidable and
even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one:
but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded,
and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you
may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first
neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who
might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of
those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask
whether you have ever derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and
humiliation of the outsiders after you yourself were in: whether you
have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders
simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means
whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were
always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question--and it is, of
course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of
your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side
of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in
the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with
satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.

But I said I was going to give advice, and advice should deal with the
future, not the past. I have hinted at the past only to awake you to
what I believe to be the real nature of human life. I don't believe that
the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that
goes on in what we moralists call the World. Even if you add Ambition I
think the picture is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the
longing to be inside, take many forms which are not easily recognizable
as Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every Inner
Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, avoidance of
routine duties, evasion of discipline. But all these would not satisfy
us if we did not get in addition the delicious sense of secret intimacy.
It is no doubt a great convenience to know that we need fear no official
reprimands from our official senior because he is old Percy, a
fellow-member of our Ring. But we don't value the intimacy only for the
sake of the convenience; quite equally we value the convenience as a
proof of the intimacy.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this
desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is
one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it--this
whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft,
disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent
mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures
to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of
your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until
the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing--the
life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if
you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If
you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact
be an "inner ringer". I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as
may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can
never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in--one way
or the other you will be that kind of man.

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not
to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the question. I
will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do.

It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable
too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand,
by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it
is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will
have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room
the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous,
ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will
not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token
of disrespect to your present characters. And the prophecy I make is
this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to
scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours.
Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost
certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a
triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or
woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and
whom you hope to know better still--just at the moment when you are most
anxious not to appear crude, or naif or a prig--the hint will come. It
will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the
technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant,
romantic public, would never understand: something which even the
outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but
something, says your new friend, which "we"--and at the word "we" you try
not to blush for mere pleasure--something "we always do". And you will be
drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but
simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you
cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would
be so terrible to see the other man's face--that genial, confidential,
delightfully sophisticated face--turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to
know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then,
if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further
from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the
jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and
penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes
at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring
is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very
bad things.

My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the
classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is
the symbol not of one vice but of all vices. It is the very mark of a
perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be
inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are
governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying
to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you
conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to
be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason--if, say, you
want to join a musical society because you really like music--then there
is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a
quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know,
your pleasure will be short-lived. The circle cannot have from within
the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has
lost its magic. Once the first novelty is worn off the members of this
circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should
they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or
humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can be really
enjoyed. You merely wanted to be "in". And that is a pleasure that
cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by
custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow's end will
still be ahead of you. The old Ring will now be only the drab background
for your endeavour to enter the new one.

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well
know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next
entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you.
Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a
good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four
people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude
others because there is work only for so many or because the others
can't in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers
because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner
Ring exists for exclusion. There'd be no fun if there were no outsiders.
The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the
wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it.
But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working
hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all
unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters.
You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will
know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the
Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will
not shape that professional policy or work up that professional
influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public:
nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner
Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists
to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which
that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements
cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the
people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a
real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of
something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner
Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its
exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of
the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another
meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle
placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness
in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses
I can't now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the
schoolboy's principle "them as asks shan't have." To a young person,
just entering on adult life, the world seems full of "insides", full of
delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter
them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no "inside" that is
worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is
like the house in _Alice Through the Looking Glass_.






[End of Transposition and other Addresses, by C. S. Lewis]
