Excerpt from A Severe Mercy (1 of 2)

A Severe Mercy is an autobiography by Sheldon Vanauken. While studying at Oxford, he and his wife develop a friendship with C. S. Lewis, under whose influence and with much intellectual scrutiny they accept the Christian doctrine. Here is the first letter to C. S. Lewis and the return letter:

To C. S. Lewis (I)

I write on an impulse—which in the morning may appear so immodest and presumptuous that I shall destroy this. But a few moments ago I felt that I was embarked for a voyage that would someday lead me to God. Even now, five minutes later, I’m inclined to add a qualifying ‘maybe’. There is a leap I cannot make; it occurs to me that you, having made it, having linked certainty with Christianity, might, not do it for me, but might give me a hint of how it’s to be done. Having felt the aesthetic and historical appeal of Christianity, having begun to study it, I have come to awareness of the strength and ‘possibleness’ of the Christian answer. I should like to believe it. I want to know God—if he is knowable. But I cannot pray with any conviction that Someone hears. I can’t believe.

Very simply, it seems to me that some intelligent power made this universe and that all men must know it, axiomatically, and must feel awe at the power’s infiniteness. It seems to me natural that men, knowing and feeling so, should attempt to elaborate on that simplicity—the prophets, the Prince Buddha, the Lord Jesus, Mohammed, the Brahmins—and so arose the world’s religions. But how can just one of them be singled out as true? To an intelligent visitor from Mars, would not Christianity appear to be merely one of a host of religions?

I said at starting that I felt I was treading a long road that would one day lead me to Christianity; I must, then, believe after a fashion that it is the truth. Or is it only that I want to believe it? But at the same time, something else in me says: ‘Wanting to believe is the way to self-deception. Honesty is better than any easy comfort. Have the courage to face the fact that all men may be nothing to the Power that made the suns.’

And yet I would like to believe that the Lord Jesus is in truth my merciful God. For the apostles who could talk to Jesus, it must have been easy. But I live in a ‘real world’ of red buses and nylon stockings and atomic bombs; I have only the record of other? claimed experiences with deity. No angels, no voices, nothing. Or, yes, one thing: living Christians. Somehow you, in this very same world, with the same data as I, are more meaningful to me than the bishops of the faithful past. You accomplished the leap from agnosticism to faith: how? I don’t quite know how I dare write this to you, a busy Oxford don, not a priest. Yet I do know: you serve God, not yourself; you must do, if you’re a Christian. Perhaps, if I had the wit to see it, my answer lies in the fact that I did write.

~Sheldon Vanauken (from A Severe Mercy)

From C. S. Lewis (I)

My own position at the threshold of Xtianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true; I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all that modern stuff about concealed wishes and wishful thinking, however useful it may be for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one’s wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one’s conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides. What I think one can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Xtianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to Him ‘Keep out! Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I v. much doubt whether even you wd. find it simply pleasant. Isn’t the truth this: that it wd. gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and outrage a great many others? So let’s wash out all the wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.

I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion— Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xtianity. Clear, lucid, transparent, simple religion (Tao plus a shadowy, ethical god in the background) is a late development, usually arising among highly educated people in great cities. What you really start with is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death & return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all. The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism & Xtianity: there you get both Metaphysics and Cult (continuous with the primeval cults). That is why my first step was to be sure that one or other of these had the answer. For the reality can’t be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things aren’t like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet—milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics). There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can’t believe, (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough. (c.) The (claimed) fulfilment of these in Hinduism, (d.) The claimed fulfilment of these in Xtianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn’t really join the two strands. Unredeemably savage religion goes on in the village; the Hermit philosophises in the forest: and neither really interferes with the other. It is only Xtianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man? The best popular apologetic I know.

Meanwhile, the attempt to practice the Tao is certainly the right line. Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.’ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans.

I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again, or call, if you think I can be of any help.

~C. S. Lewis (from A Severe Mercy)

See here for more information on the Tao.