C.S. Lewis
I plead guilty. When I was writing about pleasures last week I had quite forgotten about the mala mentis gaudia—the pleasures of the mind which are intrinsically evil. The pleasure, say, of having a grievance. What a disappointment it is—for one self-revealing moment—to discover that the other party was not really to blame? And how a resentment, while it lasts, draws one back and back to nurse and fondle and encourage it! It behaves just like a lust. But I don’t think this leaves my theory (and experience) of ordinary pleasures in ruins. Aren’t these intrinsically vicious pleasures, as Plato said, “mixed”. To use his own image, given the itch, one wants to scratch it. And if you abstain, the temptation is very severe, and if you scratch there is a sort of pleasure in the momentary and deceptive relief. But one didn’t want to itch. The scratch is not a pleasure simply, but only by comparison with the context. In the same way, resentment is pleasant only as a relief from, or alternative to, humiliation. I still think that those experiences which are pleasures in their own right can all be regarded as I suggest.
The mere mention of the horrible pleasures—the dainties of Hell—very naturally led you away from the subject of adoration to that of repentance. I’m going to follow you into your digression, for you said something I disagreed with.
I admit of course, that penitential prayers—“acts” of penitence, as I believe they are called—can be on very different levels. At the lowest, what you call “Pagan penitence”, there is simply the attempt to placate a supposedly angry power—“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Let me off this time.” At the highest level, you say, the attempt is rather to restore an infinitely valued and vulnerable personal relation which has been shattered by an action of one’s own, and if forgiveness, in the “crude” sense of remission of penalty, comes in, this is valued chiefly as a symptom or seal or even by-product of the reconciliation. I expect you are right about that. I say “expect” because I can’t claim to know much by experience about the highest level either of penitence or of anything else. The ceiling, if there is one, is a long way off.
All the same, there is a difference between us. I can’t agree to call your lowest level “Pagan penitence”. Doesn’t your description cover a great deal of Old Testament penitence? Look at the Psalms. Doesn’t it cover a good deal of Christian penitence—a good deal that is embodied in Christian liturgies? “Neither take thou vengeance for our sins . . . be not angry with us forever . . . neque secundum iniquitates nostras retribuas nobis.”
Here, as nearly always, what we regard as “crude” and “low”, and what presumably is in fact lowest, spreads far further up the Christian life than we like to admit. And do we find anywhere in Scripture or in the Fathers that explicit and resounding rejection of it which would be so welcome?
I fully grant you that “wrath” can be attributed to God only by an analogy. The situation of the penitent before God isn’t, but is somehow like, that of one appearing before a justly angered sovereign, lover, father, master, or teacher. But what more can we know about it than just this likeness? Trying to get in behind the analogy, you go further and fare worse. You suggest that what is traditionally regarded as our experience of God’s anger would be more helpfully regarded as what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power. As you say, “The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.”
My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can’t.
And you give as your reason that “even by analogy the sort of pardon which arises because a fit of temper is spent cannot worthily be attributed to God nor gratefully accepted by man.” But the belittling words “fit of temper” are your own choice. Think of the fullest reconciliation between mortals. Is cool disapproval coolly assuaged? Is the culprit let down lightly in a view of “extenuating circumstances”? Was peace restored by a moral lecture? Was the offence said not to “matter”? Was it hushed up or passed over? Blake knew better:
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath. My wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I hid my wrath. My wrath did grow.
You too know better. Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. The angers, not the measured remonstrances, of lovers are love’s renewal. Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy—the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships. All the liberalising and “civilising” analogies only lead us astray. Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into mere humanitarianism. The “consuming fire” and the “perfect beauty” both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. It comes of being high-minded.
I know that “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” That is not because wrath is wrath but because man is (fallen) man.
But perhaps I’ve already said too much. All that any imagery can do is to facilitate, or at least not to impede, man’s act of penitence and reception of pardon. We cannot see the matter “from God’s side.”
The crude picture of penitence as something like apology or even placation has, for me, the value of making penitence an act. The more high-minded views involve some danger of regarding it simply as a state of feeling. Do you agree that this would be unwholesome?
The question is before my mind at present because I’ve been reading Alexander Whyte. Morris lent him to me. He was a Presbyterian divine of the last century, whom I’d never heard of. Very well worth reading, and strangely broad-minded—Dante, Pascal, and even Newman, are among his heroes. But I mention him at the moment for a different reason. He brought me violently face to face with a characteristic of Puritanism which I had almost forgotten. For him, one essential symptom of the regenerate life is a permanent, and permanently horrified, perception of one’s natural and (it seems) unalterable corruption. The true Christian’s nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cess-pool. I knew that the experience was a regular feature of the old conversion stories. As in Grace Abounding: “But my inward and original corruption . . . that I had the guilt of to amazement . . . I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad . . . sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain.” Another author, quoted in Haller’s Rise of Puritanism says that when he looked into his heart, it was “as if I had in the heat of summer lookt down into the Filth of a Dungeon, where I discerned Millions of crawling living things in the midst of that Sink and liquid Corruption.”
I won’t listen to those who describe that vision as merely pathological. I have seen the “slimy things that crawled with legs” in my own dungeon. I thought the glimpse taught me sense. But Whyte seems to think it should be not a glimpse but a daily, lifelong scrutiny. Can he be right? It sounds so very unlike the New Testament fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace. And very unlike the Pauline programme; “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things that are before.” And very unlike St. François de Sales’ green, dewy chapter on la douceur towards one’s self. Anyway, what’s the use of laying down a programme of permanent emotions? They can be permanent only by being factitious.
What do you think? I know that a spiritual emetic, at the right moment, may be needed. But not a regular diet of emetics! If one survived, one would develop a “tolerance” of them. This poring over the “sink” might breed its own perverse pride
over-just and self-displeased
For self-offence more than for God offended.
Anyway, in solitude, and also in confession, I have found (to my regret) that the degrees of shame and disgust which I actually feel at my own sins do not at all correspond to what my reason tells me about their comparative gravity. Just as the degree to which, in daily life, I feel the emotion of fear has very little to do with my rational judgment of the danger. I’d sooner have really nasty seas when I’m in an open boat than look down in perfect (actual) safety from the edge of a cliff. Similarly, I have confessed ghastly uncharities with less reluctance than small unmentionables—or those sins which happen to be ungentlemanly as well as un-Christian. Our emotional reactions to our own behaviour are of limited ethical significance.