C.S. Lewis
Thank God. What a mare’s nest! Or, more grimly, what a rehearsal! It is only twenty-four hours since I got Betty’s wire, and already the crisis seems curiously far away. Like at sea. Once you have doubled the point and got into smooth water, the point doesn’t take long to hide below the horizon.
And now, your letter. I’m not at all surprised at your feeling flattened rather than joyful. That isn’t ingratitude. It’s only exhaustion. Weren’t there moments even during those terrible days when you glided into a sort of apathy—for the same reason? The body (bless it) will not continue indefinitely supplying us with the physical media of emotion.
Surely there’s no difficulty about the prayer in Gethsemane on the ground that if the disciples were asleep they couldn’t have heard it and therefore couldn’t have recorded it? The words they did record would hardly have taken three seconds to utter. He was only “a stone’s throw” away. The silence of night was around them. And we may be sure He prayed aloud. People did everything aloud in those days. You remember how astonished St. Augustine was—some centuries later in a far more sophisticated society—to discover that when St. Ambrose was reading (to himself) you couldn’t hear the words even if you went and stood just beside him? The disciples heard the opening words of the prayer before they went to sleep. They record those opening words as if they were the whole.
There is a rather amusing instance of the same thing in Acts XXIV. The Jews had got down a professional orator called Tertullos to conduct the prosecution of St. Paul. The speech as recorded by St. Luke takes eighty-four words in the Greek, if I’ve counted correctly. Eighty-four words are impossibly short for a Greek advocate on a full-dress occasion. Presumably, then, they are a précis? But of those eighty-odd words forty are taken up with preliminary compliments to the bench—stuff, which, in a précis on that tiny scale, ought not to have come in at all. It is easy to guess what has happened. St. Luke, though an excellent narrator, was no good as a reporter. He starts off by trying to memorise, or to get down, the whole speech verbatim. And he succeeds in reproducing a certain amount of the exordium (The style unmistakable. Only a practising rhetor ever talks that way). But he is soon defeated. The whole of the rest of the speech has to be represented by a ludicrously inadequate abstract. But he doesn’t tell us what has happened, and thus seems to attribute to Tertullos a performance which would have spelled professional ruin.
As you say, the problems about prayer which really press upon a man when he is praying for dear life are not the general and philosophical ones; they are those that arise within Christianity itself. At least, this is so for you and me. We have long since agreed that if our prayers are granted at all they are granted from the foundation of the world. God and His acts are not in time. Intercourse between God and man occurs at particular moments for the man, but not for God. If there is—as the very concept of prayer presupposes—an adaptation between the free actions of men in prayer and the course of events, this adaptation is from the beginning inherent in the great single creative act. Our prayers are heard—don’t say “have been heard” or you are putting God into time—not only before we make them but before we are made ourselves.
The real problems are different. Is it our faith that prayers, or some prayers, are real causes? But they are not magical causes: they don’t, like spells, act directly on nature. They act, then, on nature through God? This would seem to imply that they act on God. But God, we believe, is impassible. All theology would reject the idea of a transaction in which a creature was the agent and God the patient.
It is quite useless to try to answer this empirically by producing stories—though you and I could tell strange ones—of striking answers to prayer. We shall be told, reasonably enough, that post hoc is not propter hoc. The thing we prayed for was going to happen anyway. Our action was irrelevant. Even a fellow-creature’s action which fulfils our request may not be caused by it; he does what we ask, but perhaps he would equally have done so without our asking. Some cynics will tell us that no woman ever married a man because he proposed to her: she always elicits the proposal because she has determined to marry him.
In these human instances we believe, when we do believe, that our request was the cause, or a cause, of the other party’s action, because we have from deep acquaintance a certain impression of that party’s character. Certainly not by applying the scientific procedures—control experiments, etc.—for establishing causes. Similarly we believe, when we do believe, that the relation between our prayer and the event is not a mere coincidence only because we have a certain idea of God’s character. Only faith vouches for the connection. No empirical proof could establish it. Even a miracle, if one occurred, “might have been going to happen anyway.”
Again, in the most intimate human instances we really feel that the category of cause and effect will not contain what actually happens. In a real “proposal”—as distinct from one in an old-fashioned novel—is there any agent-patient relation? Which drop on the window pane moves to join the other?
Now I am going to suggest that strictly causal thinking is even more inadequate when applied to the relation between God and man. I don’t mean only when we are thinking of prayer, but whenever we are thinking about what happens at the Frontier, at the mysterious point of junction and separation where absolute being utters derivative being.
One attempt to define causally what happens there has led to the whole puzzle about Grace and free will. You will notice that Scripture just sails over the problem. “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling”—pure Pelagianism. But why? “For it is God who worketh in you”—pure Augustinianism. It is presumably only our presuppositions that make this appear nonsensical. We profanely assume that divine and human action exclude one another like the actions of two fellow-creatures so that “God did this” and “I did this” cannot both be true of the same act except in the sense that each contributed a share.
In the end we must admit a two-way traffic at the junction. At first sight no passive verb in the world would seem to be so utterly passive as “to be created”. Does it not mean “to have been nonentity”? Yet, for us rational creatures, to be created also means “to be made agents”. We have nothing that we have not received; but part of what we have received is the power of being something more than receptacles. We exercise it, no doubt, chiefly by our sins. But they, for my present argument, will do as well as anything else. For God forgives sins. He would not do so if we committed none—“whereto serves Mercy but to confront the visage of offence?” In that sense the Divine action is consequent upon, conditioned by, elicited by, our behaviour. Does this mean that we can “act upon” God? I suppose you could put it that way if you wanted. If you do, then we must interpret His “impassibility” in a way which admits this; for we know that God forgives much better than we know what “impassible” means. I would rather say that from before all worlds His providential and creative act (for they are all one) takes into account all the situations produced by the acts of His creatures. And if He takes our sins into account, why not our petitions?