This applies especially to the devotional life. Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away. They think—sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always—that their sins account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days. But were those fervours—the operative word is those—ever intended to last?
It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.
And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. ‘Unless a seed die . . .’
I expect we all do much the same with the prayer for our daily bread. It means, doesn’t it, all we need for the day—‘things requisite and necessary as well for the body as for the soul’. I should hate to make this clause ‘purely religious’ by thinking of ‘spiritual’ needs alone. One of its uses, to me, is to remind us daily that what Burnaby calls the naïf view of prayer is firmly built into Our Lord’s teaching.
Forgive us . . . as we forgive. Unfortunately there’s no need to do any festooning here. To forgive for the moment is not difficult. But to go on forgiving, to forgive the same offence again every time it recurs to the memory—there’s the real tussle. My resource is to look for some action of my own which is open to the same charge as the one I’m resenting. If I still smart to remember how A let me down, I must still remember how I let B down. If I find it difficult to forgive those who bullied me at school, let me, at that very moment, remember, and pray for, those I bullied. (Not that we called it bullying of course. That is where prayer without words can be so useful. In it there are no names; therefore no aliases.)
I was never worried myself by the words lead us not into temptation, but a great many of my correspondents are. The words suggest to them what someone has called ‘a fiend-like conception of God’, as one who first forbids us certain fruits and then lures us to taste them. But the Greek word means ‘trial’—‘trying circumstances’—of every sort; a far larger word than English ‘temptation’. So that the petition essentially is, ‘Make straight our paths. Spare us, where possible, from all crises, whether of temptation or affliction.’ By the way, you yourself, though you’ve doubtless forgotten it, gave me an excellent gloss on it: years ago in the pub at Coton. You said it added a sort of reservation to all our preceding prayers. As if we said, ‘In my ignorance I have asked for A, B, and C. But don’t give me them if you foresee that they would in reality be to me either snares or sorrows.’ And you quoted Juvenal, numinibus vota exaudita malignis, ‘enormous prayers which heaven in vengeance grants’. For we make plenty of such prayers. If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?
I don’t often use the kingdom, the power, and the glory. When I do, I have an idea of the kingdom as sovereignty de jure; God, as good, would have a claim on my obedience even if He had no power. The power is the sovereignty de facto—He is omnipotent. And the glory is—well, the glory; the ‘beauty so old and new’, the ‘light from behind the sun’.
VI
I can’t remember exactly what I said about not making the petition for our daily bread too ‘religious’, and I’m not quite sure what you mean—nor how ironically—by asking if I’ve become ‘one of Vidler’s young men’!
About Vidler. I never heard the programme which created all that scandal, and naturally one wouldn’t condemn a dog on newspaper extracts. But I have now read his essay in Soundings and I believe I go a good deal further with him than you would. Much of what he quotes from F. D. Maurice and Bonhoeffer seems to me very good; and so, I think, are his own arguments for the Establishment.
At any rate I can well understand how a man who is trying to love God and his neighbour should come to dislike the very word religion; a word, by the way, which hardly ever appears in the New Testament. Newman makes my blood run cold, when he says in one of the Parochial and Plain Sermons that Heaven is like a church because in both, ‘one single sovereign subject—religion—is brought before us’. He forgets that there is no temple in the new Jerusalem.
He has substituted religion for God—as if navigation were substituted for arrival, or battle for victory, or wooing for marriage, or in general the means for the end. But even in this present life, there is danger in the very concept of religion. It carries the suggestion that this is one more department of life, an extra department added to the economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the rest. But that whose claims are infinite can have no standing as a department. Either it is an illusion or else our whole life falls under it. We have no non-religious activities; only religious and irreligious.
Religion, nevertheless, appears to exist as a department, and, in some ages, to thrive as such. It thrives partly because there exists in many people a ‘love of religious observances’, which I think Simone Weil is quite right in regarding as a merely natural taste. There exists also—Vidler is rather good on this—the delight in religious (as in any other) organisation. Then all sorts of aesthetic, sentimental, historical, political interests are drawn in. Finally sales of work, the parish magazine, and bell-ringing, and Santa Claus.
None of them bad things. But none of them is necessarily of more spiritual value than the activities we call secular. And they are infinitely dangerous when this is not understood. This department of life, labelled ‘sacred’, can become an end in itself; an idol that hides both God and my neighbours. (‘When the means are autonomous they are deadly.’) It may even come about that a man’s most genuinely Christian actions fall entirely outside that part of his life which he calls religious.
I read in a religious paper, ‘Nothing is more important than to teach children to use the sign of the cross.’ Nothing? Not compassion, nor veracity, nor justice? Voilà l’ennemi.
One must, however, walk warily, for the truth that religion as a department has really no right to exist can be misunderstood. Some will conclude that this illegitimate department ought to be abolished. Others will think, coming nearer to the truth, that it ought to cease to be departmental by being extended to the whole of life, but will misinterpret this. They will think it means that more and more of our secular transactions should be ‘opened with prayer’, that a wearisomely explicit pietism should infest our talk, that there should be no more cakes and ale. A third sort, well aware that God still rules a very small part of their lives, and that ‘a departmental religion’ is no good, may despair. It would have to be carefully explained to them that to be ‘still only a part’ is not the same as being a permanent department. In all of us God ‘still’ holds only a part. D-Day is only a week ago. The bite so far taken out of Normandy shows small on the map of Europe. The resistance is strong, the casualties heavy, and the event uncertain. There is, we have to admit, a line of demarcation between God’s part in us and the enemy’s region. But it is, we hope, a fighting line; not a frontier fixed by agreement.
But I suspect the real misunderstanding of Vidler’s talk lay elsewhere. We have been speaking of religion as a pattern of behaviour—which, if contentedly departmental, cannot really be Christian behaviour. But people also, and more often, use religion to mean a system of beliefs. When they heard that Vidler wanted a church with ‘less religion’, they thought he meant that the little—the very little—which liberal theology has still left of the ‘faith once given’ was to be emptied out. Hence someone asked, ‘Is he a Theist
?’
Well, he certainly is. He wants—I think he wants very earnestly—to retain some Christian doctrines. But he is prepared to scrap a good deal. ‘Traditional doctrines’ are to be tested. Many things will have to be ‘outgrown’ or ‘survive chiefly as venerable archaisms or as fairy-stories’. He feels quite happy about this undefined programme of jettison because he trusts in the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit. A noble faith; provided, of course, there is any such being as the Holy Spirit. But I suppose His existence is itself one of the ‘traditional doctrines’ which, on Vidler’s premises, we might any day find we had outgrown. So with the doctrine—Vidler calls it ‘the fact’—that man is ‘a two-fold creature—not only a political creature, but also a spiritual being’. Vidler and you and I (and Plato) think it a fact. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, think it a fantasy. The neutral description of it is ‘a traditional doctrine’. Do you think he means that these two doctrines—and why just these two?—are the hard core of his belief, exempt from the threat of rejection which overhangs all other doctrines? Or would he say that, as the title of the book implies, he is only ‘taking soundings’—and if the line is not long enough to reach bottom, soundings can yield only negative information to the navigator?
I was interested in the things you said about forgive us our trespasses. Often, to be sure, there is something definite for which to ask forgiveness. This is plain sailing. But, like you, I often find one or other of two less manageable states: either a vague feeling of guilt or a sly, and equally vague, self-approval. What are we to do with these?
Many modern psychologists tell us always to distrust this vague feeling of guilt, as something purely pathological. And if they had stopped at that, I might believe them. But when they go on, as some do, to apply the same treatment to all guilt-feelings whatever, to suggest that one’s feeling about a particular unkind act or a particular insincerity is also and equally untrustworthy—I can’t help thinking they are talking nonsense. One sees this the moment one looks at other people. I have talked to some who felt guilt when they jolly well ought to have felt it; they have behaved like brutes and know it. I’ve also met others who felt guilty and weren’t guilty by any standard I can apply. And thirdly, I’ve met people who were guilty and didn’t seem to feel guilt. And isn’t this what we should expect? People can be malades imaginaires who are well and think they are ill; and others, especially consumptives, are ill and think they are well; and thirdly—far the largest class—people are ill and know they are ill. It would be very odd if there were any region in which all mistakes were in one direction.
Some Christians would tell us to go on rummaging and scratching till we find something specific. We may be sure, they say, that there are real sins enough to justify the guilt-feeling or to overthrow the feeling that all is well. I think they are right in saying that if we hunt long enough we shall find, or think we have found, something. But that is just what wakens suspicion. A theory which could never by any experience be falsified can for that reason hardly be verified. And just as, when we are yielding to temptation, we make ourselves believe that what we have always thought a sin will on this occasion, for some strange reason, not be a sin, shan’t we persuade ourselves that something we have always (rightly) thought to be innocent was really wrong? We may create scruples. And scruples are always a bad thing—if only because they usually distract us from real duties.
I don’t at all know whether I’m right or not, but I have, on the whole, come to the conclusion that one can’t directly do anything about either feeling. One is not to believe either—indeed, how can one believe a fog? I come back to St John: ‘if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.’ And equally, if our heart flatter us, God is greater than our heart. I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self-knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
Have we any reason to suppose that total self-knowledge, if it were given us, would be for our good? Children and fools, we are told, should never look at half-done work; and we are not yet, I trust, even half-done. You and I wouldn’t, at all stages, think it wise to tell a pupil exactly what we thought of his quality. It is much more important that he should know what to do next.
If one said this in public one would have all the Freudians on one’s back. And, mind you, we are greatly indebted to them. They did expose the cowardly evasions of really useful self-knowledge which we had all been practising from the beginning of the world. But there is also a merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one’s self—the slop-over from modern psychology—which surely does no good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis doesn’t cure that. We all know people who have undergone it and seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research ever since.
If I am right, the conclusion is that when our conscience won’t come down to brass tacks but will only vaguely accuse or vaguely approve, we must say to it, like Herbert, ‘Peace, prattler’—and get on.
VII
If you meant in your last letter that we can scrap the whole idea of petitionary prayer—prayer which, as you put it, calls upon God to ‘engineer’ particular events in the objective world—and confine ourselves to acts of penitence and adoration, I disagree with you. It may be true that Christianity would be, intellectually, a far easier religion if it told us to do this. And I can understand the people who think it would also be a more high-minded religion. But remember the psalm: ‘Lord, I am not high minded.’ Or better still, remember the New Testament. The most unblushingly petitionary prayers are there recommended to us both by precept and example. Our Lord in Gethsemane made a petitionary prayer (and did not get what He asked for).
You’ll remind me that He asked with a reservation—‘nevertheless, not my will but thine’. This makes an enormous difference. But the difference which it precisely does not make is that of removing the prayer’s petitionary character. When poor Bill, on a famous occasion, asked us to advance him £100, he said, ‘If you are sure you can spare it,’ and, ‘I shall quite understand if you’d rather not.’ This made his request very different from the nagging or even threatening request which a different sort of man might have made. But it was still a request.
The servant is not greater, and must not be more high-minded, than the master. Whatever the theoretical difficulties are, we must continue to make requests of God. And on this point we can get no help from those who keep on reminding us that this is the lowest and least essential kind of prayer. They may be right; but so what? Diamonds are more precious than cairngorms, but the cairngorms still exist and must be taken into account like anything else.
But don’t let us be too easily brow-beaten. Some of the popular objections to petitionary prayer, if they are valid against it, are equally valid against other things which we all do whether we are Christians or not, and have done ever since the world began, and shall certainly continue to do. I don’t think the burden of answering these rests especially on us.
There is, for example, the Determinism which, whether under that name or another, seems to be implicit in a scientific view of the world. Determinism does not deny the existence of human behaviour. It rejects as an illusion our spontaneous conviction that our behaviour has its ultimate origin in ourselves. What I call ‘my act’ is the conduit-pipe through which the torrent of the universal process passes, and was bound to pass, at a particular time and place. The distinction between what we call the ‘voluntary’ and the ‘involuntary’ movements of our own bodies is not obliterated, but turns out (on this view) to be not exactly the sort of difference we supposed. What I call the ‘involuntary’ movements necessarily—and, if we know enough, predictably—result from mechanical causes outside my body or from pathological or organic processes within it. The ‘voluntary’ ones result from conscious psychological factors which themselves result from unconscious psychological factors dependent on my economic situation, my i
nfantile and prenatal experience, my heredity . . . and so on back to the beginnings of organic life and beyond. I am a conductor, not a source. I never make an original contribution to the world-process. I move with that process not even as a floating log moves with the river but as a particular pint of the water itself moves.
But even those who believe this will, like anyone else, ask you to hand them the salt. Every form of behaviour, including speech, can go on just the same, and will. If a strict Determinist believed in God (and I think he might) petitionary prayer would be no more irrational in him than in anyone else.
Another argument, put up (but not accepted) by Burnaby in Soundings, is this. If man’s freedom is to be of any value, if he is to have any power of planning and of adapting means to ends, he must live in a predictable world. But if God alters the course of events in answer to prayer, then the world will be unpredictable. Therefore, if man is to be effectively free, God must be in this respect un-free.
But is it not plain that this predictable world, whether it is necessary to our freedom or no, is not the world we live in? This is a world of bets and insurance policies, of hopes and anxieties, where ‘nothing is certain but the unexpected’ and prudence lies in ‘the masterly administration of the unforeseen’. Nearly all the things people pray about are unpredictable: the result of a battle or an operation, the losing or getting of a job, the reciprocation of a love. We don’t pray about eclipses.
But, you will reply, we once did. Every advance of science makes predictable something that was formerly unpredictable. It is only our ignorance that makes petitionary prayer possible. Would it not be rational to assume that all those events we now pray about are in principle just as predictable—though we don’t yet know enough to predict them—as things like eclipses? But that is no answer to the point I’m making. I am not now trying to refute Determinism. I am only arguing that a world where the future is unknown cannot be inconsistent with planned and purposive action since we are actually planning and purposing in such a world now and have been doing so for thousands of years.