[Stamford House, Chipping Campden]
Your'Religious Drama: Mediæval and Modern';a5 letter was very welcome on my return from Rochester – where I had a happy visit – and I only regretted that I had not had the opportunity of writing first myself, and regret that I did not write yesterday. I had manuscripts to read, and still have, before I go away again, and slumbered for a good deal of Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and last night felt too sleepy to be able to indite a readable letter to anybody. I am glad that you sensibly took a day in bed. Buttravels, trips and plansEH's 1937 summer in England;c7TSE's 17–22 July Campden visit;b2 please do not think too much of when and when not to begin serious conversations – though certainly I feel that I can do better by you in the mornings, when there is a quiet corner of the garden available: for the transference of a town-dweller into country air and country life is apt to make him exceedingly sleepy in the evening, and therefore not intellectually very satisfying. And let us not speak of ‘patience’ ever. YouHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9as perpetual progress and revelation;c1 are unaware of how much you give me; and indeed I think that what we give each other is something that cannot be formulated, because it has been constantly in change;1 and I feel that this year everything has entered into a new phase, in which the reciprocity goes a good deal deeper, to a level at which one cannot say who is responsible for what. But I suppose it will always seem to each of us that we receive more than we give.2
The visit was a very happy one – the happiest I have had yet. Itravels, trips and plansEH's 1937 summer in England;c7TSE's 21 August Campden visit;b3 wait impatiently for the 21st – the more so because I shall be away for so much of the interval. At least, when I am here, I can feel that I could run down to Gloucestershire at any time, or that you could run up: but to be visiting other people is to be definitely cut off for so long as the visit lasts. But we have always to learn what is never completely learnt, to take the longest view of things – so far as one can, that helps to be patient.
TheHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1source of worry to EH;b1 book you want – I do not know whether such a book exists – one gets something from many books, and from different books at different moments, and books put into one’s hands are seldom just what one wants at the moment. It seems to me that you want, at present, not so much books directed at individual purification, discipline and improvement – you have such strong tendencies in those directions anyway, and a tendency to regard yourself as a miserable sinner, and to make the path of development seem as difficult to yourself as possible, that your spiritual temptation is most likely to be that of discouragement and even despair – and despair is perhaps the deadliest of the sins. ISt. Paulas saint;a4 do not say that these tendencies are to be repressed simply, because they seem to have been essential in some of the greatest saints from St. Paul on: but they need to be counterbalanced. TheHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1compared to TSE's;a5 notionChristianityUnitarianism;d9versus the Visible and Invisible Church;b4 ofChristianityChristendom;b2the Church Visible and Invisible;a4 the Church as the visible Body of Christ,3 and of the common spiritual life in the act of worship, is one that I should like to stress all the more because it is not very operative in Unitarianism, which represents rather periodic assemblages of well-intentioned people of similar social background. It’s the life of the Church in which one participates in worship, a life of the spirit inaccessible to the separated individual, however ‘sociable’ or regular in attendance at public devotions, that I want to stress – a life which is not merely a set of high-sounding words, but something really felt: that’s what I want to stress. One can overdo individual effort: duty is only a means, and joy is the end. But at the moment I can’t think of any one right book!
I shall write again before I go away, and shall write briefly (with no typewriter) while away, and will return with gladness to this room and this typewriter to write again before I come.
But on the other hand, one has to learn a critical attitude towards every other human being as well! It’s just laziness to assume that I or anybody else is right – however you come by them, you have to make convictions of your own.
1.Cf. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘And I have known the eyes already, known them all – / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin …’
2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘O Lady, we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live: / Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!’. Cf. TSE, ‘Portrait of a Lady’: ‘But what have I, but what have I, my friend, / To give you, what can you receive from me?’
3.Nicene Creed: ‘We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.’ Colossians 1: 16: ‘For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible …’; 1: 15: ‘Christ is the visible representation of the invisible God, the Firstborn and Lord of all creation …’
InChristianityChristendom;b2the Church Visible and Invisible;a4religion, religious beliefs
TSE, ‘Parliament and the New Prayer Book’, New Adelphi, June 1928, 346: ‘The Church of England is not a visible Church of communicants, but a wholly invisible Church of shy schoolboys.’ New English Weekly, 9 Apr. 1936, 523: ‘The Church, we might remember, consists not only of the living but of the dead … Would the Apostolic Succession be more genuine, the Sacraments more valid, if the visible Church were all that we should like it to be?’ Reunion by Destruction (1943), 12–13: ‘In one use of the word, it means the “visible Church” founded by Jesus Christ and living continuously since its foundation […] In another use, it means “the invisible Church”, consisting of all true believers, living and dead and to come […] Those who use the term exclusively in the second sense, tend to think of the visible churches rather as societies or associations, of a voluntary nature […] But for those to whom the first meaning is paramount, the Church is something that lives: as a tree may be encumbered by parasites, warped and mutilated by tempest, crippled by disease, so the Church lives, sustained by the Holy Ghost, Who causes the sap to flow through its living limbs?’ TSE to Geoffrey Curtis, 1 May 1944: ‘I was struck by your criticism of the depreciation of the Invisible Church by the Romans: I should like to see you pursue this further.’