Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 12

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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C.S. Lewis and Hans von Balthasar

Lesson Transcript

It may seem rather incongruous to bring, as our last session on prayer, the prayer life of C.S. Lewis and of Hans von Balthasar. One is, of course, very simple, very ordinary, and the other is dense. And the great classic that I’ve already refereed to you by von Balthasar on prayer will be a companion no doubt for the rest of your life; whereas, you don’t think of Lewis as giving you much to be inspired about with his prayer life. But then that’s who we are. Sometimes very ordinary people, as he once said himself: I’m just a mere Christian; I’m neither very high, nor am I very low; I’m a man of the foothills. And, of course, he was putting a play on that and thinking of the difference between those who were High Church and those who were Low Church and he felt he was somewhere in the middle.

The thing that brings them together is, of course, they’re almost from the same generation: Lewis was born in 1896 and von Balthasar was born in 1905. But Lewis, sadly, only lived a short life. Probably it was his habit of smoking and it was a generation where there was not long life because of people that smoked so much and he was an inveterate smoker all through his life. And on the other hand, von Balthasar lived to a ripe old age and dying in 1988.

The Lewis I’m going to talk about is talking about him more colloquially from my own privileged knowledge of him as well as some of the simple things that he writes about prayer. And of course, some of the places that he writes about prayer that you wouldn’t expect to find it is he has some things to say about prayer in Mere Christianity, which has become a classic. He also writes about prayer in his Screwtape Letters because there he’s practically showing how the tempter would want us to be distracted or sabotaged in our prayer life. And so there’s no profound text that Lewis has to speak about prayer. But as we’ve said all along, it’s our childhood upbringing that can profoundly affect us about our prayer life.

Let me explain what my own ruminations have been about this. I did write a small monogram, a long article, some years ago on Lewis’ prayer life, but as far as I’m concerned it’s long forgotten, but you could look it up if you want to see in more detail what I’m describing in this class. Lewis was nine years old when his mother died. And the background was that she came from not a full-blooded aristocracy, but she had blue blood in her; whereas, her husband was just an ordinary guy from Belfast. And he became a lawyer and so he had upward mobility and she was releasing all mobility. That’s the difference in the dynamics between the husband and wife. And Lewis loved his mother. She was gentle and, of course, she had no sense or need of self-importance; whereas, his father needed self-importance. And often that, of course, creates dynamics that are emotionally wounding for a child growing up and we see this in what followed in Lewis’ education.

[00:04:52]

He said when my mother died it was as if the continent of Atlantis had slipped under the waves and now I was stranded on a dark, heaving ocean. He was bereft. And I don’t think he ever recovered from that. And his father now as a widower with two sons, Warnie was his older brother and they were thrown into each other’s arms to look after each other because they really weren’t fathered. And that’s why the vivid imagination of Lewis then started to, when they started playing together and exercising their imagination up in the attic of the house—a big house in Belfast in those days—but there you find his wardrobe that has been competed for by both Wheaton College and Westmont. They each have the wardrobe and you can ask which one do we find the Narnia tales coming from. And so it’s really become evidence that evangelicals have religious relics as well, not just the medieval saints. It’s really very comical. Anyway, I’m mischievous.

Lewis, as a small boy and, of course, like Augustine, is showing a bit of devilry and so they’re stealing apples from the orchard. And the father brings them on the carpet and he forgets that he’s a father speaking to small boys. He’d had aspirations to leave the legal profession and become a member of the House of Commons representing Belfast. He never did. But quoting Burke and other great authorities as parliamentarians use for their speeches, he began to give a speech to these small boys on the carpet. Well, of course, they thought dad’s forgotten all about us and so off they slink and father suddenly realises they’re disappearing and he’s got no audience, rose like a bull and brings them back to attention. Well, you can see the pathos of this.

And the tragedy is that for a nine-year-old boy, his father with snobbery wanted them not to have the Irish accent of Belfast, he wanted them to have a proper accent like their mother and so he looks up a catalogue of what are the cheapest private schools in England and he finds one that’s the cheapest. As Lewis was to say bitterly later, those first three years when a week after my mother’s death I was sent 1,000 miles away to this Belsen, because the headmaster actually was deranged and the school was closed down three years later and he was put into a lunatic asylum, and so Lewis says those were my years of Belsen. It’s not a very good start for a life that he was to develop later, as he did.

[00:08:51]

The school that they were then sent to, rather reluctantly, was more expensive, but at least it was a decent school: Marlborough. And so for the rest of his time at Marlborough, he had a decent time. But there were masochistic attitudes within his teenage years that were all the result of that total disruption of his earlier life. And then when he was 16 and his father wanted to prepare him to go into university, he then sent him to a kindly tutor to be privately schooled and prepared for university. And he was tutored by an atheist, so there again you get a conflict of a kindly man, but is now destroying the faith of a teenager.

And then comes the war. And in those days, in World War I, young people of education or nobility were immediately trained as officers without considering whether they had the capacity to be an officer. He was rushed, at the age of 17, through his training in three months and then sent to the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It’s an interesting study to see who were the survivors that have changed English literature from the Battle of the Somme. One of the survivors was Tolkien. He didn’t know Lewis at that time. Another survivor was John Macmurray, a Scots philosopher that was to be profoundly influential in sabotaging the idealism of philosophy to become personal knowledge—the role of the person was profoundly significant in the later development of Trinitarian theology. He was another survivor. They were all survivors because they were wounded. The people who didn’t survive were those who were not wounded. So you think of how philosophy and literature would have been so different. And of course, another survivor—so that’s now a fourth survivor—was the close friend that became one of Lewis’ colleagues as the head of the Oxford University Press, in his novels, that he wrote so vividly, about the proximity between Earth and Heaven—in other words, Charlies Williams. All of these men were wounded in the Somme. It’s a remarkable event of history.

[00:12:26]

Well, after the war, Lewis comes out wounded. Well, not the end of the war, but in 1916. And he’s in a London hospital and he writes to his father and he says father, I suppose it’s the British public school system that’s kept us apart, but I need you. Come and see me. His father ignored the letter. And all he could do was to be mothered by the mother of one of his friends. And so Mrs Moore became more than a mother and I suspect she became a lover in the early 1920s of Lewis. But again, hugely dysfunctional for an older woman to seek the comfort of a child, really just a youth, that was the same age as her own son. But that’s what tragedies do: they bring dysfunctional relationships that you have to live with. And so, very loyally, Mrs Moore was part of his household from 1920 until her death in, I think, 1950. And we had rumours at Oxford that there was a double life that Lewis lived. He lived like a skivvy, dominated by this woman that dominated his life and that of Warnie at home.

[00:14:15]

And the reactions of all of this, both to the war and to his own father and now Mrs Moore, was that it drove Warnie to drink. So he was always having to know that his brother would be on an alcoholic binge for a few months and have to leave him. And yet, they were very close and loyal to each other and, in fact, all the letters that Lewis poured out, especially after he became famous with his books during the 1930s, because he was a punctilious responder of letters, it was done with the secretarial assistance of his brother. Lewis answered every letter that was sent to him by one of his admirers of his books. He used to say that I hate the tramp of the postman on a morning because he’s delivering yet another sack that I have to deal with. So how Lewis was able to live a scholarly life and yet, at the same time, live the life of a faithful correspondent is quite amazing. And I had, myself, experience of some of the students that came to Oxford whose lives had been changed because of Lewis’ writing so faithfully. Little girls, young students, you name them, he answered them all. That’s a remarkable feature about Lewis that people don’t always understand or realise.

Well, he himself went through… he was never an atheist, but he certainly had become abstractly as a brilliant young student at Oxford in his philosophy training as a deist. Very remarkably in four years, Lewis got a first class in three different disciplines. He got it in Greek literature, so he was a Greek linguist. And of course, he knew Latin. He got it in Classical philosophy. And then his triple degree, which he did in one year, was to do the whole school of English, that is a full, packed three year programme, in one year. No wonder he never needed a PhD. And then he started teaching first at University College and then eventually he was given a fellowship at Magdalene College.

[00:17:40]

He himself tells us in The Pilgrim’s Regress of his journey in struggling to go from one phase of disclosure about God to yet another and another until he comes to the time in the spring of 1932. And he had a close friend in Hugo Dyson, who was a Professor of English at Merton College at that time. And I knew Hugo Dyson because he was a close friend of my own senior colleague E.W. Gilbert in the school of geography, so Hugo Dyson was somebody that I personally knew. He was as dynamic, as argumentative, as brilliant in his skill of dialogue, as Lewis himself. He was a match for Lewis. And so another friend gave up at midnight, but Dyson held on like a bull terrier till 3.00 in the morning, till Lewis was safely into the Kingdom and he had become defeated. He had become converted. It was a remarkable night.

Well, the life of Lewis then went from stage to stage. And one of the things that handicapped his promotion at Oxford was that he’d become an articulate Christian. And that his books were more popular in his Christian literature, although he did some very serious work in English literature and the history of English literature, especially specialising in the Tudor period, but that was against him and so Lewis never received a full professorship. He had to leave Oxford in 1953 and take the invitation of Cambridge to become a full professor of literature in Cambridge. So he then, in a sense, was exiled from Oxford. He still kept a home in Oxford and so you can imagine what he called the long train journey across the academic lowland took usually about three hours of commuting. It still does, unless you go by bus, which is much quicker. And so no doubt most of his reviewing of books and even some of the writing of his books were done in a railway carriage. Not the most conducive place in which to be a writer.

[00:20:53]

Meanwhile, he, from his childhood, had struggled about his prayer life. And so he tells us that when he used to go to bed crying at night with the loss of his mother in those early days before he became a so-called deist or sceptic of faith, he said saying my prayers was really imitating my father: I had to be oratorical. So he would recite something verbally. That’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. And then in sheer exhaustion he would go to sleep at night feeling that he was such a failure in his devotional life. So tragic. But of course, that’s who his father had been. He had sought to be an orator. And he sought to be oratorical for his childhood prayer life. No wonder he gave it up. It was a great relief not to have to pray. And so no doubt that was part of the enticement of accepting the friendly tutor’s scepticism about the religious life.

Later in his life, he’s therefore telling us some of the practical things that he was struggling with all through his prayer life and one of them is that going to bed at night and saying your prayers is the worst place to say your prayers. In Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, the senior devil, writes in his letter to the junior devil Wormwood: humans are animals and whatever their bodies do affects their souls. So equally, the time for prayer is not the evening; it’s the morning. So he says the best way is to divert and make the pray-er religious by feeling he has to say his prayers at night. Well, this seems a very simple thing to do, but it just shows the kind of ordinariness with which Lewis is having to say his prayers. He’s like Christopher Robin who’s saying his prayers and, of course, it doesn’t mean anything.

[00:23:54]

When I got to know Lewis and I lived with a friend of his that we used to meet him once a month for seven years for a Saturday dinner, when it came to the time when I was getting married in ’53 and he was now departing to go to Cambridge, I knew I wouldn’t see him so often and so I asked him what really is a summary of all your work of what you’ve written. And his response was I think it’s all summarised in three lectures I gave to the department of education at the University of Newcastle in 1940. And it was really a protest against the reductionism that was taking place in literary criticism. He was very angry that two young Australians had written a textbook in which literary criticism had been a kind of scientific task. And so, passionately, Lewis said all my life and all my thinking is against reductionism. Of course, he was against the reductionism of logical positivism, which was really like the idealism of Germany that he was fighting against all his life. And so his richly symbolic life was to indicate that you need all different genres by which to communicate the things of God. No one in our generation has most excelled in the diversity of the genres with which he wrote children’s stories, he wrote learned essays, he wrote monographs, he wrote novels, scientific fiction, you name it, including his composition of poetry. Lewis is unexcelled in the various genres with which he communicates his Christian beliefs and faith.

So he told me, he said, along with those three simple lectures, the best work that I’ve written is a novel called Till We Have Faces. Of course, he was a man ahead of his time. And the publisher had said his won’t sell, Lewis. I’m only going to print 1,000 copies. And when I was talking to him a few months later, very few of those copies had been sold. But when you look at what he’s saying in Till We Have Faces, he’s simply saying that a human, to become real, must be speaking with his own voice, not borrowed voices like the educated voice that he had to have as a child. It must express actual desires, not what it imagines is desires. And to do so without any mask or persona. And so Psyche, which is his rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, is really a very sophisticated response to the Classical heritage and indicating that self-recognition comes very slowly. It’s Psyche, who in giving her life to the gods and becomes, in a sense, a Christ figure and transcends life through death, is the younger sister. The older sister, who is the heir to the throne, Orual, she wears a mask all her life until the end. And it was awareness that self-recognition is only bestowed by the divine. It’s, again, this Augustinian theme that self-knowledge is the result of God’s working in our lives. So, as Augustine said, what I do know of myself, I know because you shed your light on me and what I do not know of myself, I shall not know until my darkness shall become as noon day in the vision of your face. Of course, this is thoroughly Augustinian. It’s the struggle of the real ‘I’ to speak for once from his real being.

[00:29:21]

And so the first step of prayer is what Lewis is saying is unveiling. Of course, there’s a lot of unveiling. He had to unveil so much in his own life. The self then that prays is the self that knows itself. This is the road to knowing and receiving of the name, of the acquiring of a face, and so as Lewis puts it in Till We Have Faces, how could God meet us face-to-face until we have faces. And then in doing so, we engage more profoundly in the dialectic that is knowing God. And so Lewis began to realise that his sensations of longing, of what he called desire or Sehnsucht, were the moments of clearest consciousness that we can have. Of course, one person who had helped him in this was George MacDonald, who became his early mentor in understanding the role of imagery in the Christian life.

[00:30:42]

He once wrote in an American periodical called Show, ‘You find that what you called yourself is only a thin film on the surface of an unsounded and dangerous sea. But not merely dangerous. Radiant things, delights and inspirations, come to the surface as well as snarling resentments and naggings lusts. One’s ordinary self is, then, a mere façade. There’s a huge area out of sight behind it.’ And so he came to the conviction that their contact with the mystery, that is to say, with God, is at its closest through their own being. ‘Your contact with that mystery in the area you call yourself is a good deal closer than your contact through what you call matter.’ And so he saw that the most blessed result of prayer would be to arise thinking I never knew before. I never dreamed that this is who I am. And so for Lewis, the prayer preceding all prayers is let it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real vow that I speak for.

Lewis, as you know, had this tortuous relationship with a woman that wanted to marry him long before he wanted to marry her. And we all knew about it between ’50 and ’53—in sotto voce. But it just shows that even a man of such great scholarship as Lewis could have such a crazy emotional life. She’s one of his letter writers, as a secular Jew that had joined the Communist Party in New York and had got divorced from her husband and was left with two small boys. And she comes to Oxford to sit at his feet to learn seriously how to be a Christian. And, of course, it’s the McCarthy era, that anyone that has got a Red background as a communist is suspect and so she’s given a six months visa and she begs Lewis to help her to stay. And the only way she can stay is by him marrying her in a public ceremony, not in the church, but in a civil arrangement, which they do in secret. And his friends Tolkien and Dyson and all the rest of us had no clue that Lewis had got married.

[00:34:11]

And it was only when she was in her sick bed in the hospital dying of cancer that he falls in love with her. And so now he asks for a second marriage. And meanwhile, Tolkien is shocked to discover that there’s a brief reference in the London Times in December of that year that he had got married. Well, what kind of a friendship was that circle that we think of as so close to each other? So that’s the other side of Lewis. He was a very human being.

Well now, very, very different is the life of Hans von Balthasar. As we’ve said, he was born in 1905 and died in 1988. He grew up educated in a Benedictine monastery in central Switzerland, where his older brother was later to become an abbot. And from there, he went to Austria because in those days the Jesuits had been expelled from Switzerland and were only allowed to come back into the country in 1973. So he went to Austria and entered a Jesuit college and then enrolled at the University of Zurich in 1923. And then he went on and did studies in Vienna and Berlin and eventually he entered the Jesuit Society in 1929 in Germany because they still were not available for him to go into in Switzerland. He then studied philosophy at a college near Munich and moved on to the Jesuit school near Lyons in France for further theological studies. And there he was to meet the people that changed his life: Jean Danielou, who was a great philosopher, Henri de Lubac, who was a profoundly scholarly medieval historian. And these men were those that started in their friendship together to create a renaissance of Catholic theology. They called it Theologie Nouvelle, the New Theology. And my colleague Hans Boersma at Regent College has now become saturated as the evangelical spokesman for this Theologie Nouvelle. It raises eyebrows with some of his colleagues, but there he is—as a Dutch Calvinist that is steeped in Theologie Nouvelle.

[00:37:40]

It was there through this movement that von Balthasar now has a love of the Fathers that became an enduring love. And very quickly, he saturated himself in Origen and published a book on Origen in 1938, and them on Maximus the Confessor in 1941, and then Gregory of Nyssa in 1942. That’s one thing about being a bachelor and you’re a Jesuit: you have all the time for writing and scholarship. But it was a prodigious education that he engaged on. And then he finished seven years of training and became ordained as a priest eventually in 1936 and left Germany, of course, with the outbreak of the war, in 1940, and began as a chaplain in Basle, which, as we’ve said, is where he met Karl Barth. And literally, within a year of meeting Barth he had written a very scholarly appraisal of the theology of Karl Barth in 1941.

There was a Protestant physician in Switzerland who was called Adrienne von Speyr and she had been divorced and widowed and now in his relationship with her pastorally, he received her into the Catholic Church and then began an amazing new phase of his life. Adrienne von Speyr was a remarkable Christian mystic. She had extraordinary experiences of Christ. And she’s written a very formative commentary on John’s Gospel, which to this day is a unique interpretation of John’s Gospel. It’s a remarkable book. And of course, people began to talk about their relationship. Not that it was in any way sexual, but even the very fact that he was such an academic theologian and she was so mystical made it very difficult for his colleagues to know where in the world he was.

Well, the result of all the tittle tattle and gossip and defamation that he was receiving from his own colleagues in the society of the Jesuits was that he left them in 1950. now you know, when you are from a rich, wealthy background, you have an aristocratic background, and you’ve given all your money to the community, when you come out, you come out penniless. He was on the street. He could only make ends meet for the years that followed by doing summer school courses in various universities. No university employed him. And you don’t make ends meet with a stipend from a summer school. So he lived in abject poverty.

[00:41:45]

And eventually, six years later, the Church forgave him for leaving the order and so he was allowed to become a secular priest. That is to say, that he wasn’t doing anything more than teaching students. It was only—so disgraced within his own church, so an outcast—that on the very week of his death, he was given the cardinal’s hat by Pope John Paul II, who understood the outstanding contribution he had made to the councils of Vatican II.

Well, with that background, what can we say about his life of prayer? Well, as I’ve said, you should read his book. And so as we summarise what his teaching was it’s that he recognised that the climax of prayer is, for him, contemplation. For him, his prayer life was just simply, like Lewis’ Psyche, having a face before the face of God. So while we enter into verbal prayer and then move, like Teresa of Avila, into meditative prayer, you then ultimately rest your soul in contemplation. In the meditative prayer life, you’re using your mind. In the contemplative, you’re simply exercising your heart. It’s ecstatic. It’s joyful. And it’s all the result of boldness. And here again we have the echo of parrhesia, that we have boldness to enter into His presence.

[00:44:43]

And of course, the contemplative life like Lewis saw that Orual had to have is it’s the removal of all veils. It’s what Paul is writing about in 2 Corinthians 3 that we’re not like Moses that have to put a veil over our face because of the fading glory, but rather because of the transcendent splendour of the Gospel and the reality of seeing all things plainly in the face of Christ, God is giving us a face. So the acceptance of a face is from the fruit of the contemplative life that we’re living in the realm of love. And so, deepened and enriched, we are actually entering into the communion of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It’s entering into the closet prayer of Jesus in the upper room.

And of course, when you think boldly, it’s not for yourself. It’s not simply individual. It’s realising, as Lewis realised, that you have to challenge the whole technology of the culture around you. You have to challenge the whole German civilisation, or the Western civilisation. You’re talking about the need of another Reformation. And so he’s concerned that the Christian faith and the Christian culture and the Christian prayer life are all for the transformation of the whole society.

[00:46:40]

These huge ramifications are cosmic. But that’s what prayer is, it’s cosmic. So it’s time for us to close in prayer. Lord, we realise that you are the source of all life. Lord, we realise that you are source of all love. And we thank you that we can say Lord, to whom can we go for you alone have the words of eternal life. So may our lives be iconic, never receiving praise and glory, but realising it all belongs to you, that of thine own, as Solomon would say, we have given you. And so we pray that we go back to our homes, to our many different domestic situations, some sad and grievous and burdensome, as they were in Lewis’ home, some joyful, blessed and prospective. But whatever they are, Lord, help us to know, as Lewis would remind us, that it’s just the ordinary life of being a mere Christian that really gives you glory and at the same time that it has such momentous consequences.

And so we think of this dear man von Balthasar, exiled even within his own church and yet one of the great architects of the renewal of the Catholic Church in this generation. And now we see how the Reformation has come to unite Catholic and Protestant together in one, in the Nouvelle Theologie. Help us then to have a long perspective. That you’re not concerned by what people think of us now, but that we are living in the light of eternity. Give us then eternal orientation to know that while our feet are on Earth and our heads are high in the Heavens that our heart is with your heart. So may the Lord bless each one of us, be gracious unto us and truly give us his shalom. And so may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all forever more. Amen, and Amen.