My guess is that C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, might be among his least
read works, viewed perhaps as a mere mole hill next to such vast mountains like
The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But reading that book
recently, what with prayer on our minds around here, I was quite amazed by its
content. Here, for instance, is a brief quote which quite startled me by its
truth and originality. It concerns biblical interpretation:
I suggest two rules
for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to
our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the
theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our
abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of
spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to
be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—the
light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen
and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible
in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologizing”
Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer
mythology for a richer.
[From Chapter X, p. 52, Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc., edition, 1964]
Ah! the hierarchies of experience, where the poetic rises
above the intellectual. But at those heights the general fades and becomes
personal—which is where real understanding germinates.
