Into the Wardrobe

from Lewis' letter to Owen Barfield, June 28, 1936

"I wish I could Christianise the Summa[something Lewis wrote to Barfield in their long discussion they called 'the Great War'] for you - but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment - one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I'll try."

Lewis may well be joking here with the image of mistress vs wife, but it sounds reversed to me. In the accounts Lewis gives of his conversion, it seems as though it is the truth which is the wooer, and his will the wooed, rather than this way around.

But I guess, besides a possible joke, Lewis seems to be expressing a sense of spiritual fatigue, a sense that he needs to be revived or renewed before he can attempt this task. (Which he perhaps never did, at least if so it was never published).

Ah yes, thankyou.
The interpretation I would put on that quote is that in the beginning you have to keep convincing yourself that something is true (especially spiritual truths which cannot be seen or felt), so you "woo" your mind, heart, and will into believing the truth. But once your mind has accepted what it knows to be truth, then it's like a wife whom you know and it's sort of 'old hat'. You take it for granted a little maybe, but that's when you really begin to work with it, incorporate that truth into your everyday life, and you bear fruit.
Just a thought...

It's actually something that Sir Francis Bacon wrote -- about the pursuit of knowledge (wife) for power (meaning practical use), as opposed to pursuing knowledge (mistress) for its own sake. Lewis, in the volume of the Oxford History of English Literature that he wrote, likens Bacon to magicians in wanting to use knowledge for practical purposes.

This utilitarian attitude toward knowledge may be the reason why Lewis disliked Bacon, which I think we touched on in another thread recently.