Ghost

Miracles 1.1 [i.e. chapter 1 paragraph 1] Lewis speaks of a person claiming to see a ghost. His point **"Seeing is not believing."** for the experience of seeing a ghost didn't create belief in the immortal soul in the one seeing the ghost.

I wasn't at all questioning the life after death you know: only saying that its character is for us unimaginable...The Bible seems scrupulously to avoid any //description// of the other world, or worlds, except in terms of parable or allegory. //Collected Letters//, to Mrs. Vera Gebbert, 16 October 1960

The ghosts of the wicked old women in Pope 'haunt the place where their honour died'. I am more fortunate, for I shall haunt the place whence the most valued of my honours came. I am constantly with you in my imagination. If in some twilit hour anyone sees a bald and bulky spectre in the Combination Room or the garden, don't get Simon to exorcise it, for it is a harmless wraith and means nothing but good. //Collected Letters//, to the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, 25 October 1963

Have I propounded before to you my theory that the //corpse// and the //ghost// each owe all their terrors to the other? The corpse, tho so horribly different, is yet so like a man that you can't help thinking it has a life of its own i.e. you put a ghost in it. But for the idea that this unman may still live, it wd. not be horrible. Conversely, when you think of the spirit, tho you know it to be unpicturable, you can't help picturing it, and yet you feel you must make it different from the man as he was: then in comes the horrible association of the corpse. In each case you are trying to think of a thing as living and dead at the same time, and from the impossible conception comes the horror. //Collected Letters//, to Arthur Greeves, 15 September 1930

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. //Miracles,// a sermon, paragraph 1

It has been a very //odd// experience. This, the first really severe loss I have suffered, has (a) Given corroboration to my belief in immortality such as I never dreamed of. It is almost tangible now. (b) Swept away all my old feelings of mere horror and disgust at funerals, coffins, graves etc. If need had been I think I cd. have handled //that// corpse with hardly any unpleasant sensations. (c) Greatly reduced my feeling about ghosts. I think (but who knows?) that I shd. be, tho afraid, more pleased than afraid, if his turned up. In fact, all v. curious. Great pain but no mere depression. Dyson said to me yesterday that he thought what was true of Christ was, in its lower degree, true of all Christians - i.e. they go away to return in a closer form and it is expedient for us that they shd. go away in order that they may do so. How foolish it is to imagine one can imaginatively foresee what any event will be like! `Local unique sting’ alright of course for I love him (I cannot say more) as much as you:* and yet ... a sort of brightness and tingling.


 * This means //te// not //tu!//

Mr. Dyson, on the day of the funeral, summed up what many of us felt, `It is not blasphemous', he said `To believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its less degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be //with// us in a new way, even closer than before.' A month ago I wd. have called this silly sentiment. Now I know better. He seems, in some indefinable way, to be all around us now. I do not doubt he is doing and will do for us all sorts of things he could not have done while in the body. //Collected Letters//, to Florence Williams, 22 May 1945

There is, I dare say, no empirical proof that such an experience is more than subjective. But for those who accept on other grounds the Christian faith, I suggest that it is best understood in the light of some words that one of his friends said to me as we sat in Addison's Walk just after the funeral. 'Our Lord told the disciples it was expedient for them that He should go away for otherwise the Comforter would not come to them. I do not think it blasphemous to suppose that what was true archetypally, and in eminence, of His death may, in the appropriate degree, be true of the deaths of all His followers.'

So, at any rate, many of us felt it to be. No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed. //Essays Presented to Charles Williams//, Preface, 3rd paragraph from the end