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According to his brother Warren (Warnie), the greatest mystery of C.S Lewis's early life was his attachment to 'Mrs Moore' (Janie Moor or 'Minto') from 1917 (when Jack was 18, and Janie was 45) to her death in 1951.
(The situation is well summarized in
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0361.htm)
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The mystery comes from the absolute secrecy with which Lewis treated the business, so that the topic was out of bounds to everybody including Warnie (who lived with Jack and Minto) - indeed this was one topic about which Jack was routinely misleading, deceptive, dishonest - often describing Minto as his mother, even in letters written in Latin to the future Saint, the priest Don Giovanni Calabria.
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Of course, nobody will ever know the truth about it, but the matter is comprehensible on the basis of Lewis's personality.
I believe that what happened was that the relationship between Lewis and Minto was initially sexual (this is now generally accepted), but when this ceased (the time and reasons for which are not known, but was almost certainly before or at the time Lewis gradually became a Christian around 1929-31), Lewis felt he had done Minto a great wrong.
At this time, I strongly suspect that Lewis made a vow to do service to Minto for the rest of his life, as a penance for the wrongdoing. I suspect that this was a private matter and that he told nobody - but for the rest of his life he stuck to this penance, and that this is what explained the extraordinary servility of the relationship between Jack and Minto for the last 20 or so years.
It would also explain the most tragic aspect of Jack's penance, the point at which its rigidity harmed the person he loved most: that is his brother Warnie.
Because this secret penance of Jack's affected Warnie in multiple ways, every day of his life - since the household now revolved around the whims of Minto with no possibility of discussion, no disagreement being allowed.
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Jack would always side with Minto against Warnie on all matters where there was conflict, no matter now unreasonable, or even malicious, she became - which was deeply wounding to Warnie.
And even as Minto dwindled into dementia in the last years of Minto's life this continued - until the situation became unbearable for Warnie and he lived on his House Boat as much as possible throughout the later years of World War II. When this escape became impossible, Warnie took refuge in binge drinking.
For the rest of his life sustained binges of helpless drunkenness would punctuate things, leading to hospital admissions and almost killing him on several occasions. And of course, once established, alcoholism often is impossible altogether to dislodge; and leads to lying both to oneself and to others.
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So the main ill effect of Jack's servile penance to Mrs Moore was inflicted his beloved brother Warnie.
That Jack would serve Mrs Moore as a rigid, inflexible penance for their early illicit sexual relationship seems highly plausible; that it caused Warnie's late life binge-drinking alcoholism was tragic.
But - given a couple of plausible assumptions - it is not really a mystery.
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4 comments:
This is worthwhile, responsible speculation.
It prompts this reflection -- that vows should be rare indeed. Offhand I would say that most Christians should perhaps make only two vows in their lives: at Confirmation, and when they marry.
Usually what we see is that even these vows are not made in complete sincerity. A great deal of the misery that we see in society could be attributed to people not keeping these two vows.
But, on the other hand, one generally should not make vows.
(About Confirmation vows: I don't know about others' circles, but in mine, the Sunday service on which confirmands make their vows is the low point of the Church Year. Young people, having completed their years of catechesis, make vows which they break as of the next Sunday, when they fail to come to church. Thus their official entrance upon adult life as Christians is marked by insincerity. I think it would be well if there were public recognition of their having completed their Christian instruction, but a delay in their Confirmation. If in the interval they have been faithful in church attendance and other public marks of a Christian, then they could make their vows some time later.)
@Dale - "vows should be rare indeed"
Yes, very true. Breaking a vow inevitably inflicts damage, keeping a vow may inflict even more damage - so a vow can lead to a 'double bind'.
I think this is something to do with vows being (usually) too narrow and too specific.
Interestingly, Orthodox Christians do not swear vows; there are affirmations at baptisms and—especially adult baptisms—but they are of belief and membership in the community, not of particular behaviors. A lot of people are surprised that Orthodox do not even swear wedding vows (or monastic ones, for that matter). The only words my wife and I spoke when married were that we were there of our own free will.
Now, I'm not saying this as evidence of Orthodox moral superiority— I think Latin Christianity was correct to embrace the vow–centric nature of Roman law and culture for certain profound acts, like marriage (or, much later, monastic vows). They mirrored the law and culture of those peoples (though they may have less well–fit the later Germanic Christians). I think both traditions were vow–cautious in the religious realm; Christ's words on the matter were not forgotten.
However, those words are paired with the admonition that any verbal commitment is as strong as a vow; the condemnation is then about vows as hubris. The damage is there, no matter what, the vow may lead us into perverting the very meaning of the good that may have been sworn, which is an Aristotelian tragedy writ in a life.
@Ariston - thanks for the comment. I didn't know that.
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