God Speaks to God
Integrated Study Guide, Session #7
This session is part of the multi-post Study Guide titled "Learning to Pray with C.S. Lewis." You may find it helpful to refer to the introduction and session one to understand the nature of the project as a whole. There will be 10 sessions in all.
"Prayer in its most perfect state is... God speaking to God." - C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
Primary Readings:
Letters to Malcolm, Letters 13, 14, 15, 16
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapters 3-4: "Time and Beyond Time" and "Good Infection"
Recommended Reading:
"Meditation in a Toolshed" essay - Provides Lewis's crucial distinction between looking "at" and looking "along" experiences, which parallels his approach to divine presence in prayer as participation rather than observation.
Book 3 of Mere Christianity - Lewis's discussion of Trinitarian theology offers essential background for understanding prayer as participation in divine life, helping readers grasp how human communication can participate in eternal divine communion.
Theological Context: God’s Presence - Our Response
In these letters, Lewis explores the metaphysical foundations of prayer—how divine and human natures meet, how God is present in creation while transcending it, and how finite humans might apprehend infinite divine presence. These reflections touch on fundamental theological questions about the relationship between Creator and creature, transcendence and immanence, and the nature of divine-human communion.
Lewis's dramatic conversion experience—which he described as being "surprised by joy" and feeling "dragged kicking and screaming" into the Kingdom—provides not merely context but the essential hermeneutical key for understanding his theological reflections on prayer. In works like Letters to Malcolm and Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis articulates prayer as a lived reality that begins in what he called "the real nakedness of the soul"—a profound surrender of self-sufficiency—before gradually unfolding into an authentic divine-human relationship characterized by reverence and remarkable intimacy. This experiential foundation allows Lewis to bridge the often-artificial divide between doctrinal exposition and spiritual practice, offering readers an uncommon theological vision where intellectual rigor and personal devotion become inseparable companions.
The metaphysical framework Lewis employs bears striking resemblance to the classical Christian understanding of participation (methexis) developed by thinkers from Plato through Augustine and Aquinas—the notion that created beings exist through participation in divine Being. As Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy:
"The Absolute Mind—which is what I then meant by God—was not merely the ideal goal of thought but the logically necessary presupposition of all thinking."
Likewise, the metaphysical reflections in Book 4 of Mere Christianity shatter conventional assumptions about God’s presence and human prayer. Lewis's provocative thesis about divine timelessness rewrites the entire framework of divine-human communication:
"Almost certainly God is not in Time... Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him."
Lewis’s treatment of the subject renders obsolete both the image of God as a harried executive managing simultaneous prayer requests and the notion of prayer as interrupting divine attention.
Key Concepts
Trinitarian Participation in Prayer
Before exploring Lewis's specific reflections in Letters to Malcolm, we must consider his foundational articulation of prayer as Trinitarian participation in Book 4 of Mere Christianity. This passage provides perhaps his most accessible and profound explanation of how prayer involves the entire Trinity:
"An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers."
This remarkable passage clarifies what Lewis explores more tentatively in Letter 13 when examining the poem about prayer as divine soliloquy:
"If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God."
In Mere Christianity, Lewis makes explicit what remains somewhat implicit in Letters to Malcolm—that prayer emerges not from our own personal initiative but from our incorporation into Christ, who simultaneously functions as the destination of our prayer (as Father), the motivation for our prayer (as Spirit), and the mediator of our prayer (as Son).
This Trinitarian framework means that we are not isolated individuals attempting to reach a distant deity but persons being incorporated into an eternal communion that precedes and makes possible our own prayers. As Lewis suggests in Chapter 4 of Book 4, we are being drawn into "a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama" that has existed from all eternity. Prayer thus becomes the principal mode of our participation in the work and will of God—not primarily our speaking to God but God's eternal self-communication occurring through us.
Transposition: The Metaphysical Foundation of Prayer
One of Lewis’s most penetrating treatments of “participation” is found in 'Transposition'—his philosophical account of how higher realities manifest in lower mediums and how lower mediums can genuinely participate in higher realities. The essay addresses what Lewis identifies as the fundamental challenge of Christian metaphysics: explaining how transcendent divine reality can be genuinely present within immanent created reality without either collapsing the distinction between them (pantheism) or rendering their relationship merely symbolic (deism). For Lewis, the lower does not merely represent the higher but genuinely participates in it, while the higher transforms and fulfills the lower without abolishing its nature.
Lewis approaches the idea of transposition through everyday examples—how emotions manifest in bodily sensations, how three-dimensional reality is represented in two-dimensional drawings, and how orchestral scores are transposed into piano arrangements. In each case, a richer reality is expressed through a more limited medium:
"If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense... The transposition of the richer into the poorer must, so to speak, be algebraical, not arithmetical"
The principle of transposition suggests that, when we pray, the presence of God is "transposed" into finite human experience—not through exact one-to-one correspondence but through a richer reality expressing itself through a more limited medium. As Lewis explains in Letter 13, the reality of God undergoes transposition when it enters human experience:
"The Absolute cannot be thus known... The Divine Light, as it enters our earthly atmosphere, is liable to a kind of refraction."
Here Lewis challenges both materialistic reductionism that dismisses spiritual experience and naïve supernaturalism that treats God’s presence as another object within our experience. Lewis observes in "Transposition" that
"the brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture."
Similarly, those who approach prayer from "below"—as merely psychological phenomenon—will inevitably miss its participation in the providential working of God. Prayer for Lewis is not a supernatural exception to natural order, but the meeting point where created and divine realities intersect through divinely-established transposition.
In Prayer: God Speaks to God
In Letter 13, Lewis explores the surpring question of whether prayer is merely human soliloquy through analysis of a poem suggesting that in perfect prayer, God speaks through us to God:
"They tell me, Lord that when I seem To be in speech with you, Since but one voice is heard, it's all a dream, One talker aping two..."
Qualifying the poem’s potentially pantheistic conclusion, Lewis then writes:
"Dream makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme. But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God" (Letter 13).
St. Augustine captured this same paradox when he said that God is simultaneously "more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me” (Confessions 3.6.11). God is entirely present with us but utterly transcendent as well. This is the God from whom, to whom, and through whom we pray - not a distant deity we must strain to reach, nor a force that threatens to overwhelm us, but the One who in Jesus Christ has bridged the gap between divine and human speech while preserving the integrity of both.
In Jesus Christ, then, we find not just the restoration of human communication with God but its perfection. He is, as the book of Hebrews tells us, our great High Priest who both speaks God's Word to us and offers our words back to God. This is why all Christian prayer is fundamentally prayer through Christ - He is the living bridge across the communication gap that sin created, the one mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5).
In Mere Christianity, Lewis explores how human participation in divine life mirrors Trinitarian communion:
"The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us... Each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. "
Prayer represents a primary mode of this participation or fellowship with God—where human speech is taken up into divine communion without losing its distinctly human character.
Divine Presence Within and Beyond Creation
In Letter 14, Lewis articulates a sophisticated understanding of God's relationship to creation through the paradoxical formulation: "This also is Thou: neither is this Thou." This elegantly navigates between pantheism (which collapses the Creator-creature distinction) and deism (which excessively separates God from creation).
Lewis defends his use of terms like "uttering" and "inventing" against concerns they might weaken creation ex nihilo:
"I know that to create is defined as 'to make out of nothing'... But it can't mean that God makes what God has not thought of, or that He gives His creatures any powers or beauties which He Himself does not possess."
Drawing on Own Barfield's insight, Lewis positions God as simultaneously transcendent of creation yet intimately present "as the ground and root and continual supply of its reality." This theological vision transforms prayer from spatial metaphors of "reaching up" to recognition of the God who is both utterly beyond us yet intimately present with us.
Approaching Divine Presence in Prayer
In Letter 15, Lewis offers a practical method for placing oneself in God's presence:
"Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to banish the 'bright blur'—or, in statelier language, to break the idol. Let's get back to what has at least some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms are merely the façade of impenetrable mysteries."
This approach parallels Lewis's distinction (in 'Meditation in a Toolshed') between looking 'at' experiences as external objects and looking 'along' them as participatory realities. For Lewis, we err when we approach prayer attempting to observe or reach God as an object 'out there' rather than recognizing Him as the ground of our capacity to see at all. We cannot 'look at' God precisely because He is not one object among others to be observed, but rather the fundamental reality in whom 'we live and move and have our being' (Acts 17:28). Prayer thus involves an unveiling of ourselves before the One who knows us completely, a movement Lewis describes elsewhere as 'the real I who speaks' addressing 'the real Thou' (Letter 15)."
Prayer as Participatory Knowledge
Lewis rejects the modern notion of knowledge as detached observation. In Letter 13, when he writes "if the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God," he reveals prayer as participation in divine life rather than mere communication with a distant deity. This challenges the subject-object divide of modern thinking.
His humble note in Letter 15—"All this is autobiography, not theology"—demonstrates that authentic knowledge of God is insider knowledge, since we can never get outside and observe the One who is omnipresent. As Thomas Aquinas put it, “all knowledge [of God] comes from an assimilation of the knower into the thing to be known.”
For Lewis, prayer becomes the practice of this participatory knowing—looking "along" the beam of divine light rather than merely "at" it, being transformed by what we encounter rather than attempting to master it through observation. Augustine of Hippo wrote that “A comprehended God is not God at all,” and Lewis would certainly agree. For a much deeper look at what it means to “know God,” see my essay, “Loving to Know.”
Questions for Reflection
Lewis explores how prayer can be understood as "God speaking to God" through human participation in divine speech. How might this theological vision shape your understanding of prayer's purpose? How might it address contemporary concerns about whether prayer merely represents human projection rather than divine-human communication?
Consider Lewis's claim from "Transposition" that spiritual realities can only be properly understood "from above" rather than "from below." What implications does it have for how we understand both divine presence and seeming divine absence in prayer?
Lewis applies his concept of "Transposition" to prayer, suggesting that infinite divine reality is expressed through finite human experience. How might this framework help address the tension between divine transcendence and immanence? What implications does it have for understanding how God can be genuinely present in prayer without being reduced to human categories?
In Letter 15, Lewis describes his method for placing himself in God's presence, beginning with the concrete reality of his immediate surroundings rather than abstract concepts. How might this approach differ from your own practice? What advantages might it offer over beginning with either abstract theological concepts or immediate emotional experience?
Consider Lewis's statement that mental images in prayer are most helpful when "fugitive and fragmentary" rather than deliberately fixed. How might this principle apply to your own prayer life? When have images been helpful in your prayer, and when have they become obstacles?
Lewis's personal narrative in Surprised by Joy culminates in his reluctant conversion—"the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." How does this personal history illuminate his metaphysical approach to prayer? What might it suggest about the relationship between intellectual understanding and experiential encounter in prayer?
Lewis writes in Letter 14: "Therefore of each creature we can say, 'This also is Thou: neither is this Thou.'" What implications does this statement have for how we encounter God through created reality?
Practical Exercise: Recognizing Divine Presence (2-3 days)
Inspired by Lewis's approach in Letter 15, practice recognizing God’s presence:
Begin with immediate surroundings: Sit quietly and observe your immediate environment—the room, furniture, light, sounds. As Lewis suggests, recognize these not as ultimate realities but as "façades of impenetrable mysteries."
Move to self-awareness: Notice your own consciousness—thoughts, feelings, physical sensations. Again, recognize these not as exhaustive of your reality but as pointing beyond themselves.
Look through both "façades": Following Lewis's insight that "the moment I recognized them as façades, as mere surfaces, they became conductors," allow both external reality and internal consciousness to point beyond themselves to their divine source.
Rest in awareness of presence: Spend several minutes in receptive awareness of God's presence, which is, as Augustine notes, both "more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me” Confessions, 3.6.2.
After each practice, briefly note:
What aspects of physical reality seemed most conducive to awareness of divine presence?
What mental or emotional states helped or hindered recognition of God's presence?
How did this approach compare to your usual methods of prayer?
At the end of this period, reflect on how this practice has affected your sense of God's presence in both prayer and daily life. Has it helped bridge the gap between "spiritual" activities and ordinary experience? Has it provided a more integrated understanding of God’s presence?