Who knew C. S. Lewis

That same Chesterton who said:
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
My point is that your casual dismissal of scholarly works on the prejudice of perceived bias cuts both ways. You are not a detached observer evaluating in pristine objectivity. You have biases and preferences of your own, and filter what you observe through them, supporting what you choose to believe and dismissing what you don't.

If you were to actually read Pearce's book, instead of simply dismissing it, you'd see that he uses Lewis' works themselves to indicate how deeply he understood and appreciated Catholicism. (or, for that matter, read his frank exchanges with Fr. Calabria) Or you could read works by people who actually studied under him, like Sheldon Vanauken or Christopher Derrick. What you wouldn't want to do is just speculate based on your own perceptions and biases.
 
We mustn't think each other devils PotW. We should both read John Wesley's famous letter to a Roman Catholic here. Again soon I will expound more on my view on how much C. S. Lewis is or is not a Catholic. I must fight my ADD in order to do this. Please understand I do try to guard against my own bias, but when one does that you tend to start to see the futility of conquering it.
 
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I am sorry PotW that I am dismissing Pearce work. I don’t had a library of books on how Lewis is seen by Catholics. Being an Evangelical it is hard enough to keep track of all the things that Evangelicals say about Lewis. But reading reviews online I was able to get a pretty clear idea what Pearce’s argument is from both Catholic and Protestant reviewers. It is an argument that I have faced in my own life. Lewis had many close friends (several of the "Inklings") who were (or eventually would become) Catholic, including George Sayer, who wrote a highly-acclaimed biography (Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times, 1988), Jim Dundas-Grant, Humphrey Havard, Fr. Gervase Mathew, Dom Bede Griffiths, Christopher Derrick, Fr. Walter Hooper, Sheldon Vanauken, Fr. Martin D'Arcy, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who helped him to convert to Christianity, by describing it as a "true myth." Many of these names I have included in this thread to talk about. And he did hold many ideas that are more consistent with Catholicism than Protestantism (purgatory, praying for the died, using the term “the Blessed Virgin Mary”, and calling the Lord’s Supper “Mass”). And he did have a very High Church reputation in the Anglican Church. So when Lewis converted to Christianity a number of these friend encouraged his join the Church. And it can be said that one of the main reasons for the latter decline in the relation between J. R.R. Tolkien was that he never became Catholic. It definitely wasn't just because Lewis dedicated The Screwtape Letters to Tolkien (which he didn’t like) and that he didn’t like LWW. So the big question by Catholics is why Lewis rejected joining the True Church. And since it goes against logic that he should reject Catholicism, we are given some psychological reason for his rejection of Catholicism. So they attribute it to Lewis being raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Because he was raised Protestant in Belfast he had a natural bias, phobia, or worse bigotry against Romanism. And despite all the close relationships he had with Catholics and leaning he had toward Catholic doctrines, he could never overcome this subconscious bias against Catholicism.

Lewis did have a lot to say about schism between Protestantism and Catholicism both in Northern Ireland and in general:

That the whole cause of schism lies in sin I do not hold to be certain. I grant that no schism is without sin but the one proposition does not necessarily follow the other . . . what would I think of your Thomas More and of our William Tyndale? All the writings of the one and all the writings of the other I have lately read right through. Both of them seem to me most saintly men and to have loved God with their whole heart: I am not worthy to undo the shoes of either of them. Nevertheless they disagree and (what racks and astounds me) their disagreement seems to me to spring not from their vices nor from their ignorance but rather from their virtues and the depths of their faith, so that the more they were at their best the more they were at variance. I believe the judgment of God on their dissension is more profoundly hidden than it appears to you to be: for His judgments are indeed an abyss.

(Letters: C.S. Lewis / Don Giovanni Calabria [25 November 1947], 37, 39)

Tomorrow I am crossing over (if God so have pleased) to Ireland: my birthplace and dearest refuge so far as charm of landscape goes, and temperate climate, although most dreadful because of the strife, hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths. These indeed both yours and ours "know not by what Spirit they are led." They take lack of charity for zeal and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy . . . Let us, however, with mutual prayers pray with all our power for that charity which "covers a multitude of sins."

(Ibid., [10 August 1953], 39)

‘That they all may be one’ is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity.

(Ibid., 71)

All who profess themselves Christians are bound to offer prayers for the reunion of the Church now, alas, torn and divided.

(Ibid., 99)

As a Christian, I am very much aware that our divisions grieve the Holy Spirit and hold back the work of Christ; as a logician I realize that when two churches affirm opposing positions, these cannot be reconciled.

But because I was an unbeliever for a long time, I perceived something which perhaps those brought up in the Church do not see. Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.

Since my conversion, it has seemed my particular task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe. Controversy I leave to others: that is the business of theologians. I think that you and I, the laity, simple soldiers of the Faith, will best serve the cause of reconciliation not so much by contributing to such debates, but by our prayers, and by sharing all that can already be shared of Christian life.

If the unity of charity and intention between us were strong enough, perhaps our doctrinal differences would be resolved sooner; without that spiritual unity, a doctrinal agreement between our religious leaders would be sterile.

In the meantime, it will be apparent that the man who is most faithful in living the Christian life in his own church is spiritually the closest to the faithful believers in other confessions: because the geography of the spiritual world is very different from that of the physical world. In the latter, countries touch each other at their borders, in the former, at their center. It is the lukewarm and indifferent in each country who are furthest from all other countries.

(Preface to the French edition of La Problem de la Souffrance, 1950)

. . . such silence need not mean that I myself am sitting on the fence. Sometimes I am. There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think we have been told the answer. There are some to which I may never know the answer: if I asked them in a better world, I might (for all I know) be answered as a far greater questioner was answered: “what is that to thee? Follow thou Me”. But there are other questions as to which I am definitely on one side of the fence and yet say nothing. For I was not writing to expound something I could call “my religion” but to expound “mere” Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not

(Preface to Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1952, 7)

I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions - as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in…When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular doorkeeper?”

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

(Ibid., 11-12)
 
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Continuing from the last post.

I too have been forced to wonder why I didn't become Catholic. When I became a Christian I was more inclined toward Catholicism. And at that time my sister and mother did convert to Catholicism. I too have seen many Catholic doctrines and practices very favorably , though I still reject some them in my Protestant opinions (communion of the saints, rosaries, Divine Office, to name a few) I go to mass quit often and have taken some RCIA classes. Yet I am firmly in the Evangelical camp. Being a Baptist and latter a non-denominational Evangelical in America, I was well aware of anti-Catholic bigotry. I had to fight it often in myself and in others. I assure you an anti-Catholic bigot does not have a lot of Catholic friends, believe in Catholic doctrine, and become High Church Anglican. They avoid all things Catholic and call Catholics a “non-Christian” Cult. Lewis is not a anti-Catholic bigot or suffered from Catholic phobia.

The reason Lewis was also firmly in the Protestant camp is seen in the following quote from an essay that Walter Hooper probably saved from fire to share with us.

“The real reason, I take it, why you cannot be in communion with us is not your disagreement with this or that particular Protestant doctrine, so much as the absence of any real 'Doctrine', in your sense of the word, at all. It is, you feel, like asking a man to say he agrees not with a speaker but with a debating society.

And the real reason why I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement with this or that Roman doctrine, but that to accept your Church means, not to accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said but to what he's going to say.

To you the real vice of Protestantism is the formless drift which seems unable to retain the Catholic truths, which loses them one by one and ends in a 'modernism' which cannot be classified as Christian by any tolerable stretch of the word. To us the terrible thing about Rome is the recklessness (as we hold) with which she has added to the depositum fidei- the tropical fertility, the proliferation, of credenda. You see in Protestantism the Faith dying out in a desert: we see in Rome the Faith smothered in a jungle.

I know no way of bridging this gulf.”

- Christian Reunion and Other Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, London: Collins, 1990, 17-19

Catholics see their faith as a beautiful garden, full of wonderful growth. They see all the doctrines and traditions that have develop over the centuries as this beautiful garden, the True Church, that is kept by Our Lord. It is very hard for them to see why Protestants reject this Garden of Eden. Protestants see it as a wild tropical jungle on a desert island. It is full of strange ideas and teachings that overwhelm them and drives them out of the jungle back to the beach of simple sand and ocean (faith, grace, scripture, and Jesus Christ). We may at times go into the jungle to find some nice fruit but in the end we can’t live there. This is where Lewis was. He came to the island of Christianity. He does see and partake of many of the fruits of Catholicism, many of them are good to taste and pleasing to the eye, but in the end the total jungle overwhelms him and he goes back to the simple faith of the beach, which Catholics see as totally barren. In MC Lewis brings this point up by when a Protestant asks a Catholic, “does all this doctrine really matter?” and the other replies, “matter? Why, it is absolutely essential.” Now I use the example of the desert island, while Lewis uses the analogy of a mansion with many rooms. By our own feelings and conscious we chose the room where the Lord leads us to in clear conscious. So in the end Lewis couldn't cross the bridge into a Catholic world and live in his conscious

I am deliberately sharing all these posts on this thread rather than the Catholic Q&A thread, because I don’t want to be seen as attacking Catholicism. This is a thread I created on the life of C. S Lewis and all the people that influenced him and how he became the man he was. So I hope you were able to indulge in this rant.

P.S. I took some of my research from David Armstrong’s blog, Biblical Evidence for Catholicism.
 
Looking at the present situation of the Church of England I do doubt that CSL would be an Anglican today. It is hard to say what church Lewis would belong to today. We are inclined to see Lewis as he was in the 1940s and he would be a very eccentric man living now in the 21st century. Would a modern Lewis Tweet and be on Facebook? Would he smoke e-cigarettes? He may have found a Vatican II Catholic church more to his liking. Though his Latin was quite good, so an English Mass may have not have made a lot of difference. Even a modern Lewis may have not have liked what goes for Evangelicalism today. I don't think he would have liked the modern praise band. So cheer up my Catholic brothers and sisters, I doubt very much Lewis would have been a Protestant today.
 
Looking at the present situation of the Church of England I do doubt that CSL would be an Anglican today. It is hard to say what church Lewis would belong to today. We are inclined to see Lewis as he was in the 1940s and he would be a very eccentric man living now in the 21st century. Would a modern Lewis Tweet and be on Facebook? Would he smoke e-cigarettes? He may have found a Vatican II Catholic church more to his liking. Though his Latin was quite good, so an English Mass may have not have made a lot of difference. Even a modern Lewis may have not have liked what goes for Evangelicalism today. I don't think he would have liked the modern praise band. So cheer up my Catholic brothers and sisters, I doubt very much Lewis would have been a Protestant today.


Lewis was brought up in the Protestant faith in Belfast and joined its equivant in england. Tolkien hoped he would join the catholic faith and did all he could to presude him, but Lewis went back to what he knew best, his religon.
 
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Looking at the present situation of the Church of England I do doubt that CSL would be an Anglican today. It is hard to say what church Lewis would belong to today. We are inclined to see Lewis as he was in the 1940s and he would be a very eccentric man living now in the 21st century. Would a modern Lewis Tweet and be on Facebook? Would he smoke e-cigarettes? He may have found a Vatican II Catholic church more to his liking. Though his Latin was quite good, so an English Mass may have not have made a lot of difference. Even a modern Lewis may have not have liked what goes for Evangelicalism today. I don't think he would have liked the modern praise band. So cheer up my Catholic brothers and sisters, I doubt very much Lewis would have been a Protestant today.

I really can't see what else Lewis could be today except an Anglican. I dare say that there's a lot about Anglicanism today he'd disapprove of but doubtless that was true in his own time also. There has long been a radical and even socialist element in the Church of England; the idea that until the rise of 'liberal' Christianity it was basically the Conservative Party at prayer has always been a caricature.
 
I really can't see what else Lewis could be today except an Anglican. I dare say that there's a lot about Anglicanism today he'd disapprove of but doubtless that was true in his own time also. There has long been a radical and even socialist element in the Church of England; the idea that until the rise of 'liberal' Christianity it was basically the Conservative Party at prayer has always been a caricature.

No we don't know what Lewis would be today but his father was a fire and brimstone prod in Belfast who was brought up in the ways of English Empire, ie Austrila, Canada, India ect. Lewis never classed himself as British as he loved all the Irish myths and loved all the works by (free Irishmen) He rejectied the honnor from Churchill as he was Irish.
 
I do think Churchill and Lewis would have had some great discussions if they were friends. Churchill was very much a traditionalist yet he was also an agnostic.
 
Getting back to why Lewis wasn't a Catholic. The better discussion is where Lewis stood on the English Civil War. Lewis would have a Royalists ("Cavaliers") and thus he was loyal to the Anglican Church which was the Church of the Crown. He would have not had supported Cromwell and thus he was not a normal Calvinist Protestant like the Puritans. You will remember that Ransom in THS said he was a King's man and also Eustace's parents were Republicans. So you could say that Lewis' politics decided which church he belonged to.
 
We mustn't think each other devils PotW. We should both read John Wesley's famous letter to a Roman Catholic here. Again soon I will expound more on my view on how much C. S. Lewis is or is not a Catholic. I must fight my ADD in order to do this. Please understand I do try to guard against my own bias, but when one does that you tend to start to see the futility of conquering it.

I had never read that letter. Still haven't read it all, but what I have read is beautiful.

I have always been fascinated by the life and work of John Wesley. I was raised Methodist, and am now a minister with the Assemblies of God (though not a professional one). Even in the Assemblies, our theology is still basically Wesleyan and we consider our spiritual heritage to be linked to the Methodist movement which John and Charles Wesley began.

Well, not do detract from the focus of this thread. Just wanted to say thanks for the link to that letter.
 
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