THE WANDERER, MAY 19, 2005
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
C.S. Lewis versus the Church
My return to the Church began when I read C.S. Lewis
as a young man. I quickly became addicted to his writing
and he has been a model for me ever since. In fact part
of his attraction for me was that his style of thinking
seemed so Catholic, Aristotelian, and even Thomistic; I'd
(temporarily) ceased believing without ceasing to love
the Church.
Lewis's "mere Christianity," as he called it, was an
attempt to walk a tightrope, sticking to central beliefs
shared by virtually all Christians, Catholic, Protestant,
and otherwise, while avoiding sensitive areas of
disagreement. In his later books he even seemed to be
edging toward Catholicism, as in his expressed belief in
Purgatory. (See his LETTERS TO MALCOLM.) In his
conservative way, he seemed almost "ecumenical," though
without the tendency to dilute doctrine to suit the
liberal temper of the times.
So many Catholic admirers of Lewis (1898-1963) have
responded the same way I did that it's often asked why he
never joined the Church, which would seem the fulfillment
of his early conversion to Christianity.
The answer I gather from a pair of recent books is,
in part, startlingly simple: Lewis was raised in the
strongly anti-Catholic atmosphere of Protestant Northern
Ireland, and he never really got over his youthful
prejudices against Catholics, especially "bog-dwelling"
Irish Catholics.
Yes, he was privately given to just such rude and
derogatory language, which you'd never suspect from his
books. His detestation of Catholicism was tempered by his
historical awareness, but it remained strong enough to
ruin his warm friendship with the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien
(though there appears to have been fault and provocation
on both sides). Tolkien said he owed the immense success
of his LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy to Lewis's generous
encouragement; on the other hand, he was cruelly
belittling toward Lewis's Narnia stories.
This sad story is told by Michael White in a new
biography, C.S. LEWIS: A LIFE (Carroll & Graf). It's a
small, highly readable book, though rather glib in its
judgments and superficial in its summaries of Lewis's
thinking.
White admires Lewis without worshiping him, but he
also avoids iconoclasm, and he's both frank and tactful
in his treatment of Lewis's eyebrow-raising relations
with Janie Moore, who shared Lewis's house with him for
many years. (His father and brother both disapproved of
this cohabitation.)
Still, the book always leaves you wishing for more
information and explanation, particularly about Lewis's
World War II Broadcast Talks on the BBC (which later
became the book MERE CHRISTIANITY).
Anglican Disarray
More penetrating on the question of Lewis and
Catholicism is Joseph Pearce's C.S. LEWIS AND THE
CATHOLIC CHURCH (Ignatius). Pearce too deals with Lewis's
inherited prejudices and his strained relations with
Tolkien, but his chief concern remains with the
intellectual reasons that prevented him from, as the
English say, "poping."
He has too much respect for Lewis's mind and honesty
to settle for merely emotional explanations; if Lewis had
once been (in his own later description) "perhaps the
most dejected and reluctant [Christian] convert in all of
England," yet fell on his knees to pray anyway, he might
well have fallen on his knees as the most reluctant
Catholic. Intellectual candor, Lewis always stressed,
sometimes means accepting conclusions you hoped you
wouldn't have to reach.
But with respect to Catholicism, Pearce thinks Lewis
failed his own test by assuming, without argument, that
the questions dividing Christians were questions "to
which I do not think we have been told the answer." By
saying this, Pearce observes, Lewis is implicitly
rejecting the Catholic affirmation that we have been told
the answer.
Lewis trusted that his "mere" Christianity was
suitably realized in his own Anglican Church. But here,
says Pearce, he was proved wildly wrong on his own
ground. Anglicanism may have seemed, when Lewis was
alive, to be firmly based on a solid core of beliefs
shared by nearly all Christians; today that solid core no
longer exists, as witness the disarray of the Anglican
Church itself.
As Pearce says, Lewis "clearly believed that he had
found his True Home in Anglicanism. Yet today,
posthumously, he has been made homeless."
Ironically, it's chiefly the remaining traces of
orthodoxy in Anglicanism's African branch that prevent
the church in England itself from following the fads that
have made the Episcopal Church in North America a
theological zoo. Just as ironically, Lewis himself before
he died had sensed the imminent chaos when he warned of
the calamitous consequences that might ensue if women
were ordained as "priestesses."
But Lewis was concerned with more than pragmatic
results; he believed that God Himself had created the
differences between man and woman and that the
distinction was "sacramental" as well as physical. The
priesthood was for men only. This was the divine plan,
which, far from being in the vulgar sense
"discriminatory," respected the dignity of both sexes.
This is so close to the Catholic view that we must
wonder if Lewis today might be driven by events to
abandon the compromise of "mere" Christianity and join
the Church at last. But we'll never know. Lewis, as
Pearce notes, died just as Bishop John Robinson's
modernist HONEST TO GOD was about to become a bestseller.
Rare Glimpses
Meanwhile, most of Lewis's books remain available.
To the ones he published during his lifetime must now be
added a three-volume edition of his collected letters
(HarperCollins), the first two of which, each over a
thousand pages, have already appeared.
I regret to say that these are surprisingly
uninteresting. Lewis was a remarkably versatile writer;
but his casual correspondence is all too casual. We get
only rare glimpses of the Christian apologist, the superb
literary critic, the trenchant observer who created
Screwtape, the enchanting writer of children's stories,
or any of the other Lewises whom so many readers have
loved for so many reasons.
It's as if he needed a specific challenge to spur
him to write well; earlier selections of his letters have
been far more satisfying. Nor do these offer intimate
glimpses of the man himself; most of them have all the
fascination of old weather reports (from drizzly England,
at that).
Of course we can hardly blame an author for the
shortcomings of things he never meant to publish; Lewis
instructed his brother to destroy a huge cache of his
papers after his death, perhaps because they might be all
too interesting. Our age takes the view that an author's
privacy rights (if he has any at all) end with his death,
so Lewis probably took a wise precaution.
Still, I can't help wishing that some of his more
unguarded comments on religion had been preserved, though
we should be content that he was able to tell us no more
and no less than he wished to.
+ + +
SOBRAN'S watches a movie about an Irish monastery in
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