Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

C.S. Lewis versus the Church

(Reprinted from the issue of May 19, 2005)

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 the aftermath of “Vatican Four.” If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran