C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church

Joseph Pearce

Description

C. S. Lewis, the great British novelist and Christian apologist, has been credited by many-including the author-for aiding their journey to the Catholic Church. For this reason, it is often perplexing that Lewis himself never became Catholic. In C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, Joseph Pearce delves into Lewis's life, writings, and spiritual influences to shed light on the matter. Although C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity was greatly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, a Catholic, and although Lewis embraced many distinctively Catholic teachings, such as purgatory and the sacrament of Confession, he never formally entered the Church. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book digs deep to present the facts of Lewis's life, to illuminate key points in his writings, and to ask the question: Was C. S. Lewis on the path to Rome? This revised and updated edition-with a new introduction by Father Dwight Longenecker-is a fascinating historical, biographical, theological, and literary account of a man whose writings have led scores to the Catholic Church, despite never having become a Catholic himself.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Catholic Church
• History of religions
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: St. Benedict Press LLC
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618902313
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2013 Joseph Pearce
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book was first published in the United States by Ignatius Press in 2003. This Saint Benedict Press edition has been re-typeset and revised. Revisions include occasional spelling, punctuation, and typography corrections. This edition also includes a new introduction by Fr. Dwight D. Longenecker, and a new appendix by the author.
Typeset by Lapiz.
Cover design by Caroline Kiser.
Cover images: St. Peter’s Basilica © iStockphoto.com/ToniFlap . Portrait of C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), United Kingdom, 1958. (Photo by Wolf Suschitzky/Pix Inc./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).
ISBN: 978-1-61890-230-6
Published in the United States by Saint Benedict Press, LLC PO Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 www.SaintBenedictPress.com
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
for WALTER HOOPER
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Introduction to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Escape from Puritania
2. A Sound Atheist
3. “Never Trust a Papist…”
4. Meeting Mother Kirk
5. Inklings and Reactions
6. Smuggling Theology
7. Lewis in Purgatory
8. Mere Christianity
9. More Christianity
10. The Mere and the Mire
11. Mire Christianity
Appendix: C. S. Lewis and Catholic Converts
Notes
FOREWORD
T HE QUESTION of C. S. Lewis’s churchmanship is a question that won’t go away. When he billed himself, in the 1940s, as a “mere” Christian, it seemed a stroke of genius. Yes. Why not have an apologia for the ancient Faith that avoids all partisan matters, and lays out for the unbeliever (and for the believer too, for that matter) the nature of Christian belief, and the reasoning underlying that corpus of belief? Certainly the success of Lewis’s apologetic work would seem to testify to the wisdom of the approach that he chose. How many people (millions?) would give Lewis the credit for having assisted them along to true, regenerating Christian faith?
Is it pettifogging, then, to raise, forty years after Lewis’s death, the question of his particular churchmanship? Can we not simply leave it where he wished to leave it? He never tried to hide his Anglicanism; but he never wanted to give his description of the Faith any remotest Anglican tint. Surely this is praiseworthy?
Indeed. But difficulties do arise. Lewis wished to leave on one side various “peripheral” topics. But what if those topics are not peripheral to the most immense, most ancient, body of Christians? The nature of the Eucharist (and of all of the Sacraments, actually); and the role of the Blessed Virgin in the drama of Redemption; and the sacerdotal, apostolic priesthood; and the office of Peter; and the Communion of the Saints; and the doctrine of Purgatory—these can be called “peripheral” only by an avowed partisan, namely, a Protestant. And Protestantism is a late-comer to the Christian scene. So. There is an anomaly here: Lewis wishes us to accept his identity as a “mere” Christian; but we find that the truth of the matter is that he was a mere Protestant. Quite ferociously so, as it happens. His Ulster background colored his attitudes more garishly than he, in his coldly rational moments, might have wished to admit. (He is furious, for example, when a Catholic publisher of one of his books seems to want to market it to “Dublin riff-raff.”)
But there are more anomalies. Although he loathed the whole business of “High,” “Broad,” and “Low” churchmanship in the Church of England, he could not avoid it all. He had nothing but contempt for the Broad churchmen who diluted the Faith until it was a mere sickly gruel (see his Anglican bishop in The Great Divorce). And he detested the “smells and bells,” lace-cotta, biretta sort of thing that one finds at Anglo-Catholic shrines, and which formed the métier of T. S. Eliot. He just wanted to be left alone, to go to church and be done with it.
But it was not so simple. In spite of himself, Lewis moved more and more toward what can only be called a “catholic” Anglicanism. Again—he hated the epicene punctilio of the Anglo-Catholic party: but his faith came to embrace all sorts of doctrines and practices that his evangelical readers (who are his most enthusiastic clientele) must sedulously ignore. He spoke of “the Blessed Virgin,” and made his confession to his priest regularly, and believed in purgatory, and even came to refer to the Eucharist as—heaven help us all— the Mass!
Lewis’s anti-Romanism remained with him until his death, however. The point of a book like this is not to quibble. Joseph Pearce is one of Lewis’s strong allies. But Lewis’s public will find here, I think, an enormous amount of material that is both fascinating and—it must be admitted—germane.
Thomas Howard
Manchester, Massachusetts
INTRODUCTION
A SERIOUS CASE OF ANGLO-PHILIA
A S AN American college student in the late 1970s I was afflicted with a severe case of a dangerous disease called Anglo-philia—the love of all things English—and C. S. Lewis was largely to blame. I had been brought up in an Evangelical Fundamentalist family, and after high school I visited England while on a mission trip to Europe.
I was captivated by the robust life of London, the wry humor of the people, the quaint antiquity of English villages, the living links to the literary history, and the mellow beauty of the countryside. I arrived home and said to my parents, “I’m going to live over there one day!”
The Protestant religion in our home was a quiet, sincere, and deep faith. Our Christianity was the “old, old story” of a human race lost in sin and the saving love of God who sent his son for our redemption. We were fervent believers, but our faith was not fiery. After high school, however, I attended Bob Jones University (the fundamentalist college in South Carolina), and there the temperature of the religion was rather warmer.
Dr. Bob Jones preached against the Catholic Church which was “the great whore of Babylon.” Liberals were the enemy, the seminarian “preacher boys” were ready to roll, and hell was real. This rip snortin’ religion wasn’t for me. I had already imbibed deeply of English culture and as a Speech and English major I went further up and further in. I was discovering a form of Christianity which was deeper, broader, and more ancient than anything I had met with before. The problem was that fundamentalists considered this “other Christianity” of the mainline Protestant denominations to be “liberal” and “worldly.” We were taught how modernism had infected the Protestant churches and that they were not to be trusted. In the midst of these intellectually stormy waters, C. S. Lewis threw me a lifeline.
Lewis provided a bridge between the historic, Biblical Christianity I had been taught as a boy and the real roots of that faith in the European tradition. Lewis’s writings were orthodox and acceptable but they were also intelligent, witty, and fresh. He upheld something he called “Mere Christianity” which was the basic, Biblical historic Christian faith. That was what I believed, and yet Lewis was clearly not a fundamentalist, Southern Baptist. What religion was he? Like T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, John Donne, and others it turned out that Lewis was a member of the Church of England, and that he believed it was possible to be a “mere Christian” within the Anglican Church.
I was delighted to find that an Anglican church existed in Greenville, South Carolina, and that we were permitted to go there. So with some other students I started attending the little stone church in the bad part of town, and was immediately taken with the Book of Common Prayer, lighting candles, singing decent hymns, and kneeling to pray. This was C. S. Lewis’s church! Someone gave me a picture book called C. S. Lewis : Images of His World. It was full of photographs of golden green Oxford quadrangles and people punting on the River Cam. There were pictures of Lewis and the Inklings smoking pipes and swilling beer in cosy English pubs. The book was all misty fields, quiet English rivers, the hobbiton-like hills of rural England, the heavenly glories of Cambridge chapels, and the homely glories of country churches.
I was hooked. It was in that little Anglican Church in the heart of the American South that I was baptized and confirmed into the Anglican Church and heard my own call to the ordained ministry.
THE APPEAL OF ANGLICANISM
The Anglicanism of C. S. Lewis is attractive to many American Evangelicals because it gives historical and philosophical roots to the subjective, free flowing, and wide ranging experience of modern American Protestantism. The classical Anglican position is that the Church of England (and by extension the other churches of the Anglican Communion) are the ancient Catholic Church properly reformed. Anglicans like to insist that their church is one of the three ancient apostolic churches along with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, but that it has affirmed all that is good from the Protestant Reformation.
Anglicans claim that they have retained the ancient faith while excising the excesses and excrescences of Roman Catholicism. Anglicanism, they argue, is a Catholic form of Protestantism, and holds together the good parts of both in a via media— a middle way. One of the reasons C. S. Lewis was committed to Anglicanism was because he believed this via media was the best place to preach the simple Christian faith which he termed “mere Christianity.”
This was Anglicanism’s main appeal for me. I felt I could be Catholic without being Roman Catholic. I could share in the ancient tradition, culture, and spirituality of Catholicism, without all the foreign fuss, frippery and folderol. I could be Catholic without all the tireso