C. S. Lewis for Catholics

Abstract

C. S. Lewis for Catholics David P. Deavel The reputation of Clive Staples Lewis, known as C. S. Lewis to his readers and Jack to his friends, has been a strange one. The quintessentially English writer, born in the north of Ireland, was in certain ways a rather parochial figure who only ventured out of the ambit of England and Ireland on the occasions of a childhood holiday in France, time on the western front in World War I, and a late-life trip to Greece for his honeymoon with a divorced, ex-communist writer who had essentially forced her way into his life and heart. Yet he has found international success, particularly in America. Given that he always called himself an ordinary lay member of the Anglican Church, his strongest following has always been among Evangelical Protestants in America. But second to the reputation among Evangelicals would have to be his reputation among Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox), many of whom consider him to be a writer who tapped into the central truths of Catholic faith and brought them to life not only in his many essays, but also his imaginative stories. Fr. Peter Milward, a Jesuit who studied with Lewis in the 1950s at Oxford, recalled that during his Jesuit formation an instructor was using Lewis’s Screwtape Letters for spiritual training. Don Giovanni [End Page 5] Calabria, an Italian priest who is now St. Giovanni, kept up an admiring correspondence in Latin for many years with Lewis (those letters, along with translations by Lewis’s former student Martin Moynihan, have been published several times). At a conference in the 1990s Fr. Joseph Fessio, the Jesuit founder of Ignatius Press, proposed that a joint ecumenical statement be drawn up for all the historic Christian faiths that would require subscription to Holy Scripture, the Apostles’ Creed, the first six ecumenical councils, and the writings of C. S. Lewis. The proposal was somewhat tongue in cheek, but it was warmly cheered.1 The admiration goes higher up the Catholic hierarchical chain. Walter Hooper, a young Anglican priest and erst-while academic who became Lewis’s secretary at the end of Lewis’s life and spent the rest of his life editing Lewis’s uncollected writings and writing about the man himself, recounted a meeting with St. John Paul II in which he presented some volumes of Lewis to the pontiff. John Paul, who had read much of Lewis’s writing, said to Hooper, “C.S. Lewis knew what his apostolate was, and he did it!”2 Benedict XVI himself cited Lewis’s Four Loves positively in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) as he built up the case for the possibility of lower human loves leading to and becoming incorporated in agape, that specific form of love to which the New Testament calls Christians. Indeed, not only has Lewis been admired by Catholics, but he has been a source of many a conversion to Catholicism. I certainly count him as an indispensable step on the way from my own childhood Evangelical Calvinism. My sixth-grade English teacher, Carol Somsel, required us to read books independently and then show that we had read them, either through taking a computerized test (for a number of books considered classics or standard children’s fare) or through giving her the book and then letting her interview us as to whether we had read and comprehended. That year I plowed through the Narnia tales. They whetted my taste for Lewis. I wanted to know about him and to be like him—to smoke a pipe and wear tweed. Though the assignment was the reading of fiction, in Mrs. Somsel’s [End Page 6] great wisdom she allowed me nonfiction related to Lewis, including: an encyclopedia of the Narnia books; Clyde Kilby’s illustrated C. S. Lewis: Images of his World, with its lush black-and-white photographs of Oxford, Lewis’s beloved Irish landscapes, influential figures like George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, and the Inklings themselves (J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield); and even Lewis’s philosophical and theological tomes Mere Christianity and God in the Dock. Given that...