Catholicism lecture celebrates C.S. Lewis
By: Tess Civantos
Posted: 10/7/09
Although C.S. Lewis made fun of Catholics as a teen, he was actually incredibly close to being Catholic himself, associate professor of Literature and Writer-in-Residence at Ave Maria University Joseph Pearce said in a lecture Tuesday.
Pearce’s lecture was the third of four in the “Close to Catholic: A Celebration of Kindred Spirits” series, sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Culture.
Pearce has a close personal connection to Lewis’ story. Both converted after reading G.K. Chesterton’s writings – Pearce from agnosticism to Catholicism and Lewis from atheism to Anglicanism.
Having published “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church” in 2003, Pearce is considered a C.S. Lewis expert.
Pearce began his lecture with a story. Russell Kirk, a prominent American conservative thinker, was once asked, “”If C.S. Lewis were alive today, would he be Catholic?’ Kirk responded, ‘Probably.'”
Pearce traced the four phases of the Catholic literary revival, which began with Wordsworth and Coleridge and concluded with “the Inklings,” a club of Oxford professors that included Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
The conundrum, Pearce said, is that Lewis was not Catholic.
“Lewis saw himself as resolutely on the side of orthodox theology and as a great enemy of theological modernism,” Pearce said. Lewis saw theological modernism as a poor dilution of Christianity, he explained.
“He was a great ally of Chesterton’s view that orthodoxy is something dynamic that changes hearts, changes minds and changes society.”
Pearce said Tolkien attributed Lewis’ steadfast Anglicanism to his patriotic roots, since he was born in historically Protestant Northern Ireland.
“If you asked Tolkien why Lewis never became Catholic, he’s answer you in three words,” Pearce said. “The Ulsterior motive.” Ulster is another name for Northern Ireland.
As a teen at boarding school in England, the atheist Lewis wrote home to his father about “the crazy Papists and popery” of the Anglican High Church, but it was there that he first thought religion could have substance.
Lewis served in World War I and he first encountered Chesterton while recovering at a hospital in France. Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” showed Christ as the center of history. Reading this view of Christianity was “a major milestone on Lewis’s path back to Christian belief.”
Lewis began to believe in God, but “he didn’t much like God” since he saw God as a vivisecting, controlling being, Pearce said.
The final crucial step in Lewis’ conversion was a conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose love of mythology had originally made the two men friends.
“Lewis said that myths are lies,” Pearce said.
Christianity, meanwhile, is itself a myth “but it’s the true myth, with God Himself as the storyteller,” he said.
Shortly after this conversation, Lewis converted to Anglicanism.
Later in his life, Lewis attended the sacrament of confession, referred to his love for “the Blessed Sacrament” and repeatedly wrote about his belief in Purgatory.
Lewis never converted, but he wrote on his deathbed that he expected to be in Purgatory soon.
“To return to the Russell Kirk question, ‘Is C.S. Lewis a Catholic?'” Pearce said, “I would say, if he’s in purgatory, he is [Catholic] now.”
© Copyright 2009 The Observer
I think your conclusion is correct, Joseph. It was likely a nationalistic impulse that caused Lewis to choose Anglicanism reflexively, and not Catholicisim, in the first place, given both his own natural patriotism and his Northern Ireland origin. That was an instinctive choice for him at the beginning of his faith.
The estrangement of Tolkien and Lewis, rather odd when one considers how instrumental Tolkien was in helping Lewis overcome his objections to Christianity, occurs at a considerably later point, and may have more to do with respective religious sentiments than we know.
I’ve always suspected a bit that wives had something to do with things here. Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman (which Tolkien called “strange”) closed the door to any possibility of his becoming Catholic–even if he’d wanted to. Around the same time (I think–not sure) the trouble in Tolkien’s marriage occurred and included Edith’s leaving the Church, which her marriage to Tolkien had forced her to join. Just as Tolkien and Lewis were estranged, their wives became very close friends. Odd, that. Each was married to a literary genius, but apart from that, they had utterly nothing in common (except perhaps a shared antipathy toward the Catholic Church? With husband-connected causes?) Speculation, of course.
Thereafter, Lewis and Tolkien continued their deep regard for each other and mutual respect, but one of the greatest literary friendships of the 20th century was dead. I can’t help but think that wives and religion had something to do with that. After all, Lewis’s joining the Anglican Church in the early days did not affect the friendship–only after his marriage. It was during this time, wasn’t it?, that he wrote the very Catholic That Hideous Strength. And prior to his marriage, there’s no evidence (that I know of) of any hostility, restrained or otherwise, toward the Church.
But one of the neat things about being just a reader and not a published scholar is that I can speculate all I want to and never have to prove anything!