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ArdenB
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I just found out that C.S. Lewis was Anglican. I’m kind of shocked. I always thought he was Catholic. Is anyone else surprised? I wonder what he’d think of the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
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kristie_m
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I actually knew this. His writings are excellent (of particular note is "The Screwtape Letters), and seem to reflect the “catholic with a small c” ideas that you find in the more conservative Anglican churches.
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Antegin
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I thought Anglican was Catholic Lite: less filling on truth, same great tastehttp://www.theuk2day.com/UPLOAD/Packs/%2319%20Gangster/Animated%20Emoticons/laughingOutLoud.gif
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bpbasilphx
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As he said in Mere Christianity: “There’s no secret to my own believed; they are in the Book of Common Prayer.”
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VociMike
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Yes, he was Anglican. Joseph Pearce has written about Lewis’ relationship to the Catholic Church, and, as I remember it, his conclusion was that Lewis had a lot of childhood Ulster Protestant anti-Catholic baggage that would surface now and then throughout his life. There is no question that Lewis’ theology was very Catholic (moreso than a great many actual Catholics today 
). Further, his one-time personal secretary and now trustee and literary advisor of Lewis’ estate, Walter Hooper, has stated that he believes Lewis would have come into the Catholic Church had he lived longer and witnessed the disintegration (my word) of the Anglican church. Hooper did come into the Church in 1988.
). Further, his one-time personal secretary and now trustee and literary advisor of Lewis’ estate, Walter Hooper, has stated that he believes Lewis would have come into the Catholic Church had he lived longer and witnessed the disintegration (my word) of the Anglican church. Hooper did come into the Church in 1988.
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kristie_m
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That’s a pretty apt description, I think. I came back to the Catholic church via the Anglican church. It’s gotten REALLY weird.
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emeraldcoast
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I have always heard catholic without all the guilt…
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GKC
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Overall, Pearce’s book is not bad, certainly better than a couple of others that address this issue, that is a reoccurring one among RCs. And Pearce is following Tolkien in that particular opinion.Yes, he was Anglican. Joseph Pearce has written about Lewis’ relationship to the Catholic Church, and, as I remember it, his conclusion was that Lewis had a lot of childhood Ulster Protestant anti-Catholic baggage that would surface now and then throughout his life. There is no question that Lewis’ theology was very Catholic (moreso than a great many actual Catholics today
This is a subject that comes up regularly and regularly I make a comment. To assume that Lewis made his decisions on a less than rational basis is both to cast doubt on his other points, and to poison the discourse on the matter. We know why Chesterton for example, converted. He said so. We know why Lewis didn’t. He said so.
Hooper is without a doubt, a great world class Lewis scholar, who assisted Lewis for a very few months at the end of Lewis’ life. But there are questions in the Lewisian world about some of Hooper’s claims (see the late Katherine Lindskoog’s books). It is possible that Lewis would have gone to Rome, if he had lived a decade or so longer; no one knows. Certainly he moved from the centrist position he was in, when he rejoined the CoE, to a much more Anglo-Catholic one, over his life, on such issues as auricular confession, the Real Presence and (most likely) Purgatory. Whether he would have become RC, no one knows. Including Hooper.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Have you come across this essay ?
- C.S. Lewis and Mother Kirk
**The author disagrees with Pearce, & explains why he thinks it was that Lewis did not “Pope”. **
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PatienceAndLove
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less guilt, same great taste
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SIA
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I always knew C.S. Lewis was Anglican, no surprise there!
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SIA
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Why does garbage like this have to be entertained here? He was Anglican, end of story! It amazes me how so many here will assume that if someone lived long enough or if the stars and planets would have lined up just right, they would have somehow miraculously turned Catholic. Here’s the reality and truth of it all in two simple words, “they didn’t!”.Yes, he was Anglican. Joseph Pearce has written about Lewis’ relationship to the Catholic Church, and, as I remember it, his conclusion was that Lewis had a lot of childhood Ulster Protestant anti-Catholic baggage that would surface now and then throughout his life. There is no question that Lewis’ theology was very Catholic (moreso than a great many actual Catholics today
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Jeanette_L
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I’ve read just about everything Lewis wrote and published, I knew he was Anglican, and it was still his writings that led me to the Catholic Church. Go figure. 
I’m sure he is not unhappy about that from where he stands now.
I’m sure he is not unhappy about that from where he stands now.
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SIA
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that’s your opinion.I’ve read just about everything Lewis wrote and published, I knew he was Anglican, and it was still his writings that led me to the Catholic Church. Go figure.
I’m sure he is not unhappy about that from where he stands now.
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GKC
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I know the author, but not the article. I’d quibble on a point or two, of terminology (I think any Christian, of any stripe, should be wary of the idea of realized eschatology, but that might only be said to make Hutchen’s point). And perhaps a point or two further. But, in brief, a very good article, which certainly moves away from the simple-minded " residual Ulster bigotry" approach and leaves the well of discourse pure and unpoisoned, and Lewis’ conclusions resting on a logical base, whether they led him to Rome or no. It now resides in my Lewis collection. Thank you.Have you come across this essay
- C.S. Lewis and Mother Kirk
The author disagrees with Pearce, & explains why he thinks it was that Lewis did not “Pope”.
GKC
Yes it certainly is!
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Contarini
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It’s an interesting but deeply misguided book, and in some places simply uninformed. Pearce doesn’t seem to have much understanding of the various varieties of Anglicanism, and he doesn’t really even try to understand Lewis’s thought on its own terms.
In terms of mid-20th-century Anglicanism, Lewis started as fairly Low Church but came under increasing Anglo-Catholic influence as he got older. I’ve been reading through his letters as edited by Hooper, and have got to 1953. In the early 1950s at least he was still writing the occasional letter to the Church Times protesting various Anglo-Catholic moves toward “Rome” (such as the establishment of official canonization, which was suggested by some Anglo-Catholics). He did have a close relationship with a number of Anglo-Catholics (and of course with a number of “real” Catholics as well, such as Tolkien and Havard–I can’t remember if Dyson was Catholic or Anglican), and they clearly had a lot of influence on him. He certainly came to believe certain things that are more usually characteristic of the Anglo-Catholic wing of Anglicanism. However, he rejected many of the things Anglo-Catholics believed, and nothing Lewis said went beyond what many Anglo-Catholics of his time and mine would say.There is no question that Lewis’ theology was very Catholic (moreso than a great many actual Catholics today
Hooper’s indefatigable work in editing Lewis is admirable. I am not aware of any reason to put much confidence in his judgment on such speculative matters. Lewis’s congenital pessimism and grumpiness would have well suited him to existence in modern Anglicanism. He generally took the view that things were likely to fall apart and that people in authority didn’t know what they were doing (at best). Yet he kept plugging on. His objections to your Communion appear to have been quite strong, and the fact that he rarely voiced them did not necessarily mean that they were irrational prejudices. I am willing to take him at his word–he didn’t see the point of getting into an argument about it. (He generally refused to argue about Anthroposophy with Owen Barfield after his converstion to Christianity–does that mean that only childhood prejudices kept him from becoming an Anthroposophist?)
Edwin
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GKC
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Dyson was Anglican.
And, indeed, there is good reason to put little confidence in some of Hooper’s declarations of “fact”, in some cases where he is the sole source for it.
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Contarini
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This article should be much more troubling to non-Catholic admirers of Lewis (it certainly is to me) than Pearce’s breezy and truculent polemic. The section of *Pilgrim’s Regress *to which Hutchens alludes is describing the Neo-Platonic, Neo-Hegelian philosophy Lewis adhered to before becoming a Christian. Mr. Wisdom and his nobler children (some of them were mere fakes) are revealed later in the book (through the eyes of faith) as inhabitants of Limbo (as in Dante’s limbo of the virtuous heathen). Because they kept the desire for God alive but refused to allow themselves to hope for a real fulfillment of that desire, they have condemned themselves to live for eternity in desire without hope. I have to wonder what on earth Hutchens was thinking in using this passage to argue for a Protestant ecclesiology.Have you come across this essay
- C.S. Lewis and Mother Kirk
The author disagrees with Pearce, & explains why he thinks it was that Lewis did not “Pope”.
But here’s the thing: I think Hutchens actually has a point. One could make a case that Lewis’s thought was always influenced by Platonism more than was entirely good for him as an orthodox Christian. Lewis’s congenital pessimism and anti-institutionalism no doubt also played a role. Lewis’s attitude to the Catholic Church may to some extent have been a survival of his pre-Christian attitude toward Christianity as a whole. If someone had tried to convince Lewis of this, I think they would have failed. Probably Lewis would have thought this was just another attempt to psychologize ideas away instead of taking them seriously. But if Lewis had been convinced that Hutchens was right, I think that might actually have made him a lot more likely to convert to Catholicism. I think that Lewis, like me, would recognize the “ecclesiology of limbo” as a temptation rather than an expression of orthodox Christianity. (And yes, the blog post to which I linked does imply an imminent conversion on my part which, as so often before, failed to materialize. I would stand by the last sentence of the post, and the entire question continues to haunt and trouble me. But I am less certain than I was when I wrote the article that being a unity-minded Protestant has to be spiritually poisonous.)
Lewis spoke over and over again of Christian unity as something that must be worked for and that might be achieved at some point in the future. He never spoke of it as something that should be relegated on principle to the “other side of the chasm.”
Edwin
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