CS Lewis' mature theology is not Anglican, but unmistakeably Catholic. He speaks of the Eucharist in unmistakeably Catholic terms ("Next to the Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest reality accessible to your senses") and confesses that he believes in Purgatory. That being the case, the question "Why are you not a Catholic" has to be asked. Lewis himself was asked it, and he spoke vaguely of things that had changed in the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages, but never came up with any specifics. In a man so willing to take on any and all comers when debating religion, this is a very remarkable attitude indeed. Tolkien, who was Catholic, felt that he could perceive a certain underlying Ulster prejudice in his sometime friend - "the ulsterior motive", he called it. And you have to remember that Lewis lived through the upheaval of the Irish revolution and civil war. Lewis described himself all his life as an Irishman, and the Ireland of his childhood, the Ireland he speaks of in Surprised by joy and elsewhere, was a country where Dublin and Cork were no less accessible and no less part of the same world than Belfast. His own father, I seem to remember, came from Cork. Lewis fought in the British Army in WWI; that is, he had the same kind of background as the Black and Tans, or as those Irish prisoners who nearly lynched Roger Casement when the German authorities unwisely allowed him to speak to them. (It is not commonly remembered that, when Padraic Pearse and his people started the revolt, most of the young Irish most committed to Union were away from Ireland, and a considerable part were never to come back at all.) AS civil wars go, what happened in Ireland from 1916 to 1923 is moderate enough, but it was nasty enough to paint itself in the memory of all who took part. Tens of thousands of loyalists and Protestants left Eire for ever. Lewis and Tolkien's own friend, Neville Coghill, had the dreadful experience of being subjected to a mock execution by an IRA patrol. Anyone who was on the losing side of the Irish disturbances was not going to feel very happy about Catholicism. Lewis himself admits to an abiding, irrational fear of Catholics in his letter to Sr.Penelope CSMV of April 10, 1941, making a joke of it, but I think that, in the light of his fairly evident bad conscience about it later and elsewhere, we might take the hint just a bit more seriously than he wants us to.
By Darwinism, in this article, I definitely meant political Darwinism, or Social Darwinism, including but not restricted to Eugenics. There has long been a wholly unphilosophical and unreasoning tendency to see evolution as something inevitably positive and inevitably leading to better and higher forms. This is nonsense, but it is a nonsense that dominated Western attitudes through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is not dead yet.
It seems that Lewis's views of prayer expressed in Letters to Malcolm were pretty Protestant, and indeed one detects a disturbing Platonism in some of his writing...
The Platonism in Lewis' writing is not exactly concealed (check the Professor's refrain, "It's all in Plato" in The Last Battle), and nor does it seem to me at all dangerous - unless you reckon St.Augustine and Pope Benedict XVI dangerous. Platonism is, if not connaturate to the Christian religion (Irenaeus of Lyons and Thomas Aquinas, to quote only two giants, were not Platonists), at least a "recognized party". And I think that the essay you quote pushes the issue of Lewis' "barbs" against Catholicism much too far. For instance, about the passage about devotions to Saints, what Lewis has to say is nothing more than what many Catholic reformers have said down the years, indeed what the Vatican itself has backed by outlawing a number of outlandish devotions and derubricating several unhistorical saints. (If only they had got rid of the euhemerized pagan goddess St.Bridget!) As for the relevance of Tolkien's dislike of some features of Lewis' thought, while I appreciate (and indeed mentioned) the importance of "the ulsterior motive" in assessing Lewis' allegiances, nonetheless you have to remember that Tolkien was a very partisan kind of Catholic: a supporter of Franco, an avowed opponent of democracy, and a man who carried in his bones the rage of seeing his mother literally die of malnutrition because of the stone-hearted rejection by her Protestant relations. His Catholicism was considerably more partisan and exclusive than that of, say, GK Chesterton; almost to the point of being sectarian. Incredibly, he was not only pained by CS Lewis' refusal to support Franco in the Spanish Civil war - in which Lewis took the only possible course, damning both sides as tyrannical and vicious - but he actualy ascribed it to Lewis' supposed anti-Catholic prejudice, as if the only reason to disapprove of military tyranny and subversion were religious prejudice. Did Tolkien even realize that he was practically defending Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon?
I remain unconvinced over Lewis and his ulsterism. To ascribe a negative prejudice to his decision, or rather non-decision, to become a Catholic seems to assume that the Anglican Church could not accomodate his beliefs. More than any other the Anglican Church is a broad church, containing as it does functional athiests right through to high-church 'catholics' whose differences with the Catholic Church are minimal. If a return to the church of his youth accomodated his beliefs, then why would he change?
And I woulde reject utterly your assertion that Lewis came from the same community which gave rise to the Black & Tans. Lewis came from a very different class and indeed country. The Black & Tans were not recruited from Ireland as a whole or Ulster in particular, they came mainly from England and were drawn from those who had no other opportunities after their return from the war. Indeed many were alleged to have come from jails, or to have selected 'service' over prison when before the courts. Not at all similar to Lewis' middle-class background.
That being said, I'm afriad Irish History is the subject which has caused me to distrust almost all history. I have seen, in my lifetime, a total rewriting of the history of events over the last 100 years. A process that continues to this day, especially over events over the past thirty years. Events that I lived through, that my parents and grandparents lived through have been denied or warped. If similar changes and, on occasions, outright distortions occur in other areas, then it is difficult to treat any history as anything other than fiction.
I take your corrections about Irish history, the more so as I have written my article on Fascism exactly to challenge the same kind of politically motivated rewriting of recent history of my own country which you decry. My basic point was, I know who and what Fascists are - incredibly, I have even had Fascist friends. So I regard Mr.Goldberg's thesis as an imposition. About the Black and Tans, I generalized from the life history of William Joyce, the man who became Lord Haw-Haw, who certainly was an Irishman, fought in WWI, and became a Black and Tan. All his later politics were dictated by his embitterment in the years that followed the war. My point was not that Lewis would ever have become a Black and Tan - I agree that his upper-middle class background would not have agreed with becoming a cheap pseudo-soldier - but that he came from a group which essentially had their own country taken away from them about 1922. Lewis described himself as an "Irishman" (not an "ulsterman", a definition he associated with sectarianism) to the end of his life, and while his swift entrance into Oxford gave him opportunities that less fortunate loyalists may not have had, we cannot imagine that the transformation of three-quarters of his fatherland into a foreign country did not affect him; the more so as he met Coghill there, with his stories of IRA brutality. He said himself that he had "been taught from the cradle never to trust a Catholic", and that meeting with such men as Tolkien and Dr.Havard had been a real revelation. And may I say, I have met a few Anglicans and a few Protestants in my life. When I come across someone who gives as much value to the first part of the Scriptural injunction to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" as to the second, "for it is God Who works within you", and indeed makes it one of his most frequent quotations; who does not like hymns; who believes in Purgatory; who is conscientious about the details of the sacrament of marriage to the point of lawyerliness; who regards the Eucharist as the holiest thing you will ever encounter, transcending human reason; who has the highest possible regard for the priesthood, and not only for the Anglican but for the Catholic priesthood (read his correspondence with Don Giovanni Calabria); and who seems to pattern himself after GK Chesterton - well, I think I have some reason to ask, Why are you not Catholic?
I have finished the essay you linked me to. Considering that I have just finished a long polemical essay, I hope you will forgive me if I don't tackle the whole of it in a systematic way; but I am afraid that the more I went into it, the worse it seemed to me. He misrepresents Narnia (where the Fall was partly averted, unlike our world, as everyone who read The Magician's Nephew ought to know) as being exactly like our world, and therefore having the same relationship with the Second Person of the Trinity. He does not connect Lewis' mention of Aslan "coming and going" with his devastating account of spiritual dryness in The Screwtape Letters, which is what Lewis obviously meant: that is, that there are times when we subjectively feel incapable of perceiving the presence of God in any way. The Narnia stories, after all, were very much written for children, and Lewis was not going to deliver as desolating and frightful a description of spiritual loneliness as he did elsewhere; but there can be no doubt that, by the "absence" of Aslan, he meant exactly that - that dreadful mystery that led God Himself to scream "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Indeed, by making this mistake, the author even fails to bring the proper theological charge against Lewis: that is, that he seems to have mistaken the Second Person with the Third, since it is the Spirit whose absence we feel in the periods of dryness. The worst of all is the denial of Lewis having any belief in the Sacrament and the Real Presence. What on Earth did Lewis have to say for this person to listen? He said that the Sacrament was the holiest object we will meet on this Earth; that we are under an absolute obligation to attend the Eucharist every week, and to do so at our territorial parish (scarcely a Protestant doctrine!); and that the redeeming power of the Eucharist is as real as the mightiest magic in the fables - favete linguis, be still and know I am the Lord. The whole essay seems to me written in the spirit, not of a sympathetic inquirer, but of an able though not over-scrupulous prosecutor out to get a conviction by hook or by crook.
By Darwinism, in this article, I definitely meant political Darwinism, or Social Darwinism, including but not restricted to Eugenics. There has long been a wholly unphilosophical and unreasoning tendency to see evolution as something inevitably positive and inevitably leading to better and higher forms. This is nonsense, but it is a nonsense that dominated Western attitudes through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is not dead yet.
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And I woulde reject utterly your assertion that Lewis came from the same community which gave rise to the Black & Tans. Lewis came from a very different class and indeed country. The Black & Tans were not recruited from Ireland as a whole or Ulster in particular, they came mainly from England and were drawn from those who had no other opportunities after their return from the war. Indeed many were alleged to have come from jails, or to have selected 'service' over prison when before the courts. Not at all similar to Lewis' middle-class background.
That being said, I'm afriad Irish History is the subject which has caused me to distrust almost all history. I have seen, in my lifetime, a total rewriting of the history of events over the last 100 years. A process that continues to this day, especially over events over the past thirty years. Events that I lived through, that my parents and grandparents lived through have been denied or warped. If similar changes and, on occasions, outright distortions occur in other areas, then it is difficult to treat any history as anything other than fiction.
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