 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm your host, Joseph Pierce. Thanks for joining me. And this week we're looking at the great C.S. Lewis and looking at his life and understanding him as the author with the authorial authoritative voice that allows us to understand his works, his great works of fiction and nonfiction. So when I look at the Catholic cultural revival and the Catholic literary revival are normally divided into four sections very, very briefly. The first is the gestation period, the time of when it's in utero, if you like, in the womb before it becomes fully manifest. And that's the period from the romantic, from the romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballast published in 1798, through to the conversion of John Henry Newman in 1845. So a 47 year gestation period. Then we have the first period of the Catholic cultural revival, which is the Newman period 1845, Newman's entry into the church until his death in 1890, a 45 year period. We then have an interlude, what I call the decadent interlude between 1890 and 1900. That decade is sometimes called the Decade of Decadence or the Decadent Decade or La Fanda Circular, the 1890s or the Norte 90s. But again, in the midst of that, many of the English and French decadent writers became converts to Catholicism. So it's certainly part, if you like, the underbeddy of this Catholic cultural revival we're talking about. But then the next definitive period, so Oscar Wilde, the godfather of the English decadence, is receiving it into the church on his deathbed in 1900. 1900 is also the year in which G.K. Chesterton is first published. So I normally speak about the next period being the period of the Chester Bellock, the period at which Chesterton and Bellock are at the forefront, the avant-garde of the Catholic cultural revival. And that takes us from 1900 until Chesterton's death in 1936. All works out quite well because then we come to the next period, which is what I call either the Inklings period named after a group that C.S. Lewis founded in Oxford or even the Tolkien and Lewis period of the Catholic cultural or the Catholic literary revival, which we can say last from the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, the year after Chesterton's death to the death of Tolkien in 1973. So we have Lewis and Tolkien as being at the forefront of this period of the Catholic cultural revival from the mid-30s to the mid-70s. Now, what's intriguing here, of course, though, unlike most of the other writers that form the heart of this revival, Lewis, of course, was not a Catholic. And so I would look at that aspect of him of his life as well. It's not technically a Catholic. So it raises all sorts of questions. How Catholic or anti-Catholic or non-Catholic was he? So that's perhaps what we'll try to grapple with as part of the core of this episode. First of all, Lewis always despised modernism. I'm talking about theological modernism here, the modernism that believes that the Church should move with the world rather than the Church should move the world. He called modernism Christianity and water. It's the dilution of the purity of the gospel with the water of the world, shall we say, worldliness, fashion. So whereas Chesterton, who was not a Catholic when he wrote his book Orthodoxy, he was trying to look at a way in which Christians of different denominations could work together and what constitutes Christianity in this broader sense of the word, as long as by broader we don't mean so broad-minded that it becomes Christianity and water. It becomes diluted Christianity. So what we're looking for is that distillation, that which distills the essence of Christianity, not that which dilutes it. So for Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy, he took the words of the Apostles Creed as that which it delineates Christian doctrine. And the Apostles Creed is something of course, which Eastern Orthodox Catholics and Anglicans and indeed other Protestant denominations are comfortable with agreeing with. So the post-Critic distillation. Lewis, on the other hand, in mere Christianity was basically doing the same thing. What is it that brings us all together? And what he was working for was a highest common factor as distinct from a lowest common denominator. Lowest common denominator is again that Christianity and water, that modernist dilution of the faith with worldliness. The highest common factor is what is it unites all Christians? And of course, so that's what he does in mere Christianity. He shows that and cause certain sacramental dimensions, baptism, etc. But but but certainly a belief in the Trinity, in the unity of the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, that's essential. And also the incarnation that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. And these certainly are a minimum requirements for to be considered merely Christian. So Tolkien, sorry, Chesterton and Lewis were doing similar things, trying to unite authentic Orthodox Christians, even though they may have differences in in their approach to we say ecclesiology, to an understanding of what is the church. Interesting that in one of the first works that CS Lewis wrote, following his Christianity, following his conversion to Christianity, which we discussed somewhat last week in the episode on Tolkien, Tolkien's influence and Chesterton's influence on Lewis's conversion. He didn't write too much before his conversion, mostly poetry, and mostly which is not read very widely these days. But his first work as a Christian was a book called The Pilgrim's Regress. And this this shows Lewis's journey. First of all, away from Christianity, his loss of faith as a child, his embrace of atheism, and then a various, you know, intellectual currents of the day that that he engaged with and ultimately rejected in order to come back to Christianity. And it's interesting there that he speaks in that book about reason as a beautiful woman in shining armor, with two younger sisters, theology and philosophy, having the power to conquer, to defeat the monstrous spirit of the age and to release people that have been enslaved by the spirit of the age. So we see him using informal allegory here, this understanding of the union, unity of faith and reason fetus at ratio that marriage, which is the heart of all authentic Christian theology. As Chesterton remarked, when someone said that the religion of theology, not the same thing, when religion is controlled by the theologians, religious people stay away, Chesterton responded that actually all that theology is, is that part of religion that requires brains, that we do have to have a rational dimension to religion. So looking at parallels between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, both of them left the land in which they were born and ended up in Oxford. But there's a difference that that Lewis left Belfast in Northern Ireland to move to England, settling in Oxford. Tolkien was born in South Africa, ending up eventually in Oxford. But whereas Tolkien left South Africa behind, it doesn't form part of his enduring adult psyche, should we say, that's not true of Lewis, because Lewis never fully left Belfast behind. I talk about this somewhat in my book, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, about the influence of his anti Catholic childhood on throughout his life. Both of them again, looking at parallels between Tolkien and Lewis, both of them fought in World War One. Tolkien spoke about his serving in the animal horror of the of the battle of the Somme. He also talks about how the character of Samwise Gamgee is based upon Tolkien's own personal Batman. That's not Batman as in the superhero. Every every officer above a certain rank in the British army and Tolkien and Lewis were both officers, had a private soldier as a personal servant. And this is this personal service as a Batman. And Tolkien was so impressed by his own working class, private soldier who seemed to be more courageous and have more natural nobility and virtue than he did, that he sort of honoured that unknown soldier by being, if you like, the inspiration for Samwise Gamgee, Frodo's Gardener in the Lord of the Rings. The main thing during the First World War, as regards Lewis' development, was his first reading of G.K. Chesterton. Now by this time, Lewis is an atheist and somewhat cynical about things. And but he picks up a volume of G.K. Chesterton's essays. Unfortunately, we don't know which particular volume of essays by Chesterton this was. But it captivated Lewis immediately. And Lewis says in Surprise by Joy, his autobiography, that you'd have thought that Chesterton would be one of the least congenial of writers for an atheist, a cynical atheist like Lewis. But nonetheless, he couldn't help liking Chesterton. He liked his sense of humour. He liked his goodness. There's something about Chesterton's just the goodness, the sanctity of the character, which is attractive. And he said, you know, he's not being attractive to someone, even though you have no intention of sort of being like them. And he also loved the way that Chesterton used reason. Now, Lewis, I was born a long time after Lewis. But I think one thing I have in common with Lewis, we're both raised to believe you had to choose between between faith or reason that you can you can be religious, but you can only be religious by abandoning reason. Or you could have reason. But if you're going to have reason, you have to abandon the comforts of religion, you couldn't have both because they mutually contradictory. This was Lewis's position as well. When he first read Chesterton, when he was recovered from trench fever in a field hospital in France, and he came to realise through reading Chesterton that faith and reason not far from being mutually incompatible were mutually inseparable. So like me, he began reading more and more Chesterton. In the mid 1920s, he meets Tolkien for the first time and is forced to confront his own prejudices. He says that he'd been taught since his first arrival in Oxford, never to trust a philologist. You have to understand that Oxford University at the time, there's a bit of a civil war going on in the academic world between the linguists, those who studied languages, the philologists such as Tolkien, and the literature people, those who studied works of literature, such as C.S. Lewis. So there's this division between the languages and literature. So Tolkien is said as Lewis had been told upon his arrival at Oxford, never to trust a linguist. And he's been told ever since childhood, never to trust a papist. That's a term of abuse for a Catholic. He said Tolkien was both a linguist and a Catholic. So from the unpromising beginnings, a friendship was born and largely because of their shared love for mythology in general, and the mythology of Northern Europe and especially Norse mythology in particular, that brought them together. Even though they weren't united by faith, Lewis was still an atheist. Tolkien was a Catholic. And then in 1927, I believe it was, C.S. Lewis read G.K. Chesterton's book, The Everlasting Man. We should probably say a little bit about The Everlasting Man. I can't remember how much we said about it in the episode on Chesterton, but it either way, good and important things bear repetition. So H.G. Wells, just after World War One, had written series of books called The Outline of History, which is basically an atheistic, secular, progressivist understanding of human history, where the idea is that the part is barbaric. And the future will be a golden age in which barbarism and superstition and religion will be left behind and everyone will be happy because science will have delivered us from our own barbarism and ignorance. So, Hilaire Bellocke wrote a book called Mr Bellocke, sorry, wrote a book called A Companion to H.G. Wells' Outline of History, to which H.G. Wells wrote a reply Mr Bellocke objects and then Bellocke wrote a reply to Wells' reply, Mr Bellocke still objects and they went back and forth. But it was very argumentative in a quarrelsome way and Chesterton, one of Chesterton's maxims was a relationship with his brother, which I take as a personal motto. We were always arguing, but we never quarrelled. So an argument is a disagreement based upon getting at the truth, always held with charity. A quarrel is merely an argument, it's about winning or about harming the opponent in the absence of charity. So we must learn to argue without quarrelling. The argument between Bellocke and H.G. Wells became somewhat quarrelsome. The two men became enemies. This was not Chesterton's way. So he was a friend of H.G. Wells and a great friend of Bellocke. He remained friends to both men, even though he wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which was his own response to H.G. Wells' history. But done with such charity that Wells was not offended. And in fact, on two occasions, I think in the book where Wells has mentioned and Wells' book, the outline of history has mentioned, it's done with great charity and grace. But nonetheless, Chesterton, like Bellocke, thought that Wells was wrong. And the point about The Everlasting Man is the difference that the incarnation makes to history. So the first part of the book is pre-Christian. Before Christ, the second part of the book is Anno Domini in the Year of Our Lord. In other words, following the incarnation of the Gospel and the difference that that makes to human history. That's the thesis of Chesterton's book. The first chapter in part one is The Man in the Cave. So about the caveman. And the first chapter in part two is The God in the Cave, and there was Christ being born in the stable in Bethlehem. So Lewis reads this book in 1927 and is blown away by it. He says that he saw the Christian outline of history laid out before him in a way that made sense. And this was a major milestone upon Lewis's progress from atheism back to Christianity. And around this time he probably had been called a theist, one who believed in God, but not necessarily the Christian God. But again, this reading of Chesterton was crucial to Lewis's development in this respect. A little post-crypt on that, by the way. When a young Jewish girl in New York first read H.G. Wells' outline of sanity, she immediately ceased to be Jewish and became an atheist. She would later become a communist. She would then eventually read the works of C.S. Lewis and become a Christian. That young lady would become Mrs. Joy Lewis, C.S. Lewis's wife. So ironically what we have here is that Wells turned Joy, David, initially then was into an atheist and Lewis turned Joy Gresham, she then was being married into a Christian. But it was G.K. Chesterton's outline of history which converted C.S. Lewis. So such is the power, and that's one of the reasons what we're talking about is so important. This cultural revival is that network of grace and the networks of minds which activate and energize each other and bring people to Christ. None of us is an island. We all interact with others. We either have a good or positive or negative effect upon other people. Okay, where are we now? So having become a Christian, we see he wrote that book. The Pilgrim's Regress was spoken about already somewhat, could say more but won't. Lewis wrote then a book called The Great Divorce and shows the influence of another great Catholic writer that's been the subject of the authority and that's Dante. This is a look at the afterlife and hell, we seem to begin in hell, this dismal town, but then there's a day trip, a holiday from hell to the this bright place which is clearly purgatory because the the souls that come down from the high land, high ground, which is purgatory of course, is the anti-chamber of heaven, are doing so with a penitential spirit to as acts of penance where if you're in heaven proper, your sins have been completely and utterly forgiven and there's no acts of penance that necessary. So this is Lewis clearly influenced by Dante in a great psychology. The interesting thing about Lewis in his relationship to Catholicism and politics is an event with a writer, we have a featured in the authority and probably should, the great Catholic convert poet, her wife Campbell Tolkien and Lewis were in their favorite pub in Oxford, the burden baby or the eagle and child and there's this mysterious man in the corner with a wide-brimmed hat, crazy military uniform, it's during World War II and this person served in the king's African rifles and Lewis, Tolkien noticed him in the corner paying much more attention to Lewis and Tolkien's and the other inkling friends discussion of poetry than as usual amongst people and this mysterious strange in the corner reminded Tolkien of Strider, Aragorn, the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was in the middle of writing the Lord of the Rings at the time. When this man introduced himself as Roy Campbell, Lewis attacked him vehemently, Lewis had written a poem to the author of A Flowering Rifle, which is a poem that Lewis told, Campbell wrote in defense of the nationalist forces in Spain in the Spanish Civil War, Campbell had lived in, was living in Spain when the war began, the monks whom he'd befriended, the Commonwealth monks were killed in cold blood by the Communists, the priest who'd received Campbell and his wife and children into the church was killed in cold blood by the Communists, so of course Campbell was on the side of the Nationalists against the Marxists in that war but most people in England certainly all the socialists but most people except for the Catholics were on the side of the Marxists including C.S. Lewis surprisingly enough and so when he realized it was Campbell in the room he again attacked him, he apparently had a few glass of pour at the time Tolkien, Lewis this is, and was somewhat vociferous again in his in-your-face attack on Campbell, Campbell took it very well, the two friends Lewis then subsequently invited Campbell to a meeting of the Inklings and they became friends, so the enmity became friendship as should be the case amongst Christians but Tolkien in one of his letters which I won't read talks about his curious how Lewis is up in arms if a Protestant is martyred or persecuted but seems to not care so much when Catholic priests and nuns are murdered because a dozen or so bishops, hundreds I think actually thousands of priests were murdered during the Spanish of war a dozen or so bishops and I don't know the exact number but certainly well over a hundred nuns were murdered and many of those raped beforehand but yet Lewis was on the side of the people who were perpetrating that, this surprised Tolkien but anyway these people became friends afterwards Lewis's space trilogy is marvelous again I'm not going to have time to talk about his work so much here because we're running out of time already but we see in that hideous strength particularly the third of those books, a vision of post-world war society where secularism is becoming overtly tyrannical and murderous and destructive and anti-Christian so again perhaps in the spirit it's not surprising written around the same time as was written I think in the same year as Animal Farmer George Orwell three years before 1984 in the spirit of Benson's Lord of the World which we had discussed and orders Huxley's brave new world so after the war Lewis became very concerned about developments in the Anglican Church particularly the proposals for the ordination of women he wrote an essay about priestesses in the church where he talked about the priest being impersonal Christy in the person of Christ and therefore priests should be male this shows in more and more loggerheads with the drift of the Anglican Church he also went to regular or regular confession which may be unusual for Anglicans in his last book Letters to Malcolm he said that after the blessed sacrament your neighbor is the most important thing and this shows implicitly his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist again it's unusual for Anglicans to call Eucharist the blessed sacrament but to say after the blessed sacrament your neighbor is more important is actually equating the blessed sacrament with God himself because the two great commandments of course to love the Lord thy God and to love thy neighbor he believed in purgatory we've seen it obviously that the great divorce seems to be set in purgatory but he wrote to his friend sister Penelope and Anglican nun that if it were allowed could she come and visit him in purgatory so talking so Lewis not only believed in purgatory he seemed to believe he was going there so why you know that that Lewis is a somewhat singular Protestant he's not fully a Catholic and we certainly can't claim that he was but he's also somewhat odd in terms of fitting neatly into the evangelical mode or mold or the or the Anglican mold so when Tolkien said jokingly that the reason that Lewis never became a Catholic was the Ulsteria motive yes play on words upon as in Ulster Northern Ireland where he was born which is with the very Calvinistic Presbyterianism there very anti-Catholic the Ulsterian motive that's an oversimplification as we've just seen that Lewis made a many many much progress towards a Catholic understanding and I can't we can't we can't reduce it to mere bigotry even though it's a funny quip so you know who's heard of an anti-Catholic bigoted Ulster Protestant going to confession believing in the Blessed Sacrament the male priesthood or purgatory but he but he was never comfortable with the position of the Pope he was never comfortable with the position of the Blessed Virgin so what then was C.S. Lewis well his mere Christianity is certainly a highest common factor which we can all feel very comfortable with in his works we see an absolute orthodoxy again my book further up and further in which I've written for 10 books understanding Narnia shows the the profound orthodoxy of of Lewis's work in his fiction and his non-fiction so I would have finished basically by coming towards the end of Lewis's life here Tolkien being Tolkien um took his son to see C.S. Lewis in 1963 when Lewis was on his deathbed and uh his son was a Jesuit priest his son John and obviously Tolkien might have been hoping that C.S. Lewis would uh have a deathbed conversion like Oscar Wilde and others but it was not to be they discussed literature um so Lewis dies in November of 1963 on the same day and date as the the assassination of JFK of president Kennedy and also on the same day was the death of Aldous Huxley and of course Lewis's death and Aldous Huxley's death was was lost under the news of the president president's assassination JFK's death one thing it would say however is that Lewis was convinced that uh his works would not be read following his death that uh you know within 10 years of his death he would be forgotten nothing could be further from the truth it's no uh mistake and no exaggeration to talk these days of a C.S. Lewis industry Lewis sells more books uh sold far more books posthumously following his death than he ever sold during his own lifetime the Lion and Witch and Wardrobe along with the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings amongst the top 20 best setting works of literature of all time so C.S. Lewis uh is a giant uh in this a literary revival of which we speak and we can be thankful for his friendship with Tolkien but we can be thankful most of all for uh the great gift of his mind and his work and his storytelling gifts thanks be to god for C.S. Lewis and thank you for joining me in this episode of The Authority until next time goodbye god bless and good reading this has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support the authority and other great free content visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25 percent off your next order including books audio books and video courses by Joseph Pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien Chesterton Lewis Shakespeare and Bellach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life to follow Joseph and support his work check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co and thanks for listening