Published in Doctrine and Life
(November 1998) Dominican press, Dublin
“An
excellent article” (Dr Peter Kreeft, Philosophy Department, Boston College,
U.S.A.)
I first came to know of C.S. Lewis
in 1970 when I was a novice in a Franciscan friary at Chilworth, Surrey, a
beautiful part of the south of England that inspired Ketelby’s musical piece,
‘In a Monastery Garden’. It was the
novitiate custom then to read from a suitable book during meals and Lewis’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast and The Screwtape Letters were chosen. We novices chuckled or nodded assent all
through these highly enjoyable and stimulating books. I was amazed that I had not heard of Lewis
before, as I came from Belfast where he was born, in 1898.
Nearly twenty-four years later in
1994, whilst at home in Belfast, on leave from my Zulu mission, I got a message
from two American friends who, like me, were great Lewis fans, that they were
on a tour of Ireland and hoped that I would show them around Belfast. I decided now was the time to find out more
about Lewis and his Belfast connections from the famous Linenhall Library,
I was amazed to find that Lewis was
born not very far from where my family lived in South Belfast. With my parents, I visited his birthplace,
the house where he grew up, ‘Little Lea’, the inspiration for his famous book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Opposite was ‘Bernagh’, the big house of
Arthur Greeves where Lewis wrote The
Pilgrim’s Regress in 1932. Nearby we
saw St Mark’s church where Lewis was baptised and where he worshipped as a boy
and later had installed a beautiful stained glass window executed by Michael
Healey, a noted Dublin artist. We
visited his old school Campbell College, as well as the Crawfordsburn Inn where
he often stayed on holiday with his brother Warnie, and where he had his
honeymoon after his marriage to the American Joy Davidman.
Lewis loved this part of the world
and often returned for his annual holidays.
It is said that much of the landscape of his mythical Narnia Tales is to
be found in the hills above Holywood, near historic Bangor, home of one of the
most famous monasteries in Western Europe, founded in 558 A.D. Perhaps Lewis was inspired by this monastery
where their ‘perennial praise of God’ was based on the Temple praise In Jerusalem, to write his famous Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis once said that ‘Heaven is Oxford lifted
and placed in the middle of the County Down’.
In his autobiography Surprised by
Joy he writes of the Castlereagh
Hills as a metaphor for longing. But
Ireland as a whole he loved intensely whether the Wicklow Hills or Donegal, or
the Carlingford/Rostrevor area which he considered as the loveliest spot he had
ever seen.
I was delighted with my discoveries
of Lewis’ Belfast past as my brothers and I, as schoolboys, had cycled all
round this area. We had friends at
Campbell College and we knew every glen in the Castlereagh Hills. On returning home after my trip with my
parents, I drew up a brochure of the Lewis trail (1) and was now ready for my
two American friends.
I am convinced that a look at Lewis’s life and work will show why he is an
indispensible man for Ireland at the moment.
This arises in two areas – his overcoming of sectarian bigotry, and his
refutation of the kind of thinking that is now becoming fashionable as New Age
spirituality.
LIFE
AND WORK
Lewis was born in Strandtown,
Belfast on 29 November 1898, of good Protestant stock, but in a very bigoted
neighbourhood that raged at this mother having two Catholic servants from the
South. Nasty slogans were scrawled on
the walls of the home or o n bits of paper shoved into the letter-box. One read “Send the dirty Papists back to the
Devil where they belong’. This advice
was ignored by Lewis’s mother, Flora, who paid her servants a generous wage and
treated them well. (2)
Flora’s father, Thomas Hamilton, was
vicar at St Mark’s, where Lewis was baptised.
One of the major themes of his sermons was to portray Catholics as
possessed by the devil. However,
Thomas’s wife, Mary Warren, was different.
She came from Anglo-Irish gentry, was a Liberal and a supporter of Home
Rule for Ireland.
This is the environment in which
Lewis grew up. He later admitted (in Surprised by Joy) that on his first coming
into the world he had been implicitly warned ‘never to trust a Papist’. That Lewis was later able to rise above this
bigoted beginning and embrace many Catholics as close friends shows the kind of
man he was. Many years later when Lewis
and his brother were invited By Fr Gervase Mathew, O.P., to Blackfriars,
Oxford, for a meal, Warnie noted the irony of two Protestants from the North
dining in a monastery. (3)
At an early age Lewis was sent to
England for his education. Eventually he
gained a triple First at Oxford and was a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College
from 1925 to 1954. In 1954 he became
Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. As an outstanding popular lecturer he had a
great and lasting influence on his pupils.
For many years he was an
atheist. Freed of all moral restraints
he was to become a witty, but blasphemous, sex-obsessed young man. (4) Later he was converted to a joyous and
vigorous form of Christianity, and those early experiences of his life helped him
to understand religious apathy and the factors that lead to the rejection of
religion.
He used his brilliant and logical
mind as a Christian writer and broadcaster, and was a great conversationalist
and a highly perceptive critic. Among
some of his best-selling works were The
Problem of Pain, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Letters to Malcolm
Chiefly on Prayer, Reflections on the Psalms, and The Four Loves (one of Pope John Paul’s favourite books). (5) He also wrote some science fiction and many
works of literary criticism. His books
for children, called the Narnia stories, are among his most popular works.
Lewis died on 22 November 1963 at
his home in Oxford on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. His works are known to millions of people all
over the world and The Times of
London said that ‘in his own lifetime he became a legend’.
CHRISTIAN
UNITY AND DISUNITY
With the peace seemingly on track in
the North, I would like to look at what Lewis had to say on Christian disunity and
reunion. After his conversion from
atheism to Christianity, he began to read widely and talk extensively with
other mature Christians like Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Incidentally, the latter would probably never have been published as
Tolkien was a great procrastinator and had to be badgered by Lewis to finish
it.
Although Lewis regarded himself as a
Protestant, his spiritual stance was not confined by the controversies of the
Reformation, and indeed he had many Catholic tendencies. For example, he had a great devotion to the
Holy Shroud of Turin and believed it genuine.
He believed in Purgatory, and so offered up prayers for the dead. In Letters
to Malcolm, he commented: ‘Our souls
demand Purgatory, don’t they? He
believed also in praying to the saints. ‘If you can ask for the prayers of the
living,’ he reasoned, ‘why should you not ask for the prayers of the dead?’
(6) As regards the sacraments, he
believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Communion wafer: ‘Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your
neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.’ (Screwtape
Proposes a Toast) He went regularly
to the sacrament of confession to an Anglo-Catholic priest,
Again and again, Lewis acknowledged
his indebtedness to the great Catholic apologist, G.K. Chesterton, and placed
his book The Everlasting Man second
in his list of ten books that greatly influenced him. Lewis also was very familiar with St Thomas
Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and used
it constantly.
Lewis enjoyed the friendship of a
number of Catholic priests and, surprising for an Ulsterman, even some Jesuits
like Fr Peter Milward and Fr Tom Corbishley.
He sided with the Jesuits ‘shutting up’ Teilhard de Chardin, who was
lionised by theosophists, the precursors of the New Age movement and Lewis,
after his conversion, had no time for theosophy or Gnosticism.
Lewis’s famous autobiography Surprised by Joy is dedicated to his
good friend Fr Bede Griffiths, and his Mere
Christianity was submitted to various Church ministers for approval,
including a Catholic priest.
Lewis also struck up a friendship
with a Fr Giovanni Calabria – now a blessed – and corresponded with him in
Latin for some years. In a letter of
August 10th 1953, Lewis said to Blessed Giovanni:
I am crossing over
... to Ireland: my birthplace and dearest refuge so far as charm of landscape
goes, and temperate climate, although most dreadful because of the strife,
hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths, There indeed both yours and ours ‘know not by
what Spirit they are led’. They take
lack of charity for zeal and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy. I think all the crimes which Christians have
perpetrated against each other arise from this, that religion is confused with
politics. For above all other spheres of
human life, the Devil claims politics for his own, as almost the citadel of his
power. (7)
In an essay in Christian
Reunion written in 1941, Lewis again alludes to misguided zeal. ‘The history of the late medieval pseudo-Crusaders, of the
Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered.’
Even today this misguided zealotry
is not dead in Belfast. But Lewis
believed that the:
time is always ripe
for reunion. Divisions between
Christians are a sin and a scandal, and Christians ought at all times to be
making contributions towards re-union, if it is only by their prayers. (8)
So
far had Lewis travelled in expanding his vision of Christianity beyond that of
his Belfast childhood that he had many Catholic friends (at least five of the
famous Inklings group associated with Lewis were Catholics, as was his
publisher, Lady Collins). Lewis’s
secretary and trustee of the Lewis estate, Walter Hooper, observed that if
Lewis had lived he would have become a Catholic.
G.K.
Chesterton once noted that certain writers bridge the gap between the Catholic
and Protestant traditions and commented that such writers as George MacDonald
who was to have a great influence on Lewis, might be regarded as ‘morning stars
of the Reunion.’ (9) The same could be
said about Lewis himself. Let’s hope his
words and example may help in building bridges to lasting peace.
SPIRITUAL QUESTS
Another
issue I would like to look at is Lewis and the New Age Movement (NAM) now very
noticeable in Ireland – north and south.
This NAM is a syncretistic amalgam of pantheism, the esoteric and the
occult, of myth and magic about the secrets of life mixed in with ideas from
astrology, astrophysics, pop psychology and crystal power, borrowing from all
religions and under obedience to none.
This material is everywhere in America, Western Europe and in Ireland.
The
Irish bishops were so concerned about all this NAM material that they appointed
the Irish Theological Commission to produce a response published in 1994 – A New Age of the Spirit? A Catholic Response to the New Age Phenomenon
(published by Veritas). This
excellent document deals with the roots of the NAM showing, in the words of New
Agers themselves, that freemasonry and theosophy were important vehicles for
the transmission of NAM ideas.
The
bishops’ pastoral mentioned the hostility of theosophy to Judaism and orthodox
Christianity. Nearly every major city in
the world has its theosophical society.
Theosophy promotes a one-world government and a one-world religion and
at the core of this new world religion is the Luciferic Initiation as seemingly
the ‘tyrant’ God of the Old Testament has not been fair to Lucifer who will be
rehabilitated.
Theosophy
tried to usher in a new Messiah or Christ in 1929, but the young Indian
Krishnamurti, secretly groomed for the job, rejected his status as the next
incarnation of the Lord Maitreya (or ‘Christ’). But theosophy did not give up and in 1982
the second phase of the great ‘Plan’ went into action: full page advertisements in the world press
and the Reader’s Digest informed the
earth that the Messiah had now finally arrived and would announce his identity
in two months through worldwide radio and TV.
Perhaps like Krishnamurti he changed his mind, or had a sense of humour
or got cold feet for he did not show.
My
only fault with this pastoral response is its solemnity. A little levity is a good palliative to
possible paranoia and would help people see the silliness of all this. (see
Psalm 2). Of a recent book about the
history of Theosophy, the New Statesman
said:
If
Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, John Cleese and Barbara Cartland all tripped out
on a six-tab of mescaline, then collaborated in a brain-storming jam-session,
they could not have come up with a tale like this! (10)
Now
Lewis dabbled in all this stuff from his school days due to the influence of
the matron, Miss Cowie, who was ‘floundering in the mazes of Theosophy,
Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, the whole Anglo-American Occultist
tradition’. It was here he ceased to be
a Christian and passed into ‘the cool evening twilight of Higher Thought where
there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed’, The ‘vagueness, the merely speculative
character of all this Occultism began to spread ... to the stern truths of the
creed. The whole thing became a matter
of speculation.’ (Surprised by Joy)
When
Lewis got to Oxford he found that Theosophy and its offshoot Anthroposophy were
popular and that even some of his friends like Owen Barfield and Alan Griffiths
(later known as Fr Bede Griffiths, O.S.B.) were fascinated. In the allegorical story of Lewis’s
conversion The Pilgrim’s Regress,
there is a swamp called Theosophy and another place called Anthroposophy.
Lewis,
the apologist, taking up cudgels against fellow Irish writer, James Stephens,
for what he regarded as an unjust attack on G.K. Chesterton, criticised
Stephens’s ‘peculiar mixture of mythology and theosophy – Pan and Aengus,
leprechauns and angels, re-incarnation and the sorrows of Deirdre ... the blend
of Celtic Twilight and serious occultism.’ (11)
Lewis could have been describing
the New Age Movement in Ireland today.
In Crossing the Threshold of Hope Pope
John Paul II has referred to ‘the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the
guise of the so-called New Age”.
Of
course, Occultism is not new to Ireland, as in the past we had ‘Hell-fire
clubs’, pantheists and spirit mediums, but this was usually among the wealthy,
bored Anglo-Irish gentry. Today, however,
in the era of the Celtic Tiger with money splashing around and many people
having more leisure time, there seems to be an explosion of the stuff
everywhere. Where there is a spiritual
vacuum, then people, like the young C.S. Lewis, look to the NAM to fill the
void as it offers a sense of transcendence ‘with nothing to be obeyed and
nothing to be believed’ as Lewis put it.
Lewis’s
testimony is valuable in that, having gone through all this himself, he is able
to guide others to Christ. He saw the
need for discernment and this is the value of his Screwtape Letters. We Irish
need to be more discerning in these confusing times. After his conversion Lewis was so well versed
in Holy Scripture and the great Christian writers that he could detect the real
from the counterfeit a mile away.
Unfortunately many Irish people, Catholics and Protestant alike, are
getting confused by the counterfeits.
In writing about conversion or the ‘new
creation’ Lewis talks eloquently of the importance of Christ and answers New
Agers with their stress on finding the ‘real self’ or the ‘higher self’. In one talk he explained that our real new
selves and our own real, higher personality, will come only when we are
searching for Christ. He believed that
one principle runs through all life from top to bottom: ‘Give up yourself and
you will find your real self’. Submit
every day to the ‘death of your ambitions and favourite wishes ... submit with
every fibre of your being and you’ll find eternal life. Keep nothing back. Nothing that you have not given away will
ever be really yours ... Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run
only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him,
and with Him everything else thrown in.’ (12)
Just
two months before he died, Lewis wrote to a close friend. ‘When you die and if “prison visiting” is
allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.’ (13) Because 22 November is the thirty-fifth
anniversary of his death and 29 November the centenary of his birth, spare this
great Irishman a prayer.
1 Copies
of C.S.
Lewis Centenary Trail and C.S.Lewis
News are available from James O’Fee,
11
Raglan Road, Bangor, Co. Down BT20 3TL.
2 This,
and other items of family information, are found in George Sayer, Jack,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1988.
3 Walter
Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and
Guide, Harper/Collins, 1996, p.708.
4 Sayer,
op.cit. p.78.
5 Ibid.
P.390.
6 M.J.
Christensen, C.S. Lewis on Scripture, Abingdon
Press, Nashville, 1979, p.29.
7 Letters: C.S. Lewis – Don Giovanni Calabria,
edited by M. Moynihan, Collins, London, 1989, p.554.
8
Hooper, op.cit. p.554.
9 ‘G.K.
Chesterton, George MacDonald’, in The
Chesterton Review, p.290.
10 In
a review of Peter Washington, Madame
Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the
Western Guru, Secker & Warburg,
1993.
11 C.S.
Lewis, ‘A Defence of Chesterton’, Chesterton
Review, p.298.
12. Sayer,
op.cit. p.279f.
13 R.
Green and W. Hooper C.S. Lewis, Collins,
1974, p.304.
