C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  In 1945 Maureen’s husband, Leonard Blake, had become Director of Music at Malvern College, and the Blakes were now living at Malvern. To give Lewis a break, Maureen and her family would spend part of April at The Kilns, so Jack and Warnie could have a holiday in their home. Warnie, in particular, loved Malvern, and he always hated the return to Oxford and Mrs Moore. When they arrived home on 17 April, Warnie confided to his diary: ‘I have lost The Kilns: for though I can still force myself to see that it is beautiful objectively, I loathe every stick and stone and sound of it.’56

  Finally, a note of joy sounds in Warnie’s diary. ‘The incredible has happened,’ he wrote on 11 June 1947, ‘I am off on my Irish adventure.’ He nevertheless felt ‘very guilty at leaving poor J alone with that horrid old woman in that abominable house’.57

  Mrs Moore was not the only problem Warnie left his brother to deal with, for his departure deprived Jack of a secretary. Since 1943 Warnie had been giving Jack invaluable help with each day’s mail. Those who have seen letters typed on Warnie’s portable Royal typewriter will know he practised a military discipline when typing what Jack had given him to say. At the top of the right-hand of each letter is found the address of The Kilns, and on the left-hand side a number such as ‘REF. 97/47’.58 This is a letter to Ruth Pitter dated 6 June 1947 – five days before he left for Ireland – and the number indicates that this was the ninety-seventh letter he wrote that year.

  On 12 June Warnie arrived in Ireland, where he planned to meet his friend, Colonel Herbert Denis Parkin. The Colonel was unable to join him, and Warnie found himself alone in a small cottage at Dunany, County Louth. This, remarkably, was the place where Mrs Moore grew up and lived until the time of her marriage. For some time now Warnie had been having trouble with alcohol; depression, boredom or loneliness sometimes caused him to go on a binge. Realizing he was a very sick man, he called the local doctor and was taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, not far from Dunany and about thirty-two miles north of Dublin. The hospital, and the Medical Missionaries of Mary who ran it, had been founded in 1940 by Mother Mary Martin who, over the years, was to become one of Warnie’s most loved friends. Dr G.P. Costello, who had been appointed to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in 1943, was to be Warnie’s doctor there for the next twenty-six years.

  After receiving a wire from the hospital, Jack rushed over to Ireland, arriving at Drogheda on 23 June. He stayed for a week at the White Horse Hotel, making twice-daily visits to see his brother. He was still there when Warnie was released from the hospital on 30 June. Warnie refused, however, to accompany his brother back to Oxford, but continued his holiday in Drogheda, where he remained until 27 July. He had found a home away from home there – it even had an Anglican church he attended weekly – and he was to visit this favoured place as frequently as he could. Before Jack hurried back to Oxford, he visited Arthur Greeves briefly, and writing to him on 4 July 1947 he said, ‘The daily letter writing, without W to help me is appalling – an hour and a half or two hours every morning before I can get to my own work.’59

  Lewis was by now the most popular spokesman for Christianity in the English-speaking world and not long after he returned from Ireland his picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine for 8 September 1947. Underneath the picture by Boris Artzbasheff was the caption: ‘Oxford’s C.S. Lewis, His heresy: Christianity’. Inside was an article entitled ‘Don V. Devil’ in which he is included with a growing band of intellectual ‘heretics’: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers and Graham Greene.

  Despite being deprived of Warnie’s help with his correspondence, Lewis now began one of his most fruitful exchanges of letters – in Latin. He was delighted to find in the post one morning a letter of 1 September 1947 from Don Giovanni Calabria* of Verona, who in 1908 had opened an orphanage, the Casa Buoni Fanciulli (Home of Good Children) and in 1932 had founded a congregation of priests and laity called the Poor Servants of Divine Providence. Don Calabria was passionately interested in Christian unity, and after reading Le Lettere di Berlicche – an Italian translation of The Screwtape Letters – he decided to write to the author. As he could neither read nor write in English, he chose the only language he believed they would share. In his letter of 1 September he said:

  My purpose is to open my mind to you regarding a problem of the greatest importance, to solve which … the times seem to me riper than before. For today, because of this almost universal conflagration of war-madness many boundaries are overthrown, the world is like a field ploughed up with so many troubles and sufferings … All these things seem to constitute anticipations of the solution of that other problem which I have already referred to: namely that of the dissenting brethren whose return to the unity of the Body of Christ, which is the Church, is most greatly desired … But you also seem to me to be able to contribute much in the Lord, with your great influence not only in your own most noble country but even in other lands.60

  In his reply of 6 September, Lewis urged Don Calabria to be ‘assured that for me too schism in the Body of Christ is both a source of grief and a matter for prayers’, and he goes on to say:

  I have tried to do the only thing that I think myself able to do: that is, to leave completely aside the subtler questions about which the Roman Church and Protestants disagree among themselves – things which are to be treated of by bishops and learned men – and in my own books to expound, rather, those things which still, by God’s grace, after so many sins and errors, are shared by us.61

  Although it was almost impossible for Lewis to venture outside Oxford, this did not prevent some of his numerous fans from coming to see him. In the summer of 1948 Professor Chad Walsh* of Beloit College in Wisconsin came over to gather materials for a book he was writing on Lewis. The result of their meetings was the delightful and aptly titled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949). It is clear from Walsh’s book that Lewis had achieved a feat which, before his time, had seemed impossible. By confining himself to what he regarded as the essentials of the Christian faith and defending Supernaturalism in its fullest rigour he had won the respect of Protestant evangelicals, Anglicans and Roman Catholics, and all other thoroughgoing believers. He appealed, furthermore, to sophisticated sceptics who would have been scandalized at having any other religious books on their coffee tables than those of the witty and urbane Lewis.

  Except for a few Catholics who had reservations about certain points of his otherwise impeccable orthodoxy, Lewis had won the respect of the Catholic Church. His acceptance by the most extreme fundamentalist happened without his knowing it. When Walter Hooper was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1954, the hottest of all hot-gospellers from the ‘Bible Belt’ of South Carolina came to preach to the soldiers. This was Dr Bob Jones Jr, of Bob Jones University.* He was known to have visited Lewis in Oxford shortly after the war, and because of his own interest in Lewis, Hooper was allowed to look after Dr Jones. Hooper popped a peppermint in his mouth to hide any smell of tobacco, and asked the ultra-conservative what he thought of Lewis. ‘That man’, said Dr Jones fiercely, ‘smokes a pipe, and that man drinks liquor – but I do believe he is a Christian!’

  A biography of Lewis would be incomplete without a mention of his ‘pastoral letters’. This aspect of Lewis’s apostolate began with his first Mere Christianity broadcasts in 1941. ‘One gets funny letters after broadcast,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on 23 December 1941, after his Right and Wrong broadcasts, ‘some from lunatics who sign themselves “Jehovah” or begin “Dear Mr Lewis, I was married at the age of 20 to a man I didn’t love” – but many from serious inquirers whom it was a duty to answer fully.’62 As the letters came in greater and greater numbers he became worried. ‘I’m still wading thro’ the correspondence caused by the talks,’ he complained to Eric Fenn on 23 February 1942. ‘I wrote 35 letters yesterday, all out of working hours of course. It “gets one down”.’63

  It was not long before Lewis realized that if you put your thoughts in print you had to a
ccept the consequences. In any event, he believed he should. Over the years Lewis received vast numbers of letters from readers of Mere Christianity and his other theological books, and he tried to reply by return of post. The thousands of letters offering pastoral help are, in fact, a major part of Lewis’s writings, in which he encapsulated in a few words some of his most profound thoughts. When Dom Bede Griffiths observed what a large part of the day his former tutor was forced to set aside for answering letters, he wondered who were the men who wrote to him. ‘It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail,’ Lewis replied on 28 May 1953, ‘it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.’64

  Walter Hooper remembers walking down St Giles with Lewis when he stopped to give money to a beggar. ‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll spend it on drink?’ asked Hooper. ‘Well, if I kept it I would,’ said Lewis. He told the younger man that his rule regarding beggars was ‘When in doubt, give’. Later, when Hooper was living in The Kilns and helping with his correspondence, Lewis said the same rule – ‘When in doubt, give’ – applied to many of his correspondents. At that time he was near the end of his long correspondence with Mrs Mary Willis Shelburne of Washington, DC, who began writing to Lewis in 1950. Her letters were mostly filled with complaints about her family. While Lewis thought her ‘a very silly, tiresome, and probably disagreeable woman’, he also knew she was ‘old, poor, sick, lonely, and miserable’.65 Each of the 138 letters he wrote to her is a perfect gem, and many of them were published after his death as Letters to an American Lady (1967).

  What Lewis mainly offered in his letters was encouragement to those who found it difficult to persevere in the Christian life. When his correspondents wrote about moral problems Lewis nearly always urged them to consult the ministers in their churches. But there were many who wanted to know what he thought, and he told them. Mrs E.L. Baxter of Kentucky had pressed him for advice regarding contraception and on 19 August 1947 Lewis replied: ‘I’ve never propounded a general position about contraception. As a bachelor I think I should be impudent in attacking it; on the other hand I should not like the job of defending it against almost unbroken Christian disapproval.’66 One of the correspondents who became a great friend was Mrs Mary Van Deusen; her vast collection of letters from Lewis only came to light in 2000. Some snippets from these letters were published as to ‘Mrs Arnold’ in Letters of C.S. Lewis. However, in the ‘unexpurgated’ letter to Mrs Van Deusen of 7 February 1951 we find Lewis addressing a problem many readers have longed to know his thoughts on. Addressing the issue of abortion, Lewis said:

  It is certainly not wrong to try to remove the natural consequences of sin provided the means by which you remove them are not in themselves another sin (e.g. it is merciful and Christian to remove the natural consequences of fornication by giving the girl a bed in a maternity ward and providing for the child’s keep and education, but wrong to remove them by abortion or infanticide). Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, becomes wicked is where it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good.67

  Eric Fenn told their star broadcaster that those who commented on Lewis’s BBC talks were divided between those who regarded him as ‘the cat’s whiskers’ and those who thought him ‘beneath contempt’. As Lewis encouraged his correspondents to persevere in the faith, so he followed the same advice himself. It is God who will utter the final word on C.S. Lewis, but until we know what that is perhaps the closest we can get to a true assessment of Lewis comes from Pope John Paul II.

  The Pope had been an admirer of Lewis’s books since he was a young priest in Poland, and Walter Hooper was invited to an audience with him on 14 November 1984 because the Pope wanted to know more about Lewis the man. Hooper hoped the Pope would, in return, say what he thought of him. At the end of the audience, Pope John Paul said: ‘C.S. Lewis knew what his apostolate was’ … a long pause … ‘and he did it!’

  * * *

  * Elia Estelle ‘Stella’ Aldwinckle (1907–90) was born in South Africa, of English parents, and it was there, at the age of twenty-one, that Stella decided to give her life to helping people find God. She won a place at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1932 and read Theology, taking a BA in 1936 and an MA in 1941. She taught Divinity in Yorkshire but gradually realized that her calling was pastoral, and returned to Oxford where she joined the Oxford Pastorate, a team of men and women attached to St Aldate’s Church whose work was principally that of spiritual counselling of the University undergraduates. She was ideally suited as Chaplain to Women Students, 1941–66. She founded the Oxford University Socratic Club in 1941, and by the time the Club ended in 1972 she felt that she had accomplished what she set out to do.

  * A list of those who spoke at the society between its founding in Hilary Term 1942 and Trinity Term 1954, when Lewis left for Cambridge, is found in Walter Hooper’s ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, pp. 174–85.

  * ‘Learning in War-Time’.

  * Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001) was converted to Catholicism while a teenager, and this led on to a lifelong interest in philosophy. A year after taking a First in Greats at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 1941 she moved to Cambridge where, as a research student, she met Ludwig Wittgenstein and became his pupil. In 1946 she returned to Oxford as a Research Fellow of Somerville College. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, 1964–70. In 1970 she became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, a post she held until her retirement in 1986. She was married to the philosopher Peter Geach, and they had seven children. Her books include An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959), and (with Peter Geach) Three Philosophers (1961). Her ‘Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’ is found mainly in Vol. III of her Collected Philosophical Papers, Ethics, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981).

  * St Giovanni Calabria (1873–1954) was born into a poor family in Verona. He was ordained a priest in 1901 and while serving as a curate in Verona he set out to rescue some of the many orphans from the streets. In 1907 he became parish priest of St Benedict’s al Monte and the next year set up the San Zeno Orphanage, establishing a congregation of priests and laity to look after the orphans. By 1932 his congregation, the Poor Servants of Divine Providence, numbered some hundred and fifty priests and laymen, attached to about twenty houses. The Poor Servants of Divine Providence received the approval of Pope Pius XII in 1949. One of his other great interests was the unity of the Church and it was this that led him to correspond with Lewis. Their Latin correspondence continued until Don Calabria’s death in 1954, after which Lewis corresponded with others in the congregation. Don Calabria was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 17 April 1988, and he was canonized on 18 April 1999. For details of his canonization see the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, of 21 April 1999.

  * Chad Walsh (1914–91) was born in South Boston, Virginia. He took a BA from the University of Virginia in 1938, and a D.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Michigan in 1943. After two years as a research analyst with the US War Department, in 1945 he joined the English Department of Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he eventually became Professor of English. Walsh was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1948, and served as an assistant at St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Beloit, 1948–77. In 1938 he married Eva Tuttle and they had four daughters. He discovered Lewis through reading Perelandra in 1945, and from that time on he did much to make him better known in the United States. He first met Lewis in 1948 when doing research for C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949), one of the best works on Lewis. Lewis’s The Four Loves is dedicated to him. Collections of Walsh’s writings can be found at Wheaton College in Illinois and Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia.

  * Robert Reynolds Jones Jr (1911–97) was the son of the founder of Bob Jones University. After taking a BA from Bob Jones University, and a MA from the Universi
ty of Pittsburgh, he was Acting President of Bob Jones University, 1932–47, and President, 1947–71.

  NOTES

  1 ‘Socrates was a Realist’, Socratic Digest, No. 1 (1942–3), p. 6.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

  4 ‘The First Meeting’, ibid., p. 9.

  5 Ibid., p. 10.

  6 ‘The Christian Apologist’, Light on C.S. Lewis, pp. 25–6.

  7 Wain, Sprightly Running, p. 141.

  8 C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, pp. 588–9.

  9 Socratic Digest, No. 1 (1942–3), p. 23.

  10 BF, p. 179.

  11 The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (1943; Fount, 1999), ch. 1, p. 16.

  12 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 20.

  13 Ibid., p. 22.

  14 Ibid., pp. 23–4.

  15 Ibid., p. 24.

  16 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 27.

  17 Ibid., ch. 3, p. 34.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., p. 35.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Ibid., p. 38.

  22 Ibid., p. 39.

  23 Ibid., p. 40.

  24 The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, ed. R. Heber (London, 1822), Vol. V, p. 45.

  25 CG, p. 280.

  26 BF, pp. 102–3.

  27 ‘Divine Justice’ and ‘Nearly They Stood’ are found in Collected Poems, pp. 112 and 116–17.