For the purposes of this essay, “ecumenism” will be understood to mean the effort to get Christians of different traditions to relate with one another in a more harmonious fashion, either individually or institutionally or both. And such relating will be understood as a good thing, consistent with the prayer of Jesus Christ that his followers “might be one,” even as he and his Father “are one” (John 17:11, 21), so that there will be “one fold, one shepherd” (John 10:16).
C.S. Lewis was no ecumenist in the formal sense of the word. He never involved himself in official ecumenical enterprises like the World Council of Churches, founded in 1948. As far as I know, he didn’t even sign on, as his friend Tolkien did, to Frank Pakenham’s much more local endeavour of a Christian Council “of all denominations” that was founded in Oxford in 1944.[1] He wasn’t a man for synods and committees and commissions, and even if he had been such a man, the Malines Conversations of the 1920s happened too early, and the ARCIC process of the 1960s happened too late, for him to be involved with them — to name two of the more notable ecumenical programmes of the last century.[2] He did observe the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, but that hardly qualifies him as an ecumenist, beyond what could be said of any faithful Anglican.[3]
The only one of his works that he described as “ecumenical” was Mere Christianity. This essay identifies five reasons (there may be others) why Lewis chose to defend “mere Christianity” and defines his ecumenical approach with two qualifying adjectives. The essay is descriptive, not evaluative. No consideration will be given as to whether Lewis was right, wrong, or a mixture of both in the way he practised his ecumenism. This limitation will be observed partly to keep the essay within bounds and partly because, writing from a Catholic perspective as I do, I find that such evaluation has already been provided by a number of Catholic writers, notably Derrick, Como, Ker, and Pearce.[4] What follows below is not a critique but a delineation of Lewis’s ecumenical stance in terms that I believe he would recognise and accept.
Mere Christianity
The root of the term “ecumenism” is the Greek “oikeios,” meaning household, a place where one lives. It is the word used by the apostle Paul when he exhorts the Galatians to “do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10; cf. Eph. 2:19; 1 Tim. 5:8). Lewis appears to be channelling this metaphor in the preface to Mere Christianity where he discloses that his aim is to present “an agreed, or common, or central, or ‘mere’ Christianity,” and that this common ground is like the hallway of a house “out of which doors open into several rooms.”[5] The rooms represent “the creeds of the existing communions” and it is in these rooms that Christians will find “fires and chairs and meals” — in other words, warm fellowship, teaching authority, holy communion, not to mention all the other things which membership of a particular denomination provides.[6] Lewis offers no advice about which room his readers should choose to occupy. The only advice he gives is that the stay in the hall should last no longer than necessary, because the hall is just a place for waiting in, not a place for living in. Setting up a permanent camp in the hall would be a mistake: entering “the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.”[7]
The fact that Lewis presents mere Christianity — the hallway — as temporary and transitional is a point worth emphasizing, because some readers have chosen to take it in completely the opposite sense. Jacob Prahlow, for example, has called for the development of “mere Christian” churches and describes a number of congregations that already identify in such a way.[8] Whatever the merits of Prahlow’s argument, this is precisely what Lewis himself is not recommending. His metaphor of the hallway is meant to be taken evangelistically, not ecclesiologically. Mere Christianity is no more than a means to get people inside the generic house of faith. It is a provisional measure only, not a new sort of church in itself. In a manner of speaking, mere Christianity is a kind of legal fiction, for although it represents Christian belief it doesn’t represent an instantiation of Christian belief in actual communal practice. It represents that liminal phase between unbelief (when one is outside the house altogether) and membership of a communion (when one has found one’s particular room).
Lewis’s concept of mere Christianity is arrived at, he admits, by avoiding “the disputed points” between existing communions and focusing on what they have in common.[9] However, this “Highest Common Factor” of the different communions is not “vague and bloodless,” he argues, but “positive,” even “pungent;” it is “divided from all non-Christian beliefs by a chasm to which the worst divisions inside Christendom are not really comparable at all.”[10] It may be a legal fiction in terms of ecclesial commitment, but it signifies something substantial in terms of religious content. It could be summarised in the phrase “believing before belonging.”[11]
By omitting discussion of divisive issues and concentrating on shared beliefs, Lewis finds that he has, almost without intending it, taken an ecumenical step forward: “If I have not directly helped the cause of reunion, I have perhaps made it clear why we ought to be reunited.”[12] We ought to be reunited because . . . we are already united in so many essential matters. In other words, we have all come through the hall. But notice how Lewis arrives at this conclusion: by bracketing those things that separate Christian traditions and relativising them with this hallway image. He is not, so to speak, ushering people from their particular denominational rooms into a new house, a house labelled “Reunion:” instead, he is asserting that different Christians already live in the same house and are united by the fact that they have all equally crossed the same threshold in order to arrive there. It’s an adroit rhetorical move and one that has proved to be ecumenically effective, if not at the institutional level, then certainly at the individual level in helping Christians to look less suspiciously at fellow believers who belong to denominations other than their own.[13] Again, the question of whether it involves a certain logical sleight of hand (for can even rudimentary Christian belief ever not have an ecclesiological element, however implicit?) is a question we must leave to one side.
We will return to Mere Christianity below, but first it will be worth investigating why Lewis was so keen to avoid “disputed points.” He was not a man who was typically reluctant to engage in argument or controversy. Indeed, as President of the Oxford Socratic Club, he developed a reputation as a formidable public debater who had a voracious appetite for intellectual disputation; he was sometimes likened to Dr. Johnson in his love of talking “for victory.” Yet with intra-Christian controversies he was uncharacteristically given to “conflict avoidance.” The reticence that informs his ecumenism has at least five sources.
1) Personal Experiences
Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. We need not specify “Northern Ireland” because, of course, the island of Ireland was still united at that time; partition of the Protestant North from the Catholic South was decades away. Nonetheless, the sectarian divide and its entanglement with politics were already central factors in Irish life, and the Lewis family were definitely on the Protestant side. His grandfather, Thomas Hamilton, “an evangelical churchman who never tired of deprecating the Catholic Church from his pulpit,” was rector of the local Anglican church, St Mark’s, Dundela, and there Lewis received Baptism as an infant and Confirmation as a teenager.[14]
He was extracted from his Irish setting at the age of ten when he was sent away to be educated in the south of England, and it was there, he later recorded, that he first became “an effective believer.”[15] He had been taught all the usual things at home and had accepted them at a superficial level, but now his faith became lively:
As far as I know, the instrument [for my new-found faith] was the church to which we were taken twice every Sunday. This was high ‘Anglo-Catholic’. On the conscious level I reacted strongly against its peculiarities — was I not an Ulster Protestant, and were not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated English atmosphere? Unconsciously, I suspect, the candles and incense, the vestments and the hymns sung on our knees, may have had a considerable, and opposite, effect on me. But I do not think they were the important thing. What really mattered was that I here heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.[16]
Although the young Lewis disliked ritualism, he could nonetheless see that these Anglo-Catholic priests “obviously believed” the doctrines that they preached. He learned to differentiate between liturgical practices and actual faith; appearance and reality in the religious life were distinct from each other. Undoubtedly, this would have been an important element in the teaching he had received back in Belfast, where “outward forms” would have been strongly contrasted with “heartfelt devotion,” but, in an Evangelical Anglican context, the implicit conclusion would have been that, since outward forms are relatively unimportant, it makes sense to keep them to the minimum. In England, Lewis discovers that outward forms could be prominent and elaborate, yet without cancelling the possibility of authentic faith.
As it happened, this period of being an effective believer was short-lived. In his early teens, Lewis fell away from the faith and for almost two decades called himself an atheist. However, in his early thirties, he became a theist and then reverted to Christianity, thanks in no small part to the influence of his Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic.
If the Anglo-Catholicism of his English schooling had had the effect of broadening Lewis’s ecumenical outlook, Tolkien’s fully leaded Catholicism only confirmed that effect. “At my first coming into the world,” Lewis wrote, “I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the [Oxford] English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.”[17] Yet this philological Papist was clearly a real Christian, whose deep faith, as expressed in a long night-time conversation with Lewis in September 1931, made a life-changing impression on him. “I have just passed on from believing in God to believing in Christianity, in Christ,” Lewis wrote, “my long conversation with Tolkien . . . had a lot to do with it.”[18]
Thereafter Lewis proceeded to live his Christian life within the Anglican communion in which he had been raised. He attended his college chapel during term-time and his parish church, Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, on Sundays. What kind of Anglican was he? “There is no mystery about my own position,” he declared. “I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high’, nor especially ‘low’, nor especially anything else.”[19]
This is a misleading self-description. By any objective reckoning, Lewis was a “high” Anglican. He received Holy Communion every week, was comfortable using the term ‘Blessed Sacrament,’ considered clergy to be priests and not just ministers, believed that the ordained priesthood was a male-only vocation, had a deep respect for natural theology, frequently cited the Church Fathers, fasted on Fridays, went regularly to confession, entertained serious doubts about the morality of contraception, respected relics such as the Turin Shroud, believed in purgatory, and prayed for the dead.
What Lewis means by positioning himself as “not especially ‘high’” is that he is not a partisan. Although his own preferences might take him towards the higher end of the candle, what mattered was that he believed the “central” tenets of Christianity. The fact that, in addition to these central doctrines he held to other beliefs and practices, was, for him, an issue of comparative unimportance.
2) Scholarly observations
Another reason for Lewis’s lack of partisan interest in ecclesiological disputes arose from his professional expertise as a literary historian. Writing English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama required Lewis to master the history of the English Reformation, an episode he described as a “tragic farce:”
The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure . . . In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost . . . Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold: Protestants misrepresenting Romans as Pelagians or Romans misrepresenting Protestants as Antinomians.[20]
If his Ulster upbringing had led Lewis to cast a jaundiced eye over partisan churchmanships, his immersion in the literature of the sixteenth century only confirmed that distaste. He saw how easily, and how unnecessarily, theological questions could become proxies or smokescreens for other much more worldly matters that excited the interest of governments, of mobs, and even — which brings us to the next point — of demons.
3) Moral judgements
In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s fictional demon, Screwtape, writes to his nephew Wormwood, excoriating him for having failed to prevent the conversion of his human “patient,” but advising him to make the best of a bad situation by getting the new believer to indulge in partisan spirit: “if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it.”[21] Hell is full of partisans, Screwtape says:
Types that were most antagonistic to one another on Earth. Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy [God] really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany.[22]
To assist Wormwood’s patient in becoming such a sanctimonious and belligerent sectary, Screwtape would have him think of theological doctrines only insofar as they provide opportunities for exacerbating parti pris: “The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’ in any form which would hold water for five minutes.”[23] Party-spirit is bad enough, but party-spirit based on ignorance is even worse — or even better, from the demonic point of view.
Lewis himself could, no doubt, give a fairly water-tight definition of different eucharistic doctrines, but he did not like to talk about divisive theological matters even in private correspondence. In a letter to his friend Alan Griffiths, who had become a Benedictine monk, Lewis stated his position forthrightly: “I had better say once and for all that I do not intend to discuss with you in future, if I can help it, any of the questions at issue between our respective churches . . . I do not think there is anything distressing for either of us in agreeing to be silent on this matter . . . When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground. It is abstaining from one tree in the whole garden.”[24]
One tree in the garden. From this allusion to the Garden of Eden, it would appear that Lewis regarded discussion of controversial issues to be itself a kind of sin. And indeed, elsewhere he characterises it in terms of a “dog-fight.”[25] “Disputations,” he once said, “do more to aggravate schism than to heal it.”[26] He operated on the principle of least said soonest mended. If it is not necessary to talk about such matters, it is necessary not to talk about them.
4) Individualism
To his personal experiences, scholarly observations, and moral judgements, we can add a fourth colour to our gradually accumulating portrait of Lewis’s ecumenical spirit, and that is his own temperamental disposition. He had an innate “individualism;”[27] he did not enjoy being organised. Not only was he no “party” man in the partisan sense of that word, but he also was rarely animated or energised by the idea of corporate activity in general. And this attitude carried over to his view of church membership. He wrote in his autobiography that he viewed the Church as
a kind of collective; a wearisome “get-together” affair. I couldn’t yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one’s spiritual life. To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters. And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organising.[28]
In short, he admits to having been “deeply anti-ecclesiastical.”[29] Some of this disdain he overcame after his reversion to the faith in his early thirties, but some of it remained, and the general tone and shape of his character certainly remained. He of course accepted the fact that the Christian life involved membership in a spiritual organism, the “body of Christ” and he dutifully attended his college chapel and his parish church, but emphasizing or celebrating that spiritual body in its social or public or institutional manifestations was not something that comported with his psychological profile. “We few, we happy few” was a line from Shakespeare that resonated with him.[30]
5) Vocation
The fifth and final source of Lewis’s interest in expounding mere Christianity was his belief that it was his spiritual vocation to do so: “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”[31]
Lewis gives three reasons for thinking that this was his vocation. The first is awareness of his own limitations. Divisive issues “often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history, which ought never to be treated except by real experts,” and since he did not regard himself as a real theologian he felt such treatments were beyond him and that he ought to stick to the basics. Secondly, his aim was evangelistic, and since “the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold,” he felt he had best avoid them. Finally, he got the impression that relatively few people were engaged “in the defence of what Baxter calls ‘mere’ Christianity. That part of the line where I thought I could serve best was also the part that seemed to be thinnest. And to it I naturally went.”[32]
Mere Christianity
This brings us back to Mere Christianity, which is about as non-denominational a book as can be imagined. Lewis derives the title from Richard Baxter (1615-91), an English preacher and writer who sided with Cromwell during the English Civil War and the Puritan Commonwealth, but who was an inveterate peacemaker and even helped with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. He was subsequently barred from ecclesiastical office and imprisoned for eighteen months. In a work written in the last decade of his life, Baxter wrote:
I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible: But must you know what Sect or Party I am of? I am against all Sects and dividing Parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties.[33]
In much the same spirit as Baxter, Lewis wrote in the preface to Mere Christianity:
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’. You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic. This omission is intentional (even in the list I have just given the order is alphabetical).[34]
He goes on to explain that the second section of the book, where he talks about the incarnation and the atonement, he has had vetted by clergymen of those four different traditions he listed alphabetically, asking for their criticism. “Let us at least be ecumenical,” he wrote to Eric Fenn, the man at the BBC who oversaw his talks, as he was preparing them for broadcast.[35] (This I believe to be the only occasion where he is on record as explicitly calling his work “ecumenical.”) He did not have the other sections of the book similarly vetted because, “in them, though differences might arise among Christians, these would be differences between individuals or schools of thought, not between denominations.”[36]
Lewis’s ecumenism
Lewis’s ecumenism, then, was largely a negative condition, an ecumenism of silence. By refusing to talk about those controversial matters that separate the Christian communions, he ignores the whole subject almost out of existence.
Just occasionally he would acknowledge the basic question at issue. In an article intended for a Catholic publication, entitled “Christian Reunion,” in which he refers to “our tragic and sinful divisions,” he goes on to say that the real difficulty is “our disagreement about the seat and nature of doctrinal Authority,” “on which disagreement almost all the others depend.”[37] [38] But he never gave a detailed account of religious authority as he understood it. He takes the so-called Vincentian Canon — “what has been believed by everyone, everywhere, at every time” — as his basic authority for “mere Christianity.”[39] However, he doesn’t explain why he does so or how the borders of that belief are to be determined. For instance, there have been times when what we now regard as orthodoxy was the minority position within the Church, most notably the Arian heresy, when Athanasius stood contra mundum. How does that situation square with the Vincentian Canon?[40] The principle that governs his ecumenism is not explained or defended, but simply assumed to be adequate.
In another letter to Griffiths, Lewis conceded that “One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You, in your charity, are anxious to convert me: but I am not in the least anxious to convert you.”[41] Lewis simply didn’t think there was much to be gained by achieving institutional unity, and nothing at all to be gained if unity of charity was lacking.
And so, in a letter to the Jesuit priest, Fr. Peter Milward, Lewis wrote:
Our Lord prayed that we all might be one ‘as He and His father are one’. But He and His Father are not one in virtue of both accepting a (third) monarchical sovereign.
That unity of rule, or even of credenda, does not necessarily produce unity of charity is apparent from the history of every Church, every religious order, and every parish.
Schism is a v. great evil. But if reunion is ever to come, it will in my opinion come from increasing charity . . . A single act of . . . co-operation . . . does more towards ultimate reunion than any amount of discussion.[42]
This letter to Milward serves as a good summary of Lewis’s approach: if his ecumenism was an ecumenism of silence, that silence was motivated by charity. Charity “bears all things,” including the painful divisions between Christian and Christian. We can imagine Lewis saying, pace St Paul, “If we have unity of rule, but have not charity, we are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Of course, this stance leaves unaddressed the question as to what degree of “unity of rule” ought to be achieved. Tolkien, who helped bring Lewis into “the hall” in the first place, gave a notably different answer to that question from the one that his friend provided.[43] But here we come to the very point at issue, disunity, which gives rise to the need for ecumenism in the first place, and which this essay is not going to tackle.
Ecumenical silence and charity
In closing, it will be worth pointing to Lewis’s long correspondence with an Italian Catholic priest named Giovanni Calabria. Largely concerned with Christian unity, the correspondence nonetheless remains almost entirely silent about typical ecumenical matters (e.g., the seat and nature of doctrinal authority) and instead revolves around themes of charity.[44] In Lewis’s first reply to Calabria, he confesses:
Be assured that for me too schism in the Body of Christ is both a source of grief and a matter for prayers . . . [I]t has always seemed to me that I should maintain as much fraternal intercourse as possible with all those who call themselves Christians. If all were actively to do this, might we not hope that this unity of love and action over many years would precede — not to say foster — an eventual re-unification of doctrines.[45]
Elsewhere he writes to Calabria: “Common perils, common burdens . . . can, by God’s Grace, contribute much to the healing of our divisions. For those who suffer the same things from the same people for the same Person can scarcely not love each other;” “‘That they all may be one’ is a petition which in my prayers I never omit.”[46] [47]
Notes:
[1] See Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Word on Fire Academic, 2023), 274.
[2] Lewis had an antipathy toward and unsuitability for committee work, even when it was part of his professional academic duties: see Horobin, op.cit. 66-75. An exception was his membership of the Church of England’s Commission to Revise the Psalter, though even this was undertaken with a degree of reluctance.
[3] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (13 January 1948), Collected Letters Volume II, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 830.
[4] See Bibliography for details.
[5] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Glasgow: Collins, 1990), 8, 11.
[6] Ibid., 11.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Jacob J. Prahlow, “Mere Christianity for Today: Or Reflections on the Realities of Big Tent Christianity,” https://pursuingveritas.com/2021/02/08/mere-christianity-for-today/.
[9] Mere Christianity, 8.
[10] Ibid.
[11] In this respect, it reverses the order championed by the popular Alpha evangelism course, which works on the principle of “Belonging before believing:” i.e., a church community should be hospitable and welcoming to unbelievers as a first step towards their acquisition of faith.
[12] Mere Christianity, 8
[13] The trans-denominational popularity of Mere Christianity and of Lewis’s works in general suggests that he succeeded in creating, or revealing, some sort of unity. For his popularity among Evangelicals, see Ryken, op. cit; among Catholics, see Noll, op. cit; among Eastern Orthodox, see Ware, op. cit. The existence of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity is one example of how Lewis’s ecumenism has proved effective. Founded in 1986, Touchstone is edited and read, according to its self-description, by Christians “from each of the three great divisions of Christendom — Protestants, Catholic, and Orthodox. It provides a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.”
[14] Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 119.
[15] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Glasgow: Collins, 1982), 32.
[16] Ibid., 32-33.
[17] Ibid., 173.
[18] Letter to Arthur Greeves (1 October 1931), Collected Letters Volume I, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperCollins, 2000), 974.
[19] Mere Christianity, 6.
[20] C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954),37.
[21] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Glasgow: Collins, 1982), 84.
[22] C.S. Lewis, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” in Screwtape Proposes a Toast: And Other Pieces (Glasgow: Collins, 1981), 26-27.
[23] The Screwtape Letters, 84.
[24] Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths (4 April 1934), Collected Letters Volume II, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperCollins, 2004), 135-136.
[25] Letter to Michael Edwards (11 February 1959 [1960]), Collected Letters Volume III, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperCollins, 2006), 1133.
[26] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (25 November 1947), Collected Letters Volume II 816.
[27] Surprised by Joy, 139.
[28] Ibid., 187.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid., 32.
[31] Mere Christianity, 6.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Baxter, Richard. Church-History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils Abbreviated (John Kidgell: London, 1680) ninth page [unnumbered] of the first chapter, “What History is Credible, and what not.” Available: https://archive.org/details/churchhistoryofg00baxt/page/n3/mode/2up.
[34] Mere Christianity, 5-6.
[35] Letter to Eric Fenn (14 November 1941), Collected Letters Volume II, 496.
[36] Mere Christianity, 8.
[37] C.S. Lewis, “Christian Reunion” in Christian Reunion and Other Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Glasgow: Collins, 1990), 17, 19.
[38] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (25 November 1947), Collected Letters Volume II, 816.
[39] Letter to the editor of the Church Times (8 February 1952), Collected Letters Volume III, 164.
[40] Lewis appears to recognise that the Vincentian Canon, taken in an absolutist sense, would indeed be problematic. Hence, the moderated version of it given in the Preface to Mere Christianity, where he says that his aim is to “defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times” (emphasis added).
[41] Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths (20 February 1936), Collected Letters Volume II, 178.
[42] Letter to Fr. Peter Milward (6 May 1963), Collected Letters Volume III, 1425.
[43] For example, his encouragement to R.W. Chambers to become a Catholic: see Ordway, op. cit. 283-285.
[44] Giovanni Calabria (1873-1954) made it part of his mission to correspond with members of other Christian traditions. His addressees included the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and representatives of the Orthodox and Lutheran communions.
[45] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (6 September 1947), Collected Letters Volume II, 801.
[46] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (20 September 1947), Collected Letters Volume II, 804.
[47] Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (14 April 1952), Collected Letters Volume III, 182.
