C. S. Lewis on “Christian Reunion”

A passage from the essay “Christian Reunion” appeared as “Quotation of the Month” in the January 1996 issue of CSL: Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, edited by James Como.

The May-June issue features James Tetreault’s article about Peter Milward’s 1995 book A Challenge to C. S. Lewis. Tetreault, a long-time member of the New York Society, cites “Christian Reunion.”

Recently there have come forth, as usual owing to the diligence of Walter Hooper, a few pages Fr. Hooper describes as the “only sustained piece of writing we have from Lewis on the ‘questions which divide’ the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches,” published as the title essay in a collection Christian Reunion and Other Essays (Fount Paperbacks, 1991 [sic]). In this essay Lewis speaks of the abiding “disagreement about the seat and nature of doctrinal Authority” (19).

On 20 July 1996 Kathryn Lindskoog sent the following letter to Tetreault:

Thank you for your excellent article in the May-June issue of CSL. I notice that you refer to “Fr. Hooper,” although Mr. Hooper left the Anglican priesthood in 1988 and renounced his ordination. Has he been re-ordained? More important, the passage you cite from “Christian Reunion” is part of the central 40 percent of the essay that is evidently an editorial interpolation. That portion matches the “Linguistic DNA” in the book’s preface, not the “Linguistic DNA”of Lewis’s writing. I enclose for your interest a couple of pages about the faulty provenance of “Christian Reunion,” and an article about the mixed authorship by A.Q. Morton. See also Jillian Farringdon, Analysing for Authorship: A Guide to the Cusum Technique (Cardiff; University of Wales Press, 1996).