C. S. Lewis: Not on “Their Side”

“A Conversation with Thomas Howard”
by Frank Schaeffer, Editor of The Christian Activist
“A Journal of Orthodox Opinion”

Frank Schaeffer was a highly visible Protestant Evangelical until his midlife conversion to Orthodoxy. Thomas Howard was a highly visible Protestant Evangelical until his midlife conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Frank Schaeffer: I first met Tom in the early 1960s at L’Abri Fellowship, the Protestant retreat and study center in Huemoz, Switzerland, founded by my parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer. I was a teenager and Tom a young man. I remember being impressed by the fact that Tom came from one of the most “influential” Protestant families in America. (There are indeed hierarchies even in Protestantism!) His father and grandfather were revered editors of a well-established magazine.

Frank Schaeffer: I have not read the whole [Lewis biography by George Sayer], but someone drew my attention to a certain section describing a holiday where George Sayer, C. S. Lewis and C. S. Lewis’ wife, Joy, went off to Greece. C. S. Lewis attended some Greek liturgies and a Greek wedding. I was quite surprised that Sayer quotes C. S. Lewis as telling him that of all the liturgies he’d ever attended, he preferred the Greek Orthodox liturgy to anything that he had seen in the West, Protestant or Roman Catholic. Then he went on to say that of all the priests and monks that he had ever had the opportunity to meet, the Orthodox priests that he ran across in his sojourn in Greece were the holiest, most spiritual men he had ever met. C. S. Lewis referred to a certain look they had, a sense.

[Correction: In his biography of C. S. Lewis, George Sayer briefly noted the Lewises’ 1960 trip to Greece with June and Roger Lancelyn Green. He said, “Thereafter, whenever the subject came up between us, he said that he preferred the Orthodox liturgy to either the Catholic or Protestant liturgies. He was also impressed by Greek Orthodox priests, whose faces, he thought, looked more spiritual than those of most Catholic or Protestant clergy.”]

[George Sayer did not accompany the Lewises to Greece. Lewis did not attend “some Greek liturgies.” (He attended only a part of one.) Lewis did not say that Orthodox priests were the holiest, most spiritual men he had ever met.]

Frank Schaeffer: This brings up a point: isn’t it strange that C. S. Lewis is an “evangelical hero” when he certainly cannot be described as Protestant, let alone ‘evangelical’ in the classical sense?

[Correction: Lewis referred to himself as a Protestant and a lay evangelist.]

Thomas Howard: “You’ve put your finger on a very, very interesting point. I had an article in a Roman Catholic magazine called Crisis several months back on this very point: on C.S. Lewis and his evangelical ‘clientele.’ Not only is it an irony, it is a contradiction. Lewis would have been appalled by the evangelical adulation of his work. He would have been horrified, even enraged by a lot of what he would see today in American evangelical circles.”

Frank Schaeffer: How do evangelical, let alone fundamentalist, Protestants read C. S. Lewis and think that they are reading someone who is on “their side?”

Thomas Howard: “Maybe I’m being a little bit naughty, but the answer is, probably the same way they read the Bible! You and I would say the Apostolic Church is there, in its seed, in the Bible, but apparently it’s possible to read the Bible as a Protestant for sixty or seventy or eighty years and never see it! By the same token, Lewis’ evangelical American ‘clientele’ simply don’t get it. When C.S. Lewis speaks of the blessed sacrament, they don’t hear it. When Lewis speaks of the prayers of the Church, they don’t hear it. When Lewis speaks of auricular confession, which he practiced, they don’t hear it. I think when Lewis smokes a cigarette or drinks his whiskey, they don’t see it, either; not that that’s on the same level as his ecclesiology! (Laughter) C. S. Lewis would have been very, very ill at ease with his eager North American free church clientele. Very, very ill at ease and out of his metier.”