A certain group of Catholic readers””let’s call them “Chesterton’s warrior children”””cannot imagine someone like Lewis writing the things he did and not converting to Catholicism at some point. And since they cannot grant the possibility that one can write like Lewis and be Protestant, they are forced to conjure up fanciful theories to explain Lewis’s Protestantism. The best example of this is the “Ulsterior motive” theory, which claims that Lewis never got over the deep-seated anti-Catholic sentiments of his youth. (These critics conveniently fail to note that his family never seemed to possess any strong anti-Catholic sentiments to begin with, given that their servants were Catholic and Lewis’s parents were not terribly committed to the more radical brands of Irish protestantism.) The warrior children manage to say this with a straight face, which is somewhat remarkable given that many of Lewis’s closest friends were, of course, Catholic.
Meanwhile, American evangelical readers tend to see Lewis as a proto-evangelical, a man utterly committed to classic creedal orthodoxy and utterly uninterested in delving any deeper than that. He is the mere Christian par excellance in their minds and represents a tacit endorsement of the evangelical tendency to avoid the thornier theological questions that usually prompt one to seek out a confessional identity of some sort.
Both readings, of course, miss the most basic fact of all about Lewis the Christian: CS Lewis was a conservative Anglican churchman. It’s perhaps fitting that amongst all the tributes, it the was the Anglican Alan Jacobs who made this point about Lewis’s identity while also drawing attention to its neglect amongst many of his readers.
I loved the last paragraph, with its apt allusion. Alas, the vivid image the author uses at the beginning is also apt. C. S. Lewis has indeed become something of an inkblot or a “theological Rorshach test” for readers, who seem to look in Lewis’ evocative writings as if in a mirror, and find themselves reflected there.
Lewis himself would have abhorred the notion that his books were like clouds or inkblots, with no inherent meaning of their own, as if they could be plausibly interpreted in whatever fashion appealed to the fancy of the reader.
However, let me add that while one of the qualities that makes the writings of Lewis so endlessly fascinating is the inherent depth and breadth of his “invisible” Anglicanism that combines both Protestant and Catholic elements, another contributing factor is perhaps that he was also a layman. Lewis always claimed to be “an ordinary layman in the Church of England,” when, of course, he was anything but ordinary. But if it’s easy to miss the Anglican sensibility that Lewis brought to his books, it’s perhaps also easy to miss the siginificant fact that Lewis was a layman too. He may have read a good deal of theology, but he always did so as an amateur, if I may say so respectfully. He was blissfully ignorant of a seminary education, much less of more advanced training in theology (of the academic sort). Personally, I think that this factor of his perspective as a devout and highly intelligent layman has contributed sifnificantly to the breadth of his popularity across the spectrum of orthodox Christianity.
David Handy+, Ph.D.