Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: On CSL and Mike Schmitz · New blog on the kid: Did C. S. Lewis Publically Attack Catholicism?
A now public piece of writing of his, the essay "On Christian Reunion" contains this passage:
To you the real vice of Protestantism is the formless drift which seems unable to retain the Catholic truths, which loses them one by one and ends in a “modernism” which cannot be classified as Christian by any tolerable stretch of the word. To us the terrible thing about Rome is the recklessness (as we hold) with which she has added to the depositum fidei [the deposit of faith] – the tropical fertility, the proliferation, of credenda. You see in Protestantism the Faith dying out in a desert: we see in Rome the Faith smothered in a jungle.
Where I find this,* I find the intro:
Subtitled “An Anglican speaks to Roman Catholics,” the essay first published in 1990 as “Christian Reunion” is one of the hardest C.S. Lewis short pieces to get your hands on.
It may be a confusion on part of my memory, it may be it was included in an earlier collection that Brenton Dickieson was unaware of. Or in which he had overlooked it. Or the 1990 collection is an extension or otherwise revised edition of an earlier collection.
But I did read it in my youth. It can not have been much later than 1990, since in 1991 I became a Trad (other story), which led to me reading less Lewis and Tolkien for some while and more contemporary Trad controversialists, like Dom Gérard, Revd. Bryan Houghton or Mgr Lefebvre. It can as I have suggested been earlier. Or, 1990.
My conclusion was, and still is, the Protestants, on this issue, were wrong, the Catholics were right.
However, before we accuse him of attacking Catholicism, next paragraph is:
I know no way of bridging this gulf. Nor do I think it the business of the private layman to offer much advice on bridge-building to his betters. My only function as a Christian writer is to preach “mere Christianity” not ad clerum but ad populum [not to the clergy but to the people]. Any success that has been given me has, I believe, been due to my strict observance of those limits. By attempting to do otherwise I should only add one more recruit (and a very ill qualified recruit) to the ranks of the controversialists. After that I should be no more use to anyone.
By "mere Christianity" he here means "whatever Catholics, Calvinists and Anglicans traditionally agree on" ... in other words, what he attempted to write was a Catholic catechesis minus the parts Protestants disagree on, a Westminister catechesis minus the parts Catholics and Anglicans disagree on, a 39 Articles catechesis minus the parts Catholics and Calvinists agree on, first and foremost. All three in one. And on all three sides to be supplemented by more catechesis from, for instance, Baltimore, Heidelberg, 1662.
He also made it an overwhelmingly antimodernist catechesis. Yes, he had modernist heresies, and the idea of "mere Christianity" could have been one of them. It's possible the cosmological setup in the Narniad is based on things Giordano Bruno was burned for.** It is certain that for long he was an Evolutionist, and that he even fell foul of Trent Session V (where the Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, and the Heidelberg Catechism would have not done so) in regards to the individual existence and sin of Adam. But on moral issues, he was antimodernist, even if he believed contraception to be licit, he was silent on that, and in a novel he allowed Merlinus Ambrosius to most definitely not believe it was licit, on Christology, He was antimodernist, except he imagined Christ could have shared ignorance and factual falsehoods about Genesis with Jews of His time. He was staunchly against an even just moral, let alone Genetic or Surgic, Transhumanism, and this even in regards to condemned criminals (as son of a lawyer and friend of one, he was well aware of them).
So, what about him writing above? At all? His very first words are:
I have been asked to write on Christian reunion: but I am afraid that what I have to say will amount to little more than a rough analysis of the actual disunity and a suggestion as to how most of us ought to behave while our tragic and sinful divisions continue. ...
He's not saying which side is sinning, maybe suggesting it could be both / all three*** sides. Probably suggesting, though not directly saying, that all three belong to Body of Christ, a position that Pope Pius XI has condemned (and if he refrained from saying it here, it was probably because he was aware of Mortalium Animos).
As a theological guide to consult when I am in doubt, he would be inadequate, since any Catholic from Chesterton to St. Thomas Aquinas is better than he. But there was a time when I did not in the least know this, and there was a time when I had already read in his texts the mentions of both these Catholics ... and then there was a time when I passed on from him to them.
He didn't prepare me for Cardinal Newman, of whom I read "Apologia" ... the exceedingly small space Newman has explicitly in Lewis basically alludes to "Essay on the Development" preparing the way for very different attitudes, like that of Loisy. Lewis was not a fan of Loisy, and rightly so.
Lewis says in this essay a thing also true of me:
- having a background in a pretty archaic Protestantism
- not sharing its Anticatholicism.
In his case, it was:
I have been well placed for noticing this because I grew up in a very archaic society – that of Northern Ireland – amidst conditions which had even then long since passed away in England.
In my case it was a mother who went to a Bible school and on an Operation Mobilisation missionary journey to convert Italian Catholics to Christianity. On that journey, she found out they already were Christians. Hope George Werver converts, I kind of indirectly owe him my conversion.°
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
IV. LD after Easter
3.V.2026
* C.S. Lewis on “Christian Reunion”
Posted on February 6, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson
https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2017/02/06/c-s-lewis-on-christian-reunion/
** Multiplicity of worlds, multiplicity of Christs, however, it is not clear that to Bruno the Christ on Earth and the one on a planet around Sirius would have been even the same person, while to CSL, Jesus and Aslan are supposed to be the same person.
*** When he heard two clergymen speaking of "uncreated energies" and asked them and was giving a supercilious smile, he didn't know or get to know that this was not modernism in any historically modern sense, as post-Enlightenment, it was actually Palamist doctrine, a theory held by many, perhaps all, Eastern Orthodox. Since what some of them call "Vth Council of Constantinople" in the palace of Vlakhernai. When I say "three" I mean Catholic, Calvinist, Anglican, the Lutherans were assimilated to Anglicans, the Orthodox and the Evangelicals were pretty much outside his perspective as far as theological familiarity was concerned. Congregationalists, a UK version of Evangelicals, not too unlike Calvinists in his view ... but he's relying on reports, about them.
° Or that his children do. I looked him up, and he died in April 2023.

