The classical Anglicanism of C.S. Lewis

A few years ago the Reformed thinker Jake Meador wrote an article entitled 'The Invisible Anglicanism of CS Lewis'. The invisibility of Lewis' Anglicanism was, Meador said, to "miss the most basic fact of all about Lewis the Christian".  We might, of course, expect evangelicals and those Roman Catholics who Meador terms "Chesterton’s warrior children" to minimise and overlook the Anglicanism of Lewis.  Stranger, however, is that Anglicans should do so.  It is difficult not to think that a degree of embarrassment and awkwardness surrounds that fact that Lewis was a popular Christian writer.  This itself betraying a woeful ignorance of Anglicanism's past in which popular writings - such as as The Whole Duty of Man, the most popular religious work in 18th century England - shaped popular religiosity.  

Lewis also, however, positioned himself against the theological project which came to define the post-1945 Church of England establishment, challenging the assumptions of a liberal theology which undermined the Church's confidence in its proclamation:

Missionary to the priests of one’s own church is an embarrassing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.

Despite this, however, Lewis was no reactionary.  The encounter with Mr. Angular in The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis would later write, pointed to his rejection of a reactionary conservatism which made Christianity a "high-brow ... bourgeois-baiting fad" (yes, it does bring to mind "Chesterton's warrior children").  Similarly, Lewis' marriage to Joy Davidman is also certainly indicative of a life and witness which cannot be defined by reactionary clericalism.

So how should we recall the Anglicanism of this "this very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially 'high', nor especially 'low'" on this day after the anniversary of his death?  Let us celebrate his Anglican thought and piety, heard in his own words.  Firstly, we can recall how his piety was shaped by the Book of Common Prayer:

All this is said simply in order to make clear what kind of book I was trying to write; not in the least to conceal or evade responsibility for my own beliefs. About those, as I said before, there is no secret. To quote Uncle Toby: "They are written in the Common-Prayer Book" - Preface to Mere Christianity.

Not long ago when I was using the collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in my private prayers ... - 'A Slip of the Tongue', a sermon preached in 1956.

Secondly, we might note how his Eucharistic spirituality was an echo of Hooker's great exhortation:

All things considered and compared with that success which truth hath hitherto had, by so bitter conflicts with errors in this point, shall I wish that men would more give themselves to meditate with silence what we have by this sacrament, and less to dispute of the how manner how? ... Curious and intricate speculations do hinder, they do abate, they quench such inflamed motions of delight and joy as divine graces use to raise when extraordinarily they are present ... Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting myself at the Lord’s table to know what there I receive from him, without searching or inquiring of the manner how Christ performeth his promise; let disputes and questions, enemies to piety, abatements of true devotion, and hitherto in this cause but over patiently heard, let them take their rest ... what these elements are in themselves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body and blood of Christ, his promise in witness hereof sufficeth, his word he knoweth which way to accomplish; why should any cogitation possess the mind of a faithful communicant but this, O my God thou art true, O my Soul thou art happy! - LEP V.67.3 & 12.

As Lewis stated in Letters to Malcolm (19), rejecting both transubstantiation and "those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine":

The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.  Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question "What is this?" - this wafer, this sip of wine.  That has a dreadful effect on me.  It invites me to take "this" out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature.  It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes like a dead coal.

Also worthy of note is how Lewis' presentation of Baptism and Eucharist in Mere Christianity appears to reflect Hooker's emphasis on the Sacraments as necessary means of our participation in Christ, of "necessity to life supernatural":

this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution - a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.

We might suggest that Lewis' sacramental theology is deeply Hookerian.

Finally, continuing with Hooker, there is Lewis' superb summary of Hooker in English Literature in the Sixteenth-Century (1954).  As we read it, we cannot but discern Lewis' joy in Hooker's vision

Every system offers us a model of the universe; Hooker’s model has unsurpassed grace and majesty.  from much that I have already said it might be inferred that the unconscious tendency of his mind was to secularise.  There could be no deeper mistake.  Few model universes are more filled–one might say, more drenched–with Deity than his.  'All things that are of God' (and only sin is not) 'have God in them and he them in himself likewise', yet 'their substance and his wholly differeth' (V.56.5).  God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent.  It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular.  We must not honour even heavenly things with compliments that are not quite true: 'though it seem an honour, it is an injury' (II.8.7).  All good things, reason as well as revelation, Nature as well as Grace, the commonwealth as well as the Church, are equally, though diversely, 'of God'.  If 'nature hath need of grace', yet also 'grace hath use of nature' (III.8.6).  Laws merely human, if they are good, have all been 'copied out of the tables of that high everlasting law' which God made, the Law of Nature (I.16.2).  'The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself', for it is taught by Nature whose 'voice is but his instrument' (I.8.3).  'Divine testimony' and 'demonstrative reasoning' are equally infallible (II.7.5).  Certainly, the Christian revelation is 'that principal truth in comparison whereof all other knowledge is vile'; but only in comparison.  All kinds of knowledge, all good arts, sciences, and disciplines come from the Father of lights and are 'as so many sparkles resembling the bright fountain from which they rise' (III.8.9).  We must not think that we glorify God only in our specifically religious actions.  'We move, we sleep, we take the cup at the hand of our friend' and glorify Him unconsciously, as inanimate objects do, for 'every effect proceeding from the most concealed instincts of nature' manifests His power (II.2.1). Not, of course, that our different modes of glorifying God are on a level ... But we must not so regard the highest in us as to forget that the lowest is still of God, nor so call some of our activities 'religious' as to make the rest profane ... We meet on all levels the divine wisdom shining through 'the beautiful variety of all things' in their 'manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude'.

Lewis' words - "to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular" - not only function as summary of Hooker, they also describe that "integral Humanism" which John Hughes identified as "a particular piety and sensibility which could be seen as characteristically Anglican".  Hughes went on to point examples of such "integral humanism" in a range of "classically Anglican authors", ranging from Traherne to Rowan Williams.  Included in the list is C.S. Lewis.  It is a reminder that Lewis' Anglicanism should not be invisible, not least for Anglicans.  We should, rather, be celebrating this "classically Anglican" thinker.