Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1863) is a celebrated literary critic, novelist, essayist, and Christian apologist: the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, the Ransom Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, and numerous essays of apologetics, such as Mere Christianity. An Anglican from Belfast, he spent most of his life in England, teaching medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and later Cambridge. Like many of his generation, he served on the front during the First World War, and the experience reinforced his atheism and pessimism. However, as he relates in Surprised by Joy, between 1929 and 1931, he gradually regained his faith, partly thanks to conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien. From then on, his Christian faith increasingly informs his writings.
In this interview, Father Michael Ward explains his pick of five books by Lewis and will take us through the author’s works.
Fr Michael Ward is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. An associate member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, he is also Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. His books include Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008) and After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic, 2021).
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (also available for Kindle) by C.S. Lewis
- The Screwtape Letters (also available for Kindle)
by C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces (also available for Kindle)
by C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man (also available for Kindle)
by C.S. Lewis - Miracles, A Preliminary Study (also available for Kindle)
by C.S. Lewis
What would you add to the opening survey of Lewis’s life?
Well, you touched on the main features, omitting only his late marriage. Some people know him because of Shadowlands, the feature film that was made about this episode in his life.
He married an American called Joy Davidman. Indeed, he married her twice, first in a civil ceremony and then a Christian one. They had a short, happy but tragic three-year marriage before cancer killed her in 1960, at the age of just forty-five. It is a beautiful, poignant period in Lewis's life and has been treated beautifully by William Nicholson, the writer of Shadowlands.
"There is so much to be derived from Lewis: sheer literary pleasure, intellectual insight, spiritual depth and formation."
You are a professor of theology and apologetics. What led you to study Lewis and write on him?
I have had a lifelong interest in C.S. Lewis. My parents read the Narnia books to me when I was a little boy and, as soon as I could, I got into Lewis's other fiction: The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and so on. I also devoured his Christian apologetics: Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and the rest. When I came here, to Oxford, to do my undergraduate degree in English, I began to study some of Lewis's academic writings. I did a short undergraduate thesis on the depictions of evil in his fiction.
As a result of writing that undergraduate thesis, I was asked to do some lecturing and tutoring on Lewis after I had graduated, and gradually more and more. I began to write on Lewis and lived for three years in his former house, The Kilns, here in Oxford, as a warden on behalf of its owner, the C.S. Lewis Foundation. So, without really planning it, I was developing a career in Lewis scholarship.
When it came time for me to do my PhD, Lewis was the obvious topic since I was well acquainted with not only the primary literature, but a good deal of the secondary literature too. My book Planet Narnia came out of my doctoral research. That has led to a deepening and corroborating of all that has gone before so that I now have a very definite career in Lewis and Inklings-related scholarship. I never planned it, but I am very grateful to have it.
Why should we read Lewis?
He is a great and astonishingly varied writer. He mastered any number of different genres, both in fiction and non-fiction. He fictional output is represented most notably by children's literature (the Chronicles of Narnia, which are his best-known works), but also by science fiction (the Ransom Trilogy), moral satire and apologue (Screwtape, The Great Divorce), and one psychological novel (Till We Have Faces).
That is just his fiction. Then we have all his Christian apologetics. This ranges from very popular stuff like Mere Christianity, which originated as broadcasts on BBC Radio, to fairly heavy theologising, in Miracles, and philosophical works, like The Abolition of Man. That is before we get to his academic works—titles such as The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and numerous others—books he wrote as part of his professional career in English literary criticism and history. He was a brilliant essayist and critic.
He was no mean poet either. His poetry is the least known aspect of his output, but he always wanted to be a great poet and published a couple of volumes of poetry early in his career.
But he wasn’t just a man of letters: he was a devout man of faith and understood the moral life and the spiritual life from the perspective of a practising Christian. He was an Anglican, but a very Catholic-friendly Anglican. As you mentioned, his friendship with Tolkien was highly significant for him.
There is so much to be derived from Lewis: sheer literary pleasure, intellectual insight, spiritual depth and formation.
Do Lewis’s writings help you in your ministry?
Oh yes. I was baptised as an infant and raised by Anglican parents. Lewis’s intellectual defence of the faith in his apologetic works and his imaginative presentation of the faith in his fiction were hugely important for me, especially in my teens, when, like many teenagers, I was beginning to ask questions about the Christian faith. To my mind, Lewis had very satisfactory and interesting answers. He helped me stay a Christian and grow as a Christian.
And in my ministry, first as an Anglican priest and lately as a Catholic priest, I have drawn upon him hugely. How could I not, having spent so much time immersed in his thought-world? I often find myself, as it were, unwittingly quoting Lewis or channelling his ideas. It becomes a challenge sometimes not to quote him: in sermons for instance, or in small group discussions! Often, I end up just paraphrasing him and passing it off as my own work, which is a bit naughty, but I hope understandable! People can get a bit sick of it if their pastor, their preacher, their priest is always quoting from the same person or source. That can become irritating. So, I try to avoid that.
1.
The first book that you have selected is also Lewis’s best known one, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. With this novel, Lewis kicked off his seven-volume series called The Chronicles of Narnia, where the central figure is Aslan, Christ incarnated as a Lion in a world of humans and anthropomorphic animals. Why does this book top your list?
I have put it first, largely because it is the best-known of Lewis's books. Possibly, it is the book he was born to write above all others. Of its conception and its composition, he said that there came a certain age in his life when he felt he must write a fairy tale or burst. If you stopped any person in the street and did a word association game and said, “C.S. Lewis?”, and waited for an answer, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” would come back more than any of his other titles. It must be doing something right to have achieved such fame and popularity. It has become a canonical work within English children's fiction from the second half of the twentieth century, and not just among Christians. It has entered the mainstream. That’s because Lewis tells a very compelling story, a classic fairy-tale, set in this imagined kingdom of Narnia, which is accessed through the back of a wardrobe.
Assessing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe purely from a literary critical point of view, it is very well-told tale. It is beautifully balanced and economical. It has a sort of inevitability about it. I can understand why Lewis said that it burst out of him. It seems to have been gestating in him most of his life. But that is just the literary point of view. From a theological point of view, it’s a brilliant retelling of the Gospel story. Aslan is a Christ-like character. He dies and rises as a sacrificial victim and atonement for a boy called Edmund, who has betrayed his brother and his sisters. You might say that this is an obvious allegorization of the Gospel story, but it works imaginatively. That’s the crucial thing.
Lewis was, above all things, a poet. He didn’t have much success with his verse, but he had poetic gifts of understanding how language and symbol worked. He knew how to put metaphors together and structure a story. Much of this comes from his deep immersion in mythology. He was classically trained. He knew all the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, but also Norse mythology. He was fascinated with different mythologies from around the world and had a special fascination for stories of dying and rising gods. In these pagan myths, he saw a prefiguration of the Gospel story, of the true dying and rising God, Jesus Christ. Because of this mythological background, Lewis was able to shape his story in a very engaging way. A child of six can appreciate The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobebut there is so much going on that adults too can find it refreshing every time they go back to it. One of the particularly successful poetical strategies that he adopts is his use of the imagery of kingship, understood by means of the symbolism of Jupiter. That is what my book Planet Narnia is about.
I suppose you are recommending The Lion as a gateway into The Chronicles of Narnia as a whole.
Yes, it is a gateway, and it is certainly the book that people should start with, not The Magician’s Nephew, even though publishers, annoyingly, sometimes list that as number one in the series. But it is not number one. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is number one. So yes, that is another reason for putting it at the top of the list. It is a gateway to the other Chronicles.
To come back to this point about it bursting out of Lewis. Why did it burst out? There are lots of reasons why it was so significant to him. He had a love of the seven heavens, the seven planets of the mediaeval cosmos. He described them as spiritual symbols of permanent value. It’s my belief that each of the Narnia Chronicles is structured so as to embody and express the attributes and qualities of one of the seven heavens. The seven heavens “have permanent value as spiritual symbols,” Lewis said, and are “specially worthwhile in our own generation. Of Saturn we know more than enough, but who does not need to be reminded of Jove?”
He jokingly said in his university lectures that those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced, red-faced, and jolly. Then he would pause and add, “It is obvious under which planet I was born.” A lot of his friends referred to him as jovial, not always understanding the significance that the term had for him. So, there is a jovial quality to a particular kind of kingship: one that is tranquil, magnanimous, festive, prosperous, but also sacrificial. Lewis valued that poetic symbol and had done so for decades before writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That kingly symbol dominates the structuring of the story. Aslan is the true king. The children become kings and queens themselves as the tale progresses. All sorts of other jovial influences are present in the structuring and the adorning of the adventure. That is the imaginative blueprint behind this great work. Each of the other six Narnia Chronicles follows in its train, taking as its imaginative blueprint the qualities of another of the seven heavens.
This is what you have explained in your book, Planet Narnia. Could you explain how each of the other six novels, maps on to the seven heavens.
Prince Caspian, the second book in the septet, is Lewis’s Mars book. It is full of military events and battles, but also woods and forests, another important part of the martial symbolism as it was understood by the Romans.
The Voyage of the Dawn Trader is the Sun Book. It is full of light and gold.
The Silver Chair is the Moon book. The Silver in the title is a giveaway. It is a story about wetness, wanderings, and even lunacy, some of the qualities of the moon.
The Horse and His Boy is the Mercury story. It is dominated by questions of language, speed, theft, boxing, and twins: all the various attributes assembled under the mercurial heading.
The Magician’s Nephew is the Venus book. Venus is associated with creativity. This is the story in which Narnia is brought to birth.
The Last Battle is the Saturn story. Saturn was associated with the last things: death and judgement. This is the story in which Narnia comes to an end and the new Narnia—a kind of new heavens and new earth is brought into being.
That is a very quick thumbnail sketch of each of the Chronicles and how it connects to its respective planet. Theologically, the important thing is that Aslan, the Christ character, embodies in his own person—you might even say, incarnates—the qualities of the presiding planet. Lewis is using this planetary imagery in a Christian sense. He is exploiting it and turning it to Christian ends. After all, “The heavens are telling the glory of God!” according to Psalm 19, Lewis's favourite psalm. So, Aslan becomes ‘the King of Kings’, under Jupiter. Under Mars, he is the ‘Lord of hosts’, ‘mighty in battle.’ Under the symbolism of the Sun, he is ‘the light of the world.’ Under the symbolism of Mercury, he is ‘the Word of God,’ and so on, seven times over. This planetary imagery is entirely consistent with biblical theology. It is not as if the Chronicles are suddenly smuggling in pagan astrology. It is baptised astrology, as Lewis called it. It is using the heavens, that ‘are telling the glory of God,’ to tell the glory of God in this ingenious literary fashion. That is what I discovered when I was halfway through my PhD. It is a beautiful discovery. It really helps explain the otherwise puzzling oddities that you find, both within each of the Chronicles and across the series as a whole. When you come at the books from this planetary point of view, you can see Lewis's great imaginative skill and subtlety. And yes: that is what Planet Narnia is all about.
2.
For your second book, we pass from Aslan, a King of the Heavens, to a Prince of Darkness. The Screwtape Letters is a novel written in epistolary style, where Screwtape tutors his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, in the satanic arts of temptation. Meanwhile, Lewis teaches the reader about the wiles of the enemy and the ways of the Spirit. Why is this book your number two?
After The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, The Screwtape Letters is probably Lewis's best-known book. It is the book that is going to last the longest and, because it is brilliantly witty, it will continue, I think, to enjoy a very wide readership. It’s an exploration of the psychology of temptation. It has a lot of moral and spiritual insight, but also a great amount of psychological insight. It demonstrates Lewis’s skills as an as a novelist and the observational powers that he had as a writer.
He observes our various hypocrisies, compromises, and the peccadillos that we think we can get away with, but which the demons exploit to their own nefarious ends. But it is told from the point of view of the of the demon. Screwtape, the senior devil, is writing to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior devil, giving him advice on how to ensnare a human soul. From that devilish perspective, up is down, black is white: everything is reversed. So, Lewis can get away with presenting standard moral teaching, which might otherwise come across as platitudinous. Because it is presented so wittily, we accept it. We even enjoy it. We laugh at ourselves, not just at the demons, for falling for the stratagems of these of these wicked creatures. In other words, Lewis, as it were, puts a rim of honey around the medicine glass and we swallow the medicine, hardly realising that it is doing us any good. But it is. It does a great deal of good. It certainly does me a lot of good and I try to read The Screwtape Letters once a year, especially during Lent. It’s a very good moral mouthwash—a fantastically spirited book, in every sense of the word.
3.
For the third entry, we stay with Lewis’s fiction, Till We Have Faces. This is his retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Both he and Tolkien considered it his most mature novel. Is Lewis using Greek mythology to tell a Christian story about how God purifies the soul?
Well, it can be read as a Christian novel, but it is set in a pre-Christian, barbarian kingdom. So, its Christian qualities are certainly there but very indirectly. It is a beautiful, profound moving novel. I read it more frequently any other of Lewis's writings, partly because it is so mysterious and deep.
It is hard to translate into conceptual terms. The best way to understand it is just to reread it rather than translate it into doctrinal or moral categories. I advise would-be readers to simply feel or taste it as a myth retold. Let the story work its own magic on you as you read it.
Lewis regarded it as easily his best work. It came out in 1956, close to the end of his life. It has a maturity, ripeness, and reflective quality which is nourishing. It touches upon delicate subjects, such as ugliness and shame, but does so in an empathetic and sympathetic way. One feels that one is being probed by a sensitive surgeon or massaged by a very skilful masseur. It has all the hard-won wisdom that Lewis had acquired by that stage of his life. If one is trying to conceptualise it and turn it into more intellectual categories, it is quite helpful, I think to read it alongside The Four Loves, which is an analysis of the four Greek words for love: philia, strogē, eros, and agapē. Incidentally, Pope John Paul II admired that book. If one finds Till We Have Faces too mysterious, it can be helpful to turn to The Four Loves as a guide, and if one finds The Four Loves a bit dry, you can see many of its ideas dramatized in the novel. The two books work together very well.
"This turn towards a subjectivisation of value was already well underway in the 1940s and Lewis forecasts where this growing tendency will lead. Ultimately, it will lead, he says, to an abolition of our humanity"
4.
For your final two picks, we pass from Lewis’s fiction to his essays. First up is The Abolition of Man. In it, Lewis criticises a textbook that was being used to teach English literature in the upper grades of schools in the early forties. The textbook teaches the ethical theory that was in vogue at the time, moral non-cognitivism, namely, the view that moral judgments only ever express subjective feelings rather than beliefs or facts. In response, Lewis uses a Confucian concept, the Tao, to articulate a doctrine of natural law. What makes this book relevant today?
It is really an attack upon subjectivism and a defence of the objectivity of value. That could hardly be more relevant today, in our post-truth, 21st-century world.
This turn towards a subjectivisation of value was already well underway in the 1940s and Lewis, with his philosophical hat on—his metaphysician’s hat on—forecasts where this growing tendency will lead. Ultimately, it will lead, he says, to an abolition of our humanity. That is why the book is called The Abolition of Man. If we do not recognise that certain things are intrinsically good, true, and beautiful but suppose that we can just make up value out of our own subjective preferences, whatever they happen to be at any given moment, then we have given up on our own nature. We have dissolved the substance of our humanity.
The Abolition of Man is a philosophical work, not an explicitly Christian work. It is Lewis working in anthropological mode, trying to define what accounts for specifically human responses to the world. To put it in Christian terms, you could say that he is defending the natural law in his account of human conscience, one that has been given to us by our creator. But you do not have to be a Christian to accept Lewis's findings, and indeed here in Britain we have a prominent atheist philosopher, John Gray, who has written admiringly about The Abolition of Man. Incidentally, so did Joseph Ratzinger. He also spoke very admiringly of this work. Any work that can appeal both to an atheist philosopher and a pope is obviously doing something very intriguing and interesting.
It’s quite a dense work even though it’s a slender volume. It consists of three short lectures that Lewis gave in the 1940s. But, pound for pound, it is one of his heaviest works. It is allusive and oblique. There are Greek, Latin, and French terms that he does not bother to translate. So, I have written this guide, After Humanity, as an attempt to unpack The Abolition of Man and make it more accessible to the general reader. I have been delighted with the response that it has received. It really does seem to speak into our cultural moment and our turn towards post-truth.
Are there any other features of After Humanity that you would like to mention?
It is published by Word on Fire Academic, who always produce handsome, attractive volumes. I managed to persuade them to include a photo gallery of various people, places, and documents that are related to The Abolition of Man. Hopefully, this is a way of illustrating some of its meaning.
I go through the work—at times, line by line, word for word—to unpack it. I also quote extensively from the secondary literature on The Abolition of Man, because I am no philosopher myself and need a lot of help in getting to grips with it. I reviewed all the books and articles on The Abolition of Man, and selected the most insightful comments from other thinkers, scholars, and critics.
5.
Finally, there is Lewis’s Miracles. In it, Lewis aims to establish that miracles are possible. Only if they are, does it make sense to examine evidence in favour of purported miracles, such as the Incarnation. Have you chosen Miracles because it lays the groundwork for Lewis’s other works on Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity?
No, I chose Miracles for three other reasons: first, because it is rather underappreciated and ought to be better known; secondly, because it is just an excellent book in its own right, especially the second half; and thirdly, because it connects back to where we started: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Let me go through those three points one by one.
Miracles has been underappreciated partly because of a controversy that has surrounded it.
Lewis published it in 1947. In 1948, at the Socratic Club here in Oxford, a debating society of which Lewis was president, Miracles was attacked by a young philosopher called Elizabeth Anscombe. She became a great Catholic intellectual. At that stage, she was at the start of her career and in her twenties. She entered the lists and attacked one narrow aspect of Miracles that she regarded as philosophically inadequate. She was a brilliant philosopher. She had studied under Wittgenstein in Cambridge. She knew her stuff and was working at a much more professional and precise level than Lewis was, particularly in Chapter Three of Miracles.
"Some have said that Lewis was traumatised by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe and retreated into fantasy. He took up a child's fairytale because he could not hack it as a philosopher. Quite the opposite!"
It was a rare occasion at the Socratic Club when Lewis was bested in public debate. Normally, he trounced the opposition, but on this occasion, he was put on the back foot. This acquired a sort of malign importance and became something an urban myth: “Oh, were you at the Socratic Club last night? Did you see Lewis being hauled over the coals by Elizabeth Anscombe?” But Lewis respected Anscombe’s critique and thought that, yes, she had noticed some weaknesses in the book. So, he went away and eventually rewrote the offending chapter, Chapter Three, and took into account some of her criticisms. But many do not bother to look at the second edition. They just think that this book was deemed philosophically incoherent at the Socratic Club and is not worth their consideration. But that is not so at all. Indeed, Anscombe, when she realised that Lewis had rewritten it, in light of her critique, said it spoke to his seriousness and honesty as a philosopher, that he was prepared to rethink in light of what she had said. So, it should not be underappreciated.
Secondly, it is an extremely good book, especially the second half. The first half is rather dry and philosophical when Lewis is talking about how a purely naturalistic account of reality is ultimately inadequate. If all that exists is matter, then how can we have any reliable access to truth? That is a case that he makes philosophically in the first half of the book. It’s a bit gristly and technical, but essential to set up the second half. It establishes that there is this spiritual medium called rationality that we can participate in as human beings. We are not just bodies but minds too. In that sense, rationality is, vis-à-vis materiality, a kind of miracle. Lewis argues that our thoughts are not just linked in an endless chain of physical causes and effects, but that we can escape that chain and perceive truth, - and truth is qualitatively different from sensation. Perceiving truth is a kind of miracle at the natural level. Having established that, Lewis goes on to argue that there is a truly supernatural miracle in the Incarnation. Just as we can come to know reason, so we can come to know the source of reason, the divine Logos.
The second half of the book is much more richly theological, indeed poetic. We come back to that aspect of his capacity as a writer. It is beautifully written—in parts positively anthologizable. Certain passages could be put in an anthology because they are so powerfully and effectively written.
So, I encourage people to:
a) forget Elizabeth Anscombe’s critique and realise that it is a much better book than they might have supposed;
b) push through the first half of the book, which can be a bit dry, and then get into its glorious second half, which contains some of the best apologetics that Lewis ever route.
Thirdly, there is its connection with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Interestingly, after Anscombe critiqued Miracles, the next book Lewis wrote was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She debated him in February 1948. Later that summer, we get the first reference that Lewis is working on a fairy tale which will become the first Chronicle of Narnia.
Some have said that Lewis was traumatised by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe and retreated into fantasy. He took up a child's fairytale because he could not hack it as a philosopher. Quite the opposite! Lewis was not retreating into fantasy. Rather, he was advancing into fantasy. He was progressing into the richer genre of drama and character, rather than just operating in thin rationalistic argumentation. He was, as it were, saying, “How can I depict in fiction the argument that I have tried to make in nonfiction, in Miracles?”
As I was saying earlier, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is structured out of jovial, kingly imagery. Interestingly, when you look at Miracles, you find that it too is strangely indebted to imagery of kingship and monarchy. In Lewis's presentation, reason is the king and non-rational capacities are, as it were, the commons, and the commons must submit to the king. Reason itself must submit to the higher king, God, who is the source of all rationality and logic. That is Lewis's basic thesis in Miracles. The supernaturalist, the Christian, anybody who believes in miracles, lives in a monarchical universe. Naturalists live in a democratic universe and by democracy he means something bad, flat, monochrome. There is no capacity for a qualitatively higher thing called reason in a purely naturalistic account of the universe. My coughs, sneezes, and other bodily secretions are on the same level as my so-called rational thought. Thoughts don’t give me insight into truth on a naturalistic account, because reality is purely “democratic” and there is no kingship, no higher realm of reason, available to me.
That’s the essence of the argument in Miracles, and then, he comes to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis takes the imagery of kingship and casts it into a story world where Aslan is the true king, who submits himself to the Emperor-over-the-Sea, his father, God the father, and who communicates that royal nature in turn to the children, who themselves become kings and queens as the story progresses. There is a cascading torrent of kingliness depicted in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The White Witch, the villain of the piece is trying to upend that natural hierarchy and make herself empress of Narnia, but she does so in an entirely self-defeating way. She ensnares Edmund and tells him that she wants him to be prince and, after she is gone, king. Yet she is prepared to cut his throat. She is going to murder him to serve her own purposes. In other words, she is a naturalist. Lewis is rendering the self-defeating and self-refuting aspects of naturalism in story form. That is what, I think, moved Lewis to go from Miracles to The Chronicles. That is another reason why Miracles is especially interesting and important.
"Yes, C.S. Lewis: he knew what his apostolate was, and he did it.”
(John Paul II)
Finally, a more controversial question. You were a former Anglican priest, and you minister to Anglicans who have entered into communion with the Bishop of Rome. Do you have any thoughts on why Lewis did not enter the Catholic Church, or, in the end, we have no idea why?
Well, I would give two answers. One—which I think is the answer that Lewis himself would give—is that he did not hear any call to enter the Catholic Church. I think that if he had felt that God was calling him into the Catholic Church, he would have entered it. Since he did not, we must presume that he never received that summons.
There are some interesting potential reasons as to why that was the case and why, for all his faithfulness as a Christian, he was not called to leave the Anglican Communion. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic philosopher, said that if God had wanted Lewis to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, he would have brought it about. That this was not brought about, indicates that God, in his Providence, thought that Lewis could do more for the Church, by staying outside its visible bounds than by entering into full communion. I can see why Peter Kreeft says that. If Lewis had become a Catholic, he would instantly have lost almost all his Protestant or non-Catholic audience. As it is, because he is an Anglican, he is regarded as a “safe” author for Protestants and evangelicals, especially in America, who may still look very askance at the Catholic Church, but who are prepared to receive any amount of Catholic theology, as mediated to them by this Anglican.
Lewis was a very Catholic-friendly Anglican. He had a high Eucharistic theology and always referred to the Blessed Sacrament. He believed in purgatory. He went regularly to confession, which was very unusual for an Anglican. He fasted on Fridays. He had a high natural theology. He prayed for the dead. He had serious doubts about the morality of contraception. In all these respects, he was adjacent to the Catholic Church, even if he was never formally a member.
Secondly, if one was being more critical—and it is unbecoming to be critical of so great a Christian writer and thinker, and in any case, who am I to judge another’s servant?—I would point to what Tolkien said about Lewis’s upbringing. Lewis was raised in Northern Ireland in a very sectarian and divided culture. It is still somewhat that way today though, thank God, much less so than it was in Lewis’s day. Tolkien thought that this accounted for Lewis's unwillingness to become a Catholic. He did not have an ulterior motive, but an “Ulsterior” motive for not becoming a Catholic! He had been raised in Ulster, this very anti-Catholic and hyper-Protestant part of the United Kingdom, where theological questions were inextricably entwined with political questions and social considerations. On several occasions, Lewis himself seems to have recognised that he had acquired unwittingly some prejudices against Catholicism. He overcame them to an extraordinary extent. His friendship with Tolkien, which was so important for both of them, testifies to that. Lewis was close friends with many other Catholics too. Almost half the Inklings—the group of writers and Oxford figures that assembled around Lewis and Tolkien—were Catholics. So, although Lewis may have had an Ulsterior motive, by God's grace he did overcome those prejudices, if that is the right word, and to a remarkable degree.
It's interesting that Pope John Paul II knew Lewis's works quite well, especially The Four Loves. Walter Hooper, Lewis's secretary and biographer, once had an audience with Pope John Paul II, who said to him, “Oh, you are Walter Hooper, the C.S. Lewis man! Yes, C.S. Lewis: he knew what his apostolate was, and he did it.” Hooper was forever quoting this line from John Paul II about how Lewis, as an Anglican, was given an apostolate, and he did it, he carried it out. Could he or should he have done it more in a specifically Catholic direction? Really, it’s none of our business!
