S2E10 – AA – Joseph Pearce

Today is another “After Hours” episode! Joseph Pearce has written books on Oscar Wilde, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He is, among other things, the Director of Book Publishing at the Augustine Institute and can be found podcasting over at Faith and Culture.

In this episode, Joseph and I will be discussing his book C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, which looks at Jack’s relationship to the Catholic Church and addresses the question asked by many Catholic C.S. Lewis fans: Why did Lewis not convert to Catholicism? Why didn’t he “Swim the Tiber”? We hope that all our listeners, regardless of denomination, will find this discussion interesting and very thought-provoking!

S2E10: “After hours” with Joseph Pearce (Download)

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Show Notes

• Joseph was kind enough to take this interview on his birthday! He insisted on pointing out that, unlike Bilbo Baggins, he’s note quite yet at his 111st birthday…

• Like myself, Joseph is an Englishman. When he mentioned “Britain”, I quoted Lewis:

Only foreigners and politicians talk about “Britain”. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

• I said that whenever I speak about C.S. Lewis in a Catholic environment, I’m always asked the question:

“Why didn’t C.S. Lewis become Catholic?”

I always point people to Joseph’s book C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church which addresses this very question. Joseph said that this is a common question of all those who “swim the Tiber” (convert to Catholicism) and who also credit Lewis, at least in part, with their own conversion.

• The quote-of-the-week came, not from the Preface to Mere Christianity:

You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic… There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially “high,” nor especially “low,” nor especially anything else… Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Preface)

• When Joseph saw I was drinking alcohol, I shared this quotation from Hilaire Belloc:

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino! [Let us bless the Lord]”

Hilaire Belloc

Joseph was drinking PG Tips, which is probably the most popular tea brand in England.

• Before becoming Catholic, Joseph was an active member of a white supremacist group. He recounts this conversion in his book Race with the Devil and he gave us the highlights of that story.

• He spoke about his love for G.K. Chesterton and then recounted his discovery of Lewis when he picked up Surprised By Joy . I compared this to Lewis’ own discovery of George MacDonald’s Phantastes at Leatherhead Station. Lewis said that it baptized his imagination and Joseph said that Lewis baptized his intellect. He had previously simply accepted what the zeitgeist (German: Spirit of the age) said, that Christianity is irrational. However, Lewis and Chesterton showed him the indissoluble union between fides et ratio (Latin: Faith and reason). In response to this story, I quoted Lewis:

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading”

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Chapter 12)

• Despite being English, we both live in the United States, so we bonded over the fact that Americans almost always think we’re from Australia. I asked him what he most missed about England. He identified pubs, English Ale and walking on public footpaths. When I asked him what he loves most about America, like me, he said that it’s Americans!

• I asked about Lewis’ ecumenical legacy and Joseph pointed out that, while Lewis was ecumenical, he wouldn’t allow the faith to be watered-down. He always sought the “Highest Common Factor”, not the “Lowest Common Denominator”. In response, I recounted a story I’ve told before on this podcast:

After the best conference I ever attended, with two serious theologians [each] from the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Evangelical, and mainline Protestant churches staying all week and talking about their differences and agreements, in a frank and candid but irenic and listening way, everybody constantly and naturally referring to things C.S. Lewis wrote about this and that. Father Joe Fessio got up at the closing session and proposed that we issue a joint statement of agreement and say that what unites us all, despite our serious differences, is scripture, the first six ecumenical councils, and the collected words of C.S. Lewis. Everyone cheered.

Peter Kreeft

Joseph declared that “C.S. Lewis Christians” are the creme de la creme (French: Cream of the cream) and he admitted he often feels more at home with them than he does with Catholics!

• Joseph spoke briefly about the Anglican Church’s relationship with Lewis today. In recent years the Church of England has been particularly susceptible to the Modernism which Lewis fought so hard against. He said that Lewis’ secretary, Walter Hooper, lamented that many Anglicans today do not read Lewis’ works. I commented that I had spent several years at an Anglican Church and they behaved far more like Evangelicals and, in fact, it was members of that parish who reintroduced me as an adult to Lewis and his books!

• I asked Joseph about Lewis’ approach to denominations. Quoting Pope St. John-Paul II, he said that Lewis knew what his apostolate was, he knew that he was called to preach the Highest Common Factor (“mere”) Christianity to the world. However, in his private life, his faith looked much more Catholic. To demonstrate this, he quoted from The Weight of Glory:

“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

• Although Lewis is an ecumenical figure, many people credit him, at least in part, with their conversion to the Catholic Church. The stories of many of these can be found in the Appendix of Joseph’s book: Walter Hooper, George Sayer, Hugo Dyson’s Son, Peter Kreeft, Thomas Howard, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, … I asked Joseph to explain this phenomenon. He pointed to the rational basis of Lewis’ faith, saying that this leads people away from fideism, the kind of Christianity which is about blind faith. He suggested that this, in turn, leads people into the kind of Christianity which the Catholic Church champions.

• In his book, Joseph explained that Lewis didn’t read much of St. Thomas Aquinas directly, but imbibed much of him through his reading of Dante. This was a great irony, since he himself spoke about getting past the “watchful dragons” of people’s prejudices by smuggling theology into literature.

This caused Joseph to speak about, what Tolkien called, Lewis’ “Ulsterior Motive”. Ulster is a province in the north of the island of Ireland where Lewis grew up. Lewis admitted that he was always taught never to trust a “Papist” (Catholic). Although he largely overcame these anti-Catholic prejudices later in life, Tolkien thought that he never quite shook them off entirely.

Joseph said that the two major areas of Catholic teaching with which Lewis struggled were the Blessed Virgin and the Papacy. These were also two of the final issues with which he himself struggled. I think that’s true for most converts and reverts (including myself).

I admitted that I was initially suspicious of using “childhood prejudice” as an explanation for Lewis never converting, particularly given that Lewis overcame many prejudices simply in converting to Christianity. However, in C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, Joseph demonstrates the blind spot which Lewis had for Mary even in his academic works. Joseph explained that this was particularly noticeable when Lewis wrote about amour courtois (French: courtly love), of which Dante’s Beatrice is the ultimate literary model. He recommened the book Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis.

• I asked about the difference between G.K. Chesterton and Lewis’ journey since, while similar, Chesterton eventually came to embrace the Catholic Church. Joseph pointed to Chesterton’s extremely Catholic view of romance from earlier in his life. This meant that when he recoiled from the pessimism of Schopenhauer, he naturally went towards the Catholic version of Christianity.

• I had always wondered what influence Lewis’ wife Joy Davidman might have had with regards to Catholicism. Joseph described her as a femme formidable (French: strong women), noting that she was a great influence behind Lewis’ book, Till We Have Faces. While he suspects that she would have probably have been more resistant to Rome, he thinks that Lewis’ outlook was already well-formed by the time he met her. He notes that some of Lewis’ most Catholic-sounding comments can be found in Letters to Malcolm, which he wrote after getting married.

• George MacDonald was a major influence in Lewis’ life, so I wondered what impact he had concerning the question of Catholicism. Joseph suggested that he probably didn’t influence Lewis’ ecclesiology. Instead, MacDonald baptized his imagination, helping him get over materialism, but probably did open Jack up to a more sacramental view of the world.

• Rather than Catholicism, I’ve often thought that Lewis would be more likely to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, since it would avoid his problem with the Papacy. Joseph agreed with my assessment, but pointed out that there would be an irony if this had happened, given that Lewis was very much “the old western man”.

I commented that, in reading an article by Kallistos Ware, I was surprised to learn that Lewis didn’t have a huge exposure to the Early Church Fathers. Joseph said that he sympathized with Lewis because he too is primarily a Literature person, not a theologian. Lewis knew Augustine, not primarily because Augustine was a writer of theology, but because he was a writer of great literature.

• If you would like to discover more of Joseph’s work, check out his website jpearce.co and his podcast Faith and Culture.