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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Hansen Lectureship Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Perhaps no other literary figure has transformed the American religious landscape in recent history as much as C. S. Lewis. Even before the international publication and incredible success of his fictional works such as The Chronicles of Narnia or apologetic works like Mere Christianity, Lewis was already being read "across the pond" in America. But who exactly was reading his work? And how was he received? With fresh research and shrewd analysis, this volume by noted historian Mark A. Noll considers the surprising reception of Lewis among Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical readers to see how early readings of the Oxford don shaped his later influence. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.
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Readings and Reception, 1935-1947
To
MAGGIE NOLL
and
THE MEMORY OF CHRIS MITCHELL
Contents
Preface
G. Walter Hansen
A DRAMATIC OCCURRENCEstruck the United States with surprising force during World War II and in the years immediately before and after. Audiences who witnessed that unfolding episode were stunned. That unexpected event was the striking effect of books by a Belfast professor of medieval literature at Oxford University.
In this book, American historian Mark Noll documents the astounding impact of books by C. S. Lewis when they first appeared in the United States in the turbulent years of 1935–1947. His study yields two results: (1) portraits of the audiences that responded to C. S. Lewis, and (2) challenges to emulate C. S. Lewis in our own turbulent times.
His portraits of audiences responding to Lewis pose intriguing historical contrasts. In the Roman Catholic response (chapter one), consider how the pre–Vatican II church’s unanimous, enthusiastic appreciation for the defense of objective, universal moral values articulated by Lewis differs from the division between Catholic liberals and conservatives in our day. In the wake of the 1960s sexual revolution and Pope John XXIII’s call to aggiornamento, or “updating,” of the church with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), conflicting, diverse Catholic perspectives generated tension and even animosity in the Catholic Church. While official (magisterial) teaching on the traditional creeds has not wavered, the splintering of the church can be seen today as inflammatory rhetoric over many moral issues causes rifts in Catholic parishes and families. You can hear the loss of the moral consensus in our day as Catholics disagree with Catholics regarding abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Just listen to the spectrum of positions held by US bishops, some of whom assert that a pro–abortion rights politician such as President Joseph Biden, a Roman Catholic, should not present himself for Communion.
The response of mainstream media (chapter two), from the first review in the New York Times (December 1935) to the appearance of Lewis on the cover of Time (September 1947), reveals the state of American culture seventy-five years ago. The popularity of Lewis in that era points to, in Noll’s words, a “late Christian culture,” in contrast to the post-Christian culture of our day. The decrease of Americans who identify as Christian and the increase of the nones, Americans who deny association with any faith tradition, provide evidence that the beliefs of Christianity are rejected or at least forgotten by an increasing number in our society. Of course, nones sing Christian hymns at funerals and weddings and advance arguments based on Christian ideas about human rights, but the Christian theology for those hymns and arguments is mostly forgotten.
The appreciation of Lewis’s works by both mainline Protestants and, eventually, evangelicals (chapter three) shows us a common center in the American Protestant world in the 1940s, in contrast to the polarization between progressives and right-wing evangelicals in our day. In his preface to Mere Christianity, Lewis says, “It is at [the church’s] centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine.”1 The appeal to dwell in the church’s center seems to fall on deaf ears and hard hearts in our day.
These significant contrasts between the time of the early reception of Lewis and our time might make you wonder about the relevance of C. S. Lewis for our day. What is the enduring value in the work of Lewis? Noll answers this question in his conclusion by pointing to qualities in Lewis’s writing for us to emulate in our thought, life, and work. The following three phrases based on Lewis’s work encapsulate Noll’s challenges for us today.
LEARNING IN WAR-TIME
I am struck by the absence of direct, explicit commentary on breaking news by Lewis. Yet, he was writing during war time. How did he keep from being terrorized by the horror of war? We find out by reading his Evensong message, “Learning in War-Time,” October 22, 1939, delivered to students and faculty at Oxford University. “The first enemy,” he says, “is excitement—the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work.”2 He calls his university colleagues back to their intellectual work, the work of the mind: “To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophers must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”3
According to Noll, the enduring value of Lewis’s work is that he was “deeply learned.” Lewis, he writes, had an “extensive reservoir of literary knowledge.” A challenge for us today is to free ourselves from the panic of breaking news and pursue a life of learning that is “in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to Divine reality and the Divine beauty.”4 Though few of us are called to a life of learning as professors and students in a university, all of us need to apply this challenge to keep our focus on the responsibilities of our own spheres of life and work in our turbulent times. When each of us pursues our God-given calling, the light of love and beauty of grace will overcome the darkness of vengeful hate and cruelty.
LIVING WITHIN THE TAO
Lewis saw clearly that the dominant philosophies of subjectivism and pragmatism were inadequate responses to the force of Nazism. He points to the Tao as the Way out of the darkness:
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.5
The only way to avoid the abolition of humanity is to live within the Tao, the framework of transcendent, universal norms of truth, justice, goodness, and beauty. The illustrations of the Tao that Lewis provides in the appendix to The Abolition of Man are drawn from a wide range of religious and philosophical sources. They give abundant evidence for the apostle Paul’s claim that the moral law of God is written on the hearts of all humans (Rom 2:15). The universal moral law, the Tao, establishes a standard for all human behavior: “Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.”6 Lewis’s illustrations of the Tao show that the moral standard for speech in all times and places for all people forbids slander and false witness against neighbors and calls for words of love, truth, and grace.
In the most widespread Chinese translation of the Gospel of John, John 1:1 reads, “In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God and the Tao was God.” This translation has generated controversy because of the potential confusion of Christian faith with what Tao means in the Chinese Taoist tradition. But if we see Tao as presented by Lewis to be the universal values in all human traditions, then we can affirm that Jesus is indeed the full embodiment of the Tao. Jesus says, “I am the way” (Jn 14:6). In Chinese, he is the Tao. The challenge for us today is to shine the light of the Tao—Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Justice—to dispel the darkness of destructive, inhumane powers.
SITTING IN THE WHITE-HOT FURNACE OF ESSENTIAL SPEECH
In the final chapter of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the gods of other planets come to the house of Ransom. He speaks to them in the heavenly language. Then, in one of my favorite lines ever penned by Lewis, we read: “For Ransom, whose study had been for many years in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech.” Ransom’s heavenly pleasure was anticipated heavenly fulfillment for Lewis’s own longing as one who loved words. In his work, he was sitting in the “white-hot furnace of essential speech,” purifying and refining his language.
Noll demonstrates that American responses to Lewis during the war all applauded the exceptional clarity and humor in Lewis’s writing. His language was accessible, purged of academic jargon and empty platitudes. Lewis wrote in the time of the big lie of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. Goebbels famously said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” In the “white-hot furnace of essential speech,” Lewis burned up the big lies of Screwtape, the insidious lies of pride, sophisticated lies of academic skeptics, and the smooth lies of politicians. The challenge for us today is to burn away all toxic speech so that our words bear the beauty of truth and goodness.
THE KEN AND JEAN HANSEN LECTURESHIP
I was motivated to set up a lectureship in honor of my parents, Ken and Jean Hansen, at the Wade Center primarily because they loved Marion E. Wade. My father began working for Mr. Wade in 1946, the year I was born. He launched my father’s career and mentored him in business. Often when I look at the picture of Marion Wade in the Wade Center, I give thanks to God for his beneficial influence in my family and in my life.
After Darlene and I were married in December 1967, the middle of my senior year at Wheaton College, we invited Marion and Lil Wade for dinner in our apartment. I wanted Darlene to get to know the best storyteller I’ve ever heard.
When Marion Wade passed through death into the Lord’s presence on November 28, 1973, his last words to my father were, “Remember Joshua, Ken.” As Joshua was the one who followed Moses to lead God’s people, my father was the one who followed Marion Wade to lead the ServiceMaster Company.
After members of Marion Wade’s family and friends at ServiceMaster set up a memorial fund in honor of Marion Wade at Wheaton College, my parents initiated the renaming of Clyde Kilby’s collection of papers and books from the seven British authors—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield—as the Marion E. Wade Collection.
I’m also motivated to name this lectureship after my parents because they loved the literature of these seven authors whose papers are now collected at the Wade Center.
While I was still in college, my father and mother took an evening course on Lewis and Tolkien with Dr. Kilby. The class was limited to nine students so that they could meet in Dr. Kilby’s living room. Dr. Kilby’s wife, Martha, served tea and cookies.
My parents were avid readers, collectors, and promoters of the books of the seven Wade authors, even hosting a book club in their living room led by Dr. Kilby. When they moved to Santa Barbara in 1977, they named their home Rivendell, after the beautiful house of the elf Lord Elrond, whose home served as a welcome haven to weary travelers as well as a cultural center for Middle-earth history and lore. Family and friends who stayed in their home know that their home fulfilled Tolkien’s description of Rivendell:
And so at last they all came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide. . . . [The] house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. . . . Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. . . . Their plans were improved with the best advice.7
Our family treasures many memories of our times at Rivendell, highlighted by storytelling. Our conversations often drew from images of the stories of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other authors. We had our own code language: “That was a terrible Bridge of Khazad-dûm experience.” “That meeting felt like the Council of Elrond.”
One cold February, Clyde and Martha Kilby escaped the deep freeze of Wheaton to thaw out and recover for two weeks at my parents’ Rivendell home in Santa Barbara. As a thank-you note, Clyde Kilby dedicated his book Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis to my parents. When my parents set up our family foundation in 1985, they named the foundation Rivendell Stewards’ Trust.
In many ways, they lived in and lived out the stories of the seven authors. It seems fitting and proper, therefore, to name this lectureship in honor of Ken and Jean Hansen.
ESCAPE FOR PRISONERS
The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to provide a way of escape for prisoners. J. R. R. Tolkien writes about the positive role of escape in literature:
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic.8
Note that Tolkien is not talking about escapism or an avoidance of reality but rather the idea of escape as a means of providing a new view of reality, the true, transcendent reality that is often screened from our view in this fallen world. He adds:
Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this [derogatory] way the [literary] critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.9
I am not proposing that these lectures give us a way to escape from our responsibilities or ignore the needs of the world around us but rather that we explore the stories of the seven authors to escape from a distorted view of reality, from a sense of hopelessness, and to awaken us to the true hope of what God desires for us and promises to do for us.
C. S. Lewis offers a similar vision for the possibility that such literature could open our eyes to a new reality:
We want to escape the illusions of perspective. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. . . .
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . .
In reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. . . . Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.10
The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to explore the great literature of the seven Wade authors so that we can escape from the prison of our self-centeredness and narrow, parochial perspective in order to see with other eyes, feel with other hearts, and be equipped for practical deeds in real life.
As a result, we will learn new ways to experience and extend the fulfillment of our Lord’s mission: “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Lk 4:18 NIV).
Introduction
Mark A. Noll
IMAGINE THAT INthe 1930s and 1940s transatlantic air travel had been as routine as it is now. Imagine also that C. S. Lewis had journeyed to the United States to converse in person with those who were reading his books on this side of the Atlantic. Through 1942, it was only a small number of mostly academics and reviewers for the nation’s newspapers of record. But after early 1943 and the American publication of The Screwtape Letters, that number grew rapidly and from every intellectual, religious, and cultural corner of the land. These readers in America included well-regarded literary scholars, theologians, historians, and philosophers; figures destined for renown, such as Thomas Merton and W. H. Auden; masters of the radio, such as Alister Cooke, who would later become a fixture on public television; reviewers for the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review, and other well-positioned periodicals; and many Roman Catholics, many mainline Protestants, and a few—but only a few—fundamentalists and evangelicals.
In actual, as opposed to imagined, history, we know only a little about how Lewis responded to what his American readers wrote about his works.1 Yet we know in detail how Americans from these various constituencies regarded his books because of the many reviews they published—at first a steady trickle and then, after The Screwtape Letters, a rapidly expanding deluge of critical engagement.
Figure I.1. C. S. Lewis, who had been noticed by only a small circle of academics, gained a widespread American readership almost immediately after Macmillan brought out an American edition of The Screwtape Letters in February 1943.
This book examines that engagement from before the New York Times published the first American review on December 8, 1935, through 1947, the year that Time magazine celebrated Lewis with a cover portrait and laudatory article in its September 8 issue. The logic for treating this span of years as a period unto itself is twofold.
For Lewis, these were the years when he first gained a significant audience in the United Kingdom and the United States. But they came before the stratospheric recognition that followed the publication in 1950 of the first Narnia tale (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and the appearance in 1952 of Mere Christianity, Lewis’s apology and exposition of the Christian faith, which he assembled from pamphlets of radio talks he had delivered during the Second World War.2
The years 1935 through 1947 also mark a distinct period for showing what American critical reactions to Lewis reveal about Americans. This was an era dominated by pervasive national crises—first the Depression, then World War II, and then uncertainties after the war about charting a national course as the world’s dominant superpower. These same years also witnessed a crucial cultural transition—from a past in which Christian values could be more or less taken for granted by wide swaths of the American people to a future in which those values became increasingly contested.3
In trying to make sense out of critical reactions to C. S. Lewis in the years surrounding the Second World War, this book follows outstanding recent studies by K. Alan Snyder, George Marsden, and Stephanie Derrick. By researching how, when, where, and why Lewis’s writings became so popular, these books have greatly helped to understand the remarkable extent of the C. S. Lewis phenomenon.4C. S. Lewis in America goes further by differentiating in considerable detail among the various American groups that responded to Lewis in the first years of his public visibility: first, the many Roman Catholics who wrote about Lewis and his works; second, Lewis’s reception in journals, magazines, and newspapers intended for general audiences or the academic world; and third, responses to Lewis from mainline Protestants and fundamentalist or evangelical Protestants. The chapter devoted to each group shows how the critical reception of C. S. Lewis sheds light on the history of that particular constituency in the years surrounding World War II. In other words, by bringing together what Lewis wrote and what Americans wrote about Lewis, we gain deeper insight into both Lewis and America.
Figure I.2. This image (ca. 1940) shows a considerably younger Lewis than the individual whom later photographs would make so well known throughout the whole world.
Table 1. Publication of C. S. Lewis’s Books in the United States, 1935–1947
TITLE
FIRST AMERICANPUBLICATION
FIRST BRITISHPUBLICATION
Literary Scholarship
The Allegory of Love
1958
(Oxford University Press, NY)
1936
(Clarendon)
Rehabilitations and Other Essays
1939, March 23
(Oxford University Press, London & New York)
The Personal Heresy, with E. M. W. Tillyard
1939, April 27
(Oxford University Press, London & New York)
A Preface to Paradise Lost
1942, October 8
(Oxford University Press, London & New York)
as editor, George MacDonald: An Anthology
1947
(Macmillan)
1946
(Geoffrey Bles)
Imaginative Writing
The Pilgrim’s Regress
1935, October
(Sheed & Ward)
1933
(J. M. Dent)
The Screwtape Letters
1943, February 16 (Macmillan)
1942, February 9
(Geoffrey Bles)
Out of the Silent Planet
1943, September 28 (Macmillan)
1938, September 23
(John Lane The Bodley Head)
Perelandra
1944, April 11
(Macmillan)
1943, April 20
(John Lane The Bodley Head)
The Great Divorce
1946, February 26 (Macmillan)
1946, January 14
(Geoffrey Bles/Centenary Press)
That Hideous Strength
1946, May 21
(Macmillan)
1945, August 16
(John Lane The Bodley Head)
Christian Exposition
The Case for Christianity (US) / Broadcast Talks (UK)
1943, September 7
(Macmillan)
1942, July 13
(Geoffrey Bles/Centenary Press)
The Problem of Pain
1943, October 26
(Macmillan)
1940, October 18
(Centenary Press)
Christian Behaviour
1944, January 18
(Macmillan)
1943, April 19
(Geoffrey Bles/Cenenary Press)
Christian Exposition
Beyond Personality: The Christian Idea of God
1945, March 20
(Macmillan)
1944, October 9
(Geoffrey Bles/Centenary Press)
The Abolition of Man
1947, April 8
(Macmillan)
1943, January 6
(Oxford University Press)
Miracles: A Preliminary Study
1947, September 16
(Macmillan)
1947, May 12
(Geoffrey Bles/Centenary Press)
Source: Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
Between 1935 and 1947, Americans enjoyed access to seventeen of Lewis’s books. The Catholic firm Sheed & Ward published the first American edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1935. Soon four books from Lewis’s literary scholarship became accessible through the New York office of Oxford University Press. Beginning in 1943, Macmillan was responsible for twelve titles, including two fantasies (The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce); the Ransom Trilogy (a.k.a. Space Trilogy); three slim volumes of radio presentations lectures that later became Mere Christianity; three works of Christian or moral argument (The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and Miracles); and Lewis’s edited collection of writings from George MacDonald.
At the end of chapter three, C. S. Lewis in America draws to a close by considering matters of contemporary relevance. Documenting the reception of Lewis’s writing during this early period underscores the enduring qualities that have kept these works alive for so many readers in so many places. Attending to this reception history may in turn suggest how the approaches Lewis modeled decades ago might assist believers in addressing the public today.
This book, with a modest expansion and further editing, presents the lectures and responses that were first given at Wheaton College in early 2022 as the seventh series of the Ken and Jean Hansen Lectures at Wheaton’s Marion E. Wade Center. In preparing the lectures for publication, I have retained some features of the original oral presentations while revising the chapters with a general readership in view.
At a time of increasing pressure on the humanities in colleges and universities, and indeed of resistance everywhere to careful intellectual labor, philanthropy as exemplified by Walter and Darlene Hansen in endowing a lectureship in honor of Walter’s parents becomes all the more meaningful. It is thus an honor to thank both generations of Hansens for their long-standing commitment to the authors curated at the Wade Center, for making this lecture series possible, and for their overarching desire to show that Christian learning can be pursued as a God-given task.
I am also deeply grateful to Marjorie Mead of the Wade Center for organizing the lectures as well as to Crystal Downing, David Downing, Laura Schmidt, and other Wade staff for all that was involved in bringing off a lecture series in pandemic times. Chloe DuBois and Elise Peterson deserve special mention for their diligence in pursuit of the book’s images. Jerry Root and Lyle Dorsett do not realize how greatly I benefited from the many hours of illuminating conversation in which they indulged me on matters relating to C. S. Lewis. A special word of thanks is due to Karen Johnson, Kirk Farney, and Amy Black for the care with which they prepared their responses to the lectures and the depth of insight those responses add to this book. For the images reproduced in the book, I would like to thank the owners of rights to those images. I am particularly grateful to America magazine for permission to reprint as an appendix to this volume the two pathbreaking articles on Lewis, authored by Charles Brady, that appeared in the May 27, 1944, and June 10, 1944, issues of that periodical.
C. S. Lewis in America is dedicated to my wife, Maggie Noll, and to a former director of the Wade Center, the late Chris Mitchell, and for very good reasons. Maggie undertook the research that led to a nearly complete collection of early American reviews of Lewis’s works and then carefully organized that research while I was teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The project itself, however, came about only because Chris had asked me to prepare a talk as part of an observance in 2013 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s death. It was a poignant but also joyful occasion in late 2021 to take part at the Wade Center in launching a book of essays in grateful memory of Chris, a book in which a preliminary essay based on Maggie’s research was published.5
Surprise
Roman Catholics as Lewis’s First and Most Appreciative Readers
MARK A. NOLL
FOR NEARLY EIGHTY YEARS, C. S. Lewis has sustained an incredible popularity in the United States. The beginning point of that popularity can be identified exactly. On February 16, 1943, the American publisher Macmillan brought out a New York edition of The Screwtape Letters a year after the book had been published in England. By the end of March, rapturous notices of the book had appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Springfield Republican, the New York Times, and the Christian Century. Sensing sales, Macmillan in October rushed into print two Lewis titles that had appeared earlier on the other side of the Atlantic, Out of the Silent Planet and The Problem of Pain. Immediately, American newspapers, magazines, and journals sprang to celebrate these works with almost as much enthusiasm as had greeted Screwtape.
Prominent in the initial chorus of praise for Lewis’s work were positive reviews of Screwtape in Commonweal, a magazine published by lay Roman Catholics, and America, sponsored by the nation’s Jesuits. Thought, a Catholic academic quarterly from Fordham University, had even jumped the gun in January with a sparkling review of the English edition.
This initial enthusiasm led to Catholic engagement that was remarkable in several respects. Catholic authors reviewed or discussed all seventeen of Lewis’s books that could be read in America (see table 1). No other religious or academic constituency treated both popular and academic works so thoroughly. Beginning in early 1943, in what is still an incomplete accounting, American Catholics published at least thirty-four reviews and one extensive essay review in Catholic publications. They added five substantial reviews in the major New York newspapers. The high point in this wave of interest came in an extensive two-part essay in 1944 by Charles Brady, a professor of English literature at Canisius College, whom Lewis himself called “the first of my critics so far who has really read and understood all of my books and ‘made up’ the subject in a way that makes you an authority.”1 Although Catholic responses did include some negative criticism, they were more generally positive about Lewis than any other American constituency. Not until 1946, when Chad Walsh, an Episcopalian English professor at Beloit College, began to publish on Lewis did anyone else even come close to the breadth of Catholic treatment or the depth of Catholic appreciation.
To explore this episode in reception history, it helps to begin with a simplified account of the state of the church in the 1930s and 1940s. Then a survey of which Catholic authors highlighted which features of Lewis’s writing will make it obvious why he was received so warmly. That survey, in turn, will put us in position not to claim that Lewis exerted the kind of influence on American Catholics that he would later exert on American evangelical Protestants but to show why Catholic responses to Lewis provide a telling gauge for crucially important developments that were underway in the American church.
