CS Lewis Anglican or Catholic?

[Solomons Song]

I have always got the impression that Lewis believed in Purgatory from his writings, but that is entirely subjective as he never actually explicitly says it.

Lewis always depicted Purgatory as a place to take the final steps in bringing your will completely in tangent with God's will. While pain is an intrinsic part of this process, the process isn't merely pain, like Catholicism suggests. Lewis' depictions of the ghosts hurting due to their natures not aligning with their current environment in The Great Divorce is interesting. And, as the ghosts conform (or resist conformance), the pain diminishes (or increases). Consequently, they're in Heaven, or at least what seems to be a suberb of heaven, the whole time. And they begin to feel more at home there as the pain diminishes.

Being an evangelical, I do not believe in Purgatory. But if I did, Lewis' definition of it would be the most logical in my opinion.

[Preacherintraining]

[David]

Will, you wrote: "That the idea that someone can be prayed into Heaven without themselves making a personal choice for Christ, seems to be a contradiction to every description the Bible gives to salvation."

That's not really the idea of Purgatory as I understand it--and I'm not RC. Lewis once said the intermediate state he refers to in The Great Divorce is not Limbo (for souls already lost) or Purgatory (for souls already saved). Purgatory is a place where those who have died with sin in their lives are purified or purged of that remaining sin and then sent on to Paradise (correct me if I'm wrong, anyone).

If you read Dante's Purgatorio you will get a good view of how this operates (too bad people today only read The Inferno). The people there are believers but they have significant sins in their lives they have never dealt with and learn to leave those sins behind so they can fully enter Paradise. This is the same sort of idea you see in The Great Divorce.

There was an old poem by Rod McKuen, the greatest kitschy poet of all time, about people who hit animals on the roads, and in it he said, "Purgatory in the very least" should be the punishment of someone who kills an animal with a car. This is a misunderstanding of what Purgatory is. It is not a sort of "lesser hell" as he envisioned it. It is not a place like "Heck" in the Dilbert comics ruled over by Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. It is a place of purgation and cleansing.

DWL[/i]

[robsia]

[David]

[robsia]

[David]

[Stanley Anderson]

[David]

Picking up on this thread again. I'm a little disturbed that a recent book by Joseph Peace called C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church tries to depict Lewis as a man who should have converted to the RC faith but was too influenced by Northern Irish anti-catholicism to do so. I wrote a review of this book (it will appear in The Lamp-Post soon). In that review I quote Lewis replying to a woman who wrote to ask him why he had never converted to the Roman Catholic faith. What he wrote her is, I think, instructive:

"The question for me (naturally) is not 'Why should I not be a Roman Catholic' but 'Why should I?' But I don't like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion form the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less."

Sounds to me like Lewis's disagreement with Roman Catholicism were doctrinal and were substantial. He was firmly an Anglican and the less shilly-shallying over this, the better.

David

[Jeff]

Hi! I'm new here. This is a great forum.

I think everyone understands what it was that C. S. Lewis believed happens immediately after death: that there is a cleansing of the soul which is in some sense painful, and that this is necessary due to a lack of complete self-renunciation during earthly life. Everyone seems to agree about this.

I think that what most people in this forum don't understand is the teaching of the Catholic Church. In this case, it is difficult to say whether or not Lewis' view was particularly Catholic.

The Council of Florence (Session 6, July 6, 1439) formally defined 'purgatory' for all Catholics: "Also, if truly penitent people die in the love of God before they have made satisfaction for acts and omissions by worthy fruits of repentance, their souls are cleansed after death by cleansing pains...." This is all that is said about the nature of purgatory in the Council of Florence, and nothing further has been added by any Ecumenical Council.

The recently published Catechism of the Catholic Church, though lacking the authority of a council, expresses the mind of the Church very well:

"...every sin...entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the "temporal punishement" of sin. [This] punishement must not be concieved of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin." (CCC 1472)

"All who die in God's Grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned." (CCC 1030-1031)

What the Catholic Church does NOT teach about purgatory is that people get punished by God before they get to heaven because they were bad and deserve it. In fact, 22 out of the 23 autonomous churches that make up the Catholic Church reject this idea outright. This is not to say that there haven't been any Latin Catholics who expound this as a theological opinion, but it is just that--a theological opinion, and not a doctrine taught by the Catholic Church.

I hope that this helps everyone to understand what the Catholic Church teaches concerning purgatory. I guess we'll never know exactly what Lewis thought, but it seems clear to me, at least, that Lewis would agree very much with the Council of Florence and the Catechism.

[Roonwit]

Interesting.. I have never come across anything stating that Lewis was Catholic... always that he was Anglican... I did read that after his trip to Greece he was impressed with the Orthodox faith...

[David]