Talk:C. S. Lewis

Hmmm.... C.S. Lewis as an anonymous Orthodox? Is this because he is used by Orthodox apologists as well as other apologists? I'm not so sure if he would be necessarily Orthodox because he was a Low-Church Anglician (maybe Central) and so the liturgics would probably bother him. But then again, he doesn't necessarily adher to a particular theory of atonement the way that the West does. He also has a sense of santicification as a process involving time and position (I'm thinking of his words: "The bad man repents but the perfect man repents perfectly"). Interesting thought... I wouldn't know how to write it but I hope somebody does =] -Fedya

Many people have raised the question in this way, which was the reason for the heading. He surely had many symoathies with Orthodox Christians, including a love of liturgy. I'm hoping that with time, someone can fill all of this in. N.B. we're not declaring him an anonymous Orthodox, just raising the question of his ties to the East. - Fr. John

Comment by Very Former Anglican

While I am a great fan of C.S. Lewis, I can in no way understand why he should be included in Orthodoxwiki. He was not Orthodox. He was not interested in Orthodoxy. He was Anglican and intensely interested in Anglicanism as well as in Christianity as far as he understood it. He had a typically Western approach to original sin, he seems to have adhered to a form of Cartesian duality (absolute evil pitted against absolute good, but each somehow "needing" the other to exist) - both of which Orthodoxy rejects. It would be a shame if we confused inquirers and they ended up in the Episcopal Church just as it implodes. E.W. Riggs

Hello E.W. - I don't think we need to worry about folks ending up in the Episcopal church. Of course he wasn't Orthodox, but my take on why C.S. Lewis is here is because he is much loved by many Orthodox Christians. Hopefully, in time, this article will highlight his relationship with Orthodoxy and what Orthodox people have said about him, explaining his relevance to Orthodox folks. About the dualism you mentioned, I do think that The Great Divorce shows pretty clearly that he held to a "privative theory of evil" which is basically universal among classicly Christian theologians. He does mention Orthodoxy a number of times in his books. Given his time and place, he didn't enter in very far, but he was evidently quite interested in what he saw. Maybe these passages would be good to include here, to highlight his relationship to the Orthodox Church. - Fr. John