The Nouvelle Théologie of C.S. Lewis

The work of C.S. Lewis should be read within the broader context of the Nouvelle Théologie movement.

Jan 16, 2025

camera on brown wooden shelf — Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash

Most come here first for the science fiction and weird anecdotes while others come here for my occasional prophetic frothing against ideologies that, for instance, support Nazis. Though I promise to get to the Nazis, I want to lead-in with what scandalizes most Evangelicals about their scifi and fantasy hero, C.S. Lewis: the man smoked enough to turn his bleach white ceiling corners brownish yellow and drank enough to fry a couple kidneys. I know this because I once tracked mud into C.S. Lewis’s historic home, The Kilns.

I promise those two are related first to one another, then to Nouvelle Théologie.

We were late from Oxford, you see. It was February 2020 and as far as I was concerned absolutely, positively nothing could go wrong with international travel in February of 2020. Tara and I were passing Oxford having kept our appointment to encourage a colleague retiring in Worcester. We got off the bus and had exactly 15 minutes to get from the bus stop to The Kilns for our appointment (we had another to keep in Cambridge for another colleague getting his PhD there). The woman who ran it in California was absolutely strict: no lateness, they slam the door in your faces and form a pike wall, ye heathen.

From where we stood, taking the roadway walk would have taken us 30 minutes. We wouldn’t make it in time to get in the door and sit at the desk and so forth. So I plotted it across the rugby patch. It was going to take 15 as a straight cut through the woods.

“Is that okay?” Tara asked.

I said, “Jack walked this path a billion times.”

We proceeded to march across freshly soaked marshland with 100 pounds of luggage in two bags, boots, and my herringbone tweed. They don’t call us Brooklyners for nothing.1 I bet we had a solid inch of mud on our boots and even more on the suitcase wheel wells to boot. We arrived three minutes late.

I said immediately, “I’m so sorry, I know the woman in California—”

“They say that all the time and we really don’t care. Come in.”

“But there’s mud all over my boots. We had to cross the rugby—”

“Jack Lewis tracked mud all over this house, come in.”

The first thing we noticed, beyond the mud and dirt clinging to the author, was that either someone had applied Crest whitening strips to the bottom half of the walls and house or someone had applied a tobacco rolling factory’s decade of smoke to the upper layer. The man smoked more than his chimney. And that was before you added his brother into the mix.

We went from there to The Bird and Baby where we realized the Inklings met on Tuesday mornings. Which is the other thing that tends to scandalize teetotaling Evangelicals: not only that Lewis drank, but that he and the rest of them drank on a Tuesday morning. I suppose there are those who would clear their throat and say, “Ahem, Jack, starting early?”

To which I can imagine him saying, “No, dear, I’m ending early.”

This was of course the man who was accosted outside The Eagle and Child once for giving money to a man experiencing homelessness. The PhD in Wendell Berry I met at Oxford (this one from Alabama, which is a common theme among these colleges of late) told me this story: Jack’s friend said, “Jack, that bum’s just going to use that money on booze.”

And C.S. Lewis said, “Well so? That’s what I was going to do.”

I wanted to take awhile to show both the character of the man and the character of those who seem rather shallowly scandalized by his smoking and drinking (not unlike Chesterton’s) in order to give an image for those who, on the Catholic side, might find themselves scandalized by Lewis’s deep connection to Nouvelle Théologie. After this is over, there will be those focused on Lewis’s intellectual ceilings covered in yellowed tobacco stains, his intellectual floors covered in mud, his intellectual deposit robbed by stewbums. Similarly, there will be those focused on Lewis’s bookshelves filled to his intellectual ceilings, mud as evidence that the bounty of nature’s graces composing his intellectual floors, and alms to beggars as proof that his intellectual treasure hides in heaven where he sees himself as no better than the man drinking whiskey in the street.

I suppose it depends on your perspective on the Nouvelle Théologie and whiskey-soaked tobacco mud in question.

Nouvelle Théologie was a derisive term used by the opponents of a loosely-associated group of thinkers in the mid-twentieth century.2 “Many of the ressourcement scholars themselves, however—Henri de Lubac, Jean Danie ́lou, Henri Bouillard (1908–81), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Yves Congar—questioned the appropriateness of the term.”3 Most of its opponents came from the neo-scholastic background, the same neo-scholastics who dominated Catholic theology (and, arguably, still do) after Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris.4 They — more or less — advocated for ressourcement, a literal re-sourcing, a return to the sources.

Which sources?

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Yes, it’s true that Hitler himself hated the ethics of Christianity, was anti-clerical,9 enough so that Michael Burleigh’s analysis of Hitler’s Table Talk, a record of his private conversations, revealed "a mixture of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzschean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-clericalism." For this reason, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler – backed by Hitler – the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods with the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.”10

But that did not stop Hitler from finding certain clerics like Henriot as incredibly useful to him even though “vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans”.11 And so we should note that Fascist sympathizers and enablers like the Vichy bishops came from a certain theological point of view. Nouvelle Théologie attacked this neo-Thomism, this hegemony. Some in more recent years have harshly named this thinking a “sub-Christian dualism” perspective on the human being.

Whatever the case, de Lubac thought only the beauty of a latent supernatural within every nature could correct a dehumanizing dualism. Though he didn’t say so, it seems to me — mindful of the Vichy bishops — that if there is such a thing as an ungraced nature, there can be such a thing as an ungraced race. Say, for instance, Jews or immigrants.

The opposite move would offer a supernatural ends, a supernatural desire, for all humanity, latent in our very being:

De Lubac’s controversial Surnaturel did not get published until 1946, but de Lubac had been working on it for years and had finished much of the writing by the late 1930s. This book went to the heart of his disagreement with neo-scholastic theology: its separation between nature and the supernatural. De Lubac argued, in uncompromising fashion, that nature and the supernatural were not two parallel orders, running alongside one another, each with its own, distinct end. Instead, he argued that God had created nature in such a way that from the beginning it had a supernatural goal for its purpose. The natural desire (desiderium naturale) for the beatific vision that this implied seemed, to the neoThomists at least, to endanger the gratuity of divine grace: if human beings contributed a natural desire, the process of salvation did not seem to be originating only with God.12

Which leads us to a particular Dominican priest who warred against the Nouvelle Théologie school of thought and nevertheless enabled it having been sandwiched on either side of his tenure by two Nouvelle Théologie types. Hilary Carpenter, OP was a chaplain in the Royal Air Force — whom we know was stationed in North Africa13 — certainly served during the years Christopher Tolkien joined and trained in South Africa. Whether they had any direct contact, we don’t know. But we do know of his contact with many of the other thinkers around the time when he became provincial of Blackfriars, Oxford.

This is important because of Carpenter’s thinking when compared to the kinds of thinkers he allowed to be published in the journal. Yves Congar, one of the nouvelle theologie cadre, became a teacher at Cambridge in 1956. In the meantime, Carpenter was editing Blackfriars:

Carpenter, who had a distinguished record as a chaplain in the Royal Air Force during the war, belonged to that English Catholic tradition that emerged in the 1920s and 30s. By the 1940s and 50s it had a quite solid sense of its own identity as a community; you only have to glance through their journals, Blackfriars among them, to find the names of Eric Gill, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Martin D’Arcy and many others, academics such as Edward Bullough but also David Knowles; very much a dissenting community, proud to line up rhetorically if not in practice with the Dissenters, the non Anglican churches, the Christians who dissented from the establishment and who were if anything rather hostile to the Anglican Church.14

Chesterton — as one of Lewis’s “masters” along with the Eastern-Father-influenced George MacDonald — did not ascribe to Neo-Thomism. He made his opinions on various parallel issues known in places like Blackfriars. Remember: the Nouvelle Théologie movement reinterpreted even Thomas according to the fathers and an exegetical reading:

Aidan Nichols demonstrates the subtlety of the intuitive Thomism that characterized Chesterton's mind long before he read Aquinas or was received into the Catholic Church. GKC was no simple-minded advocate of natural theology who believed that one might employ unaided reason to deduce, with infallible certainty, the uncreated Prime Cause from the existence of created things. Never did Chesterton suggest that the supernatural could be simply read off the natural, as if the former completed the latter in a sort of layer-cake, two-tiered theology. Like the "new theologians" who would emerge in the 1940s - e.g., Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, and Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) - GKC held that there is no such thing as pure or independent or ungraced nature. On the contrary, creation is always and already laden with the longing for God, so that a full-orbed understanding of nature reveals that it radiates with a supernatural desire for that which transforms and completes and perfects it.15

You can see this outright hostility on full display in Chesterton’s snide comment in his biography on Aquinas, “It is not altogether unnatural that many bishops and doctors feared that the Thomists might become good philosophers and bad Christians. But there were also many, of the strict school of Plato and Augustine, who stoutly denied that they were even good philosophers.”16 The first sentence displays perhaps the same ire that motivated de Lubac’s underground journal Témoignage chrétien, which unveiled how desperately incompatible Christian belief remains with Nazi philosophy and actions (as Hitler himself proclaimed). De Lubac applied this first to Germany, but also to that Vichy government in southern France, which was theoretically, though not actually, independent of the Reich.

But the second?

The second echos the ire of C.S. Lewis — teaching as the newly founded chair in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge by 1954 — who was an incredibly careful reader of both Plato and Augustine:

The recovery of Aristotle’s text dates from the second half of the twelfth century: the dominance of his doctrine soon followed. Aristotle is, before all, the philosopher of divisions. His effect on his greatest disciple [Aquinas], as M. Gilson has traced it, was to dig new chasms between God and the world, between human knowledge and reality, between faith and reason. Heaven began, under this dispensation, to seem farther off. The danger of Pantheism grew less: the danger of mechanical Deism came a step nearer. It is almost as if the first, faint shadow of Descartes, or even of ‘our present discontents’ had fallen across the scene.17

According to J. Matthew Pinson “present discontents,” Lewis means the skeptics of his own age.18 But does Lewis merely mean that? The above quote comes from Allegory of Love, originally published in 1936 — already three yeas into Nazi Germany. Was it perhaps a reference to Dean William Ralph Inge’s language that made its way into the book by the same title, Our Present Discontents? The Anglican priest who followed the Cambridge Platonists?

And so Steve Park says Lewis was “disturbed by the Thomistic tendency to dichotomize nature and grace or reason and faith.”19 Lewis’s prime philosopher was Boethius.20 Lewis “did not follow schools [of thought], he did not follow the school of Thomas Aquinas. In Lewis’ mind, however, to have become a Roman Catholic would have meant that he would have had to follow the school of Thomas.”21 Considering other schools of thought and other Catholics, if this truly was his main reason, it’s rather unfortunate in the long tail of history. So much so that in a letter to Adam Bede Griffiths, Lewis wrote, “It was a great shock to learn that Thomism is now de fide [a matter of faith] for your Church—if that is what you mean. But is that really so? I should welcome a letter clearing the matter up.”

J. Matthew Pinson uncovered Christopher Derrick’s point about how Oxford changed and grew into

…a hotbed of the “vigorous revival of scholastic and Thomist thought among Catholics,” especially tied to the establishment of a Thomist college, Blackfriars. Lewis “revolted instinctively” against it.
…Adam Bede Griffiths once said that Lewis was “most unsympathetic to the revival of Thomism. . . . I don’t think that he found Saint Thomas himself very attractive.”This is probably why Lewis described himself as a “very poor Thomist,” and why, according to Walter Hooper, when he downsized after his retirement from Cambridge and sold many of his books, “amongst those he parted with were St Thomas’ Summa Theologica.”22

Considering Lewis’s perspective, Chesterton published his post-Thomism pieces in Blackfriars while Yves Congar came to Cambridge in 1956. The mood had shifted in Cambridge rather radically and no one would know that the priest they all shunned — who felt perennially depressed in their company — would one day become a cardinal. He felt worse than in the POW camp in Colditz and Lübeck: at least there he had the companionship of his fellows. He almost describes the English and Irish Dominicans of the time as “bêtes noires,” not for want of a beautiful priory. By this point, you’ll notice he was in his fifties and had been writing for some time alongside the others — and also that Lewis read French. Congar obtained a year off from Carpenter to translate Rahner’s work into English:

In September 1959 it must have been when we young Dominicans began the course de ecclesia, under the leadership of Cornelius Ernst (1924-77), who had entered the Order in 1949 after being taught by F. R. Leavis and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge. Indeed Ernst had become a Catholic at Cambridge and in 1958 had a year free to com plete his translation of the first volume of Karl Rahner’s Schrifien zur Theologie. Hilary Carpenter, as a Thomist of the strict observance, gave permission reluctantly. He must have known little of Rahner’s work, and did not read German; but nevertheless was willing to allow a young professor to have a year off to complete the translation.23

This included, of course, Wittgenstein’s protege Elizabeth Anscombe, who found a mentor in Victor White.

In recruiting White to be her tutor, Anscombe secured the most innovative interpreter of Thomas at Blackfriars…. In the 1930s, ressourcement theology was in its infancy, and its sources-based method of interpreting Aquinas was viewed by ‘transcendental Thomists’ with great suspicion…. The leading manifesto for the recovery of an historical and source-oriented method of interpreting Aquinas was M.D. Chenu OP’s 1937 book Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir. By February 1938 other Dominicans in the Roman Curia had forced Chenu to withdraw the book, and by 1942 it would be placed on the Roman Index. As Chenu was coming under fire, Blackfriars began to publish articles by him, publishing four by Chenu in 1938 and 1939. For a discussion of Chenu’s approach to Aquinas, which highly influenced later generations of Thomists.24

And so those editorial moves began to shift the culture of the Blackfriars:

White became assistant editor of Blackfriars under Hilary Carpenter, who had succeeded Jarrett as editor. While Carpenter initially contributed monthly editorials, this ceased in early 1937, with the ethos of Blackfriars already evolving. From 1936 onwards, Blackfriars was filled with articles on political ideologies, conflicts arising from them, and the morality of war conflicts, e.g. communism and fascism, Italy and Abyssinia, the Spanish civil war, and the rise of Hitlerism.
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In contrast to most of the English Catholic press, Blackfriars included a range of perspectives, emphasized the scholastic tradition of just war, and published critiques of the possibility of a just ‘modern war’ by e.g. Eric Gill, Franziskus Stratmann OP, and Gerald Vann OP. Blackfriars’ relatively ‘neutral stance’ on the Spanish civil war came in for harsh criticism. Furthermore, in the late 1930s, Blackfriars published articles by three highly controversial French intellectuals two articles by Jacques Maritain, who at this time was persona non grata in many Catholic circles for his opposition to Franco; two articles by Yves Congar OP, whose work on ecumenism was highly controversial; and four articles by M. Dominique Chenu OP, whose provocative endorsements of aspects of modernism and whose advocacy of ressourcement theology made him the bête-noire of the (Dominican-dominated) Roman Curia.25

Bede Jarret, the editor prior to White, had searched for a “culturally relevant” Thomist “rooted in history, art, philosophy, psychology, literature, and culture” and not mere Neo-Thomist manuals.

Although the term had not yet been invented, we might say that Jarrett was looking for something approximating a ressourcement Thomist, who by understanding Aquinas in light of his own history and culture, could appropriately apply Aquinas’ teaching to contemporary culture. In White, Jarrett had found a Thomist theologian who was at least groping in that direction.26

This ressourcement Thomist White — who mentored Anscombe and published Congar before Congar came to Cambridge — took over Blackfriars from Carpenter, who had succeeded Jarret as editor.

Why does Anscombe and White matter?

Because of her and Lewis’s famous debate on how naturalism refutes itself. Whatever the nuance disagreement, they were covertly united in their shared assumption of nature’s inherent rationality and grace. In her piece I am Sadly Theoretical, she even referred at one point to Gerard Manly Hopkins’ As Kingfishers Catch Fire:27

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I say móre: the just man justices; 
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; 
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is 
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, 
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Lewis’s resistance to Thomas in mind, his former debate with Anscombe, his use of the French-influenced Chesterton and Eastern Universalist George MacDonald, as well as the presence of other ressourcement thinkers in his life and reading, particularly during his Cambridge tenure, is it any surprise that we find the three or four main tenants of Nouvelle Théologie in his thought?

They — more or less — advocated for ressourcement, a literal re-sourcing, a return to the sources.

Which sources?

A return to scripture and the Church Fathers. If his work in something like The Discarded Image didn’t satisfy that category, what about his article On Reading the Old Books?

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.
The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself. Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books.
But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why – the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance.
…Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.
They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.
…
Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth.

Consider that being a Pantheist when quoting Aquinas is precisely what Hart was falsely accused of by Feser. Regardless, whatever you call that passionate entreaty by Lewis, it is at very least ressourcement.

As for giving history — and exegesis — its proper dais in the philosophical and theological task, what else is the Abolition of Man but that? Or The Discarded Image? Or his many, many other works?

And what are Lewis’s metaphors in Mere Christianity if not cataphatic? If not downright Augustinian?

We’ve already seen his — and Chesterton’s — distain for Neo-Scholasticism. What about Jean Daniélou’s idea of the “rupture between theology and life” and how “theoretical speculations, separated from action while not engaging life, have had their day” ?

According to Alan Jacobs, Lewis was not the only one focused on vocation in The Year of Our Lord 1943. So too was Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden (also of the Inkling orbit), and Simone Weil. But Lewis was the one who said that “going back is the quickest way on.” Meaning, of course, that we could no longer bracket or suspend ultimate questions.28

It was in “The Weight of Glory” that Lewis bluntly asks students whether they should even be attending university at all, considering the war. He later published it as Learning in War-Time. What use do academics have?

Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things…. if our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

He later in his ongoing debate with George Every over multiple issues of the journal Theology concluded:

“…culture, though not in itself meritorious, was innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, was helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and could be pursued to the glory of God.”
…In his storytelling and his polemical writings alike, Lewis understood himself to be bringing something distinctive to bear on the challenges of his world: an intimate knowledge of, and love for, the distant past.29

It was in this context that he wrote of Weston in the Space Trilogy as a direct counterpoint to Nazi and Fascist futurism:

I agree that Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.30

It was also in this context that he wrote in the Abolition of Man, “What we call Man’s power of Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” That, to me, is as clear of a rebuke of the two-tier division — and its technological and social implications — as is possible. And he roots in that book ultimate values to the daily life and work of common folk: moral formation and its lack, particularly when abstracted, leads to “men without chests” in the workplace, who become tools for tyrants.

But the principle of making what you’re called to make in the teeth of tyranny may well correct this. He calls for not merely attending to the mind, but actually forming the sensibility and affections towards the good.

You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

For this very reason, the worker priests formed in 1943:

As a result, priests began to enter the factories to join the workers there. They saw this involvement as part of their missionary apostolate. Chenu was a strong supporter of this worker–priest movement. His understanding of the ‘law of the Incarnation’ was that it called for the involvement (engagement) of the Church and her priests in the actual lives of the working people.31

But what of desire?

Of a natural desire for the supernatural we found in de Lubac?

Is it not shot through all of Lewis’s allegory of his conversion, The Pilgrim’s Regress, wherein his every experience and thought has not merely an earthly fulfillment, but a supernatural one as well? Or his ideas of desire in Surprised by Joy?

As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss" of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to "enormous") comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit-tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. [Greek: Ioulian pothô] and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

And then, while idly flipping through Longfellow:

I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and read
I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead----
I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

And of course the evergreen quote from Mere Christianity:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

Whatever else this does, it mirrors both Augustine and Boethius and the rest of the Neo Platonists and it certainly — absolutely — mirrors de Lubac and the others.

Under the weight of evidence (and this piece has honestly only popped the bottle cap and let out a bit of fizz), I cannot see how Lewis would be seen as anything other than one of the Nouvelle Théologie school. Sure, he told Tolkien that he wouldn’t join the Catholic Church because of his Irish heritage, but he also said that he “did not follow schools [of thought], he did not follow the school of Thomas Aquinas. In Lewis’ mind, however, to have become a Roman Catholic would have meant that he would have had to follow the school of Thomas.”32

Shame, then, that Nouvelle Théologie was so persecuted for so long that Lewis died only one year into Vatican II, a council that arguably has his fingerprints all over it; that he couldn’t see so many of them promoted to cardinals; that he didn’t see Joseph Ratzinger become Pope Benedict XVI. We might be telling a different story, one perhaps involving the beautification and perhaps even canonization of the first modern science fiction and fantasy writer if they could see past the smoking, drinking, and mud. Certainly Evangelicals, for all of their modern dualistic faults and Vichy-like Fascist accommodation and addiction to power, at least got that one sole part right about St. C.S. Lewis.

Thanks for reading Lancelot of Little Egypt! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Refer a friend

From Dutch Breukelen, from broek (“wetland, marsh”). See also my poem Silt, published in the 2016 Poet’s Market, reprinted in Inconveniences, Rightly Considered.

Mettepenningen, Jürgen (2010). Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II. London: T&T Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-29991-8. p. 8.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009) 8.

Pope Leo XIII (1879). "Aeterni Patris". Acta Sanctae Sedis. 12: 97–115.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009) 2.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009) 3.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009) 4.

Nicholas Atkin, “Ralliés and Résistants: Catholics in Vichy France, 1940–441,” in Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Kay Chadwick (Liverpool University Press, 2000), 0, https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9780853239741.003.0006. 97ff.

*Bullock 1991, p. 219: "Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church... [but] to its teachings he showed only the sharpest hostility... he detested [Christianity]'s ethics in particular"
- Ian Kershaw; Hitler: A Biography; Norton; 2008 ed; pp. 295–297: "In early 1937 [Hitler] was declaring that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction', and that the Churches must yield to the 'primacy of the state', railing against any compromise with 'the most horrible institution imaginable'"
- Richard J. Evans; The Third Reich at War; Penguin Press; New York 2009, p. 547: Evans wrote that Hitler believed Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope and "Priests, he said, were 'black bugs', 'abortions in black cassocks'". Evans noted that Hitler saw Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law of natural selection".
- Richard Overy: The Dictators Hitler's Germany Stalin's Russia; Allen Lane/Penguin; 2004. p. 281: "[Hitler's] few private remarks on Christianity betray a profound contempt and indifference".
- A. N. Wilson; Hitler a Short Biography; Harper Press; 2012, p. 71.: "Much is sometimes made of the Catholic upbringing of Hitler... it was something to which Hitler himself often made allusion, and he was nearly always violently hostile. 'The biretta! The mere sight of these abortions in cassocks makes me wild!'"
- Laurence Rees; The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler; Ebury Press; 2012; p. 135.; "There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church"
- Derek Hastings (2010). Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 181 : Hastings considers it plausible that Hitler was a Catholic as late as his trial in 1924, but writes that "there is little doubt that Hitler was a staunch opponent of Christianity throughout the duration of the Third Reich."
- Joseph Goebbels (Fred Taylor Translation); The Goebbels Diaries 1939–41; Hamish Hamilton Ltd; London; 1982; ISBN 0241108934 : In his entry for 29 April 1941, Goebbels noted long discussions about the Vatican and Christianity, and wrote: "The Fuhrer is a fierce opponent of all that humbug".
- Albert Speer; Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs; Translation by Richard and Clara Winston; Macmillan; New York; 1970; p. 123: "Once I have settled my other problem," [Hitler] occasionally declared, "I'll have my reckoning with the church. I'll have it reeling on the ropes." But Bormann did not want this reckoning postponed ... he would take out a document from his pocket and begin reading passages from a defiant sermon or pastoral letter. Frequently Hitler would become so worked up ... and vowed to punish the offending clergyman eventually ... That he could not immediately retaliate raised him to a white heat ..."
- Hitler's Table Talk: "The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity."

Shirer, William L., Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, p. 240, Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 95–96.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009) 26.

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“Fergus Kerr - Yves Congar From Suspicion To Acclamation | PDF | Thomism | Copyright,” Scribd, accessed January 14, 2025, https://www.scribd.com/document/675084651/Fergus-Kerr-Yves-Congar-From-Suspicion-to-Acclamation. 278.

Ralph C. Wood, “The Argument from Joy: The Current State of Scholarship on G.K. Chesterton as Thinker and Theologian,” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 27 (2010): 87.

St. Thomas Aquinas G. K. Chesterton, III THE ARISTOTELIAN REVOLUTION

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in the Medieval Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.

J. Matthew Pinson, “C.S. Lewis, ‘A Very Poor Thomist’? | J. Matthew Pinson,” American Reformer (blog), December 19, 2022, https://americanreformer.org/2022/12/c-s-lewis-a-very-poor-thomist/.

S. Steve Park, Journey Towards Home: The Christian Life According to C. S. Lewis (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 17.

Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), quoted in Park, 18. Stewart Goetz, A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis: Why It Did Not Include Rome(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

Stewart Goetz, A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis: Why It Did Not Include Rome(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) 172 n. 67.

Christopher Derrick, C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome: A Study in Proto-Ecumenism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1981), quoted in Goetz, 176.

“The Influence of Victor White and the Blackfriars Dominicans on a Young Elizabeth Anscombe: An Essay Accompanying the Republication of G.E.M. Anscombe’s ‘I Am Sadly Theoretical: It Is the Effect of Being at Oxford’ (1938,” accessed January 14, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/59242358/The_Influence_of_Victor_White_and_the_Blackfriars_Dominicans_on_a_young_Elizabeth_Anscombe_An_Essay_accompanying_the_Republication_of_G_E_M_Anscombes_I_am_Sadly_Theoretical_It_is_the_Effect_of_Being_at_Oxford_1938?auto=download, 709-710.

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018), 35.

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018), 57-61.

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018), 86.

Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (OUP Oxford, 2009), 30.

Goetz, 172 n. 67.

Kendall Bates

Jan 16

Interesting piece. I can’t lie, it’s a bit of a disappointment to learn that my favorite (Lewis) had such a strong distaste for my supreme favorite (St. Thomas), but at the same time I’m not all that surprised. His writings positively ooze with Platonism, aside from his stronger Aristotelian moral-leanings.

Even in general it makes sense. If I can be a bit reductive, Plato has by far the more poetic metaphysic. It’s certainly no surprise that a poet would prefer him.

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Barbara Morrison

Brilliant piece! You've taken the little I knew and expanded it mightily.

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Lancelot of Little Egypt

The Nouvelle Théologie of C.S. Lewis

The work of C.S. Lewis should be read within the broader context of the Nouvelle Théologie movement.

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