Coincidental review

I just visited Mere Comments for the first time in several weeks, read this post, and followed the link to this review of Joseph Pearce's book, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Touchstone Senior Editor S. M. Hutchens. I found the review to be meaningful and highly significant.

I would love to purchase and read Pearce's book but my house is already cluttered with piles of partially-read books that have turned our home into a fire hazard; meaning, I’d be insane to take on yet one more...

This is the part of the review I found especially noteworthy:

Accompanying this conviction [that “the Object of faith and hope is realized only beyond this world, where it must always be firmly kept not only by the tellers of tales, but the custodians of the life and faith of the Church”], as one might imagine, is deep suspicion of realized eschatology, precluding identification of the True Church (or the heavenly Narnia, or Britain) with any of its present, earthly forms. This conviction is also at the heart of Protestant ecclesiology, which in its purer form does not arise from mere anti-Catholicism, but from a positive vision of the nature of reality and our manner of comprehending it, a vision far older than the Reformation-era confessions on the nature and identity of the Church in which it came forward with such force. Lewis believed this vision of the nature of things is taught by ancient Wisdom itself.

To the Protestant Lewis was, the temptation to regard any ecclesiastical form, as faithful as it might be to its heavenly archetype, as the One, True, Church that comprehends heaven and earth, presenting itself as offering in the here and now, especially to disappointed seekers after certitude, the kind of supernal finalities the Catholic Church appears to offer her children, is something to be resisted in every one of the many forms it takes within that Church. What we find here, in the darkened glass of our present existence, are reflections—true reflections, but still only reflections—of glory that leads us on toward it, but cannot fully comprehend that glory or its joy in itself.

One cannot make a perfectly loyal church member, a wholly devoted convert, of any Christian who thinks this way, for he will never take his church, whichever church that might be, with the ultimate seriousness the accredited magisteriums (as they must to be what they are) require. He will always look beyond them for something higher and better, of which their communions are at best only worthy reflections. He will always be accused by the partisans of those churches with malignant individualism, and be classed with the truly malignant individualists, for doing it, even when his deepest love and firmest devotion is for the same City Father Abraham saw afar off, for the Kingdom that is not of this world, for the heavenly Jerusalem of which every earthly Jerusalem is only the barest reflection.”

These paragraphs describe the way I take and live my Christian faith, in words far more precise and eloquent than I could ever muster.

I am boggled by the serendipity of finding this review, which really came about only because I happened to notice my blogroll today and see “Mere Comments” there, which reminded me that I hadn’t visited recently. The timing of the review's appearance and my reading it is especially striking since recently I've had a very long and involved debate with Elena, a Catholic blogger. The discussion started on my blog and continued on hers (see first two paragraphs of this post). It began with her responses to my posts on the topic of contraception and centered mainly on its various aspects, but also led into Protestant vs. Catholic issues as well.

I had not been aware of certain beliefs and characteristics of Catholics and Catholicism, prior to this discussion and my own subsequent, personal quests. Some of these very beliefs and characteristics are articulated in Hutchens' review.

Also interesting is the timing of mention of another current book, The Clash of Orthodoxies... by Robert P. George, yesterday on Rusty's blog, New Covenant. Though I’ve seen the title before, this book and the thought it explores were brought back to my attention.

And of course then I realized that, duh, George is one of the writers included in another book I just purchased (mainly for one chapter specifically!): Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law!

So here I am again: faced with much more to study than I, a stay-at-home, homeschooling, very-part-time musician/music teacher, heavily-involved-at-church mom of three; can possibly digest in the time I’ve got to pursue it!

Anyway, the coincidence of all this is remarkable to me...

Another portion of the review I found interesting and relevant:

Let us begin by admitting that we all assign Christians not of our communion to whatever purgatories we can muster—or at least, this Protestant reviewer will admit it for himself. We have our opinions on where they have gone wrong that can hardly be articulated in a sociable way, apart from what the other will perceive as patronizing and belittling of the kind that Pearce here visits upon Lewis. It is impossible, after all, from a purely Catholic point of view, to see non-Catholic Christianity as anything but systemically flawed and any non-Catholic as what he is apart from sins that blind him to the truth, particularly when it faces him full-on, as it did Lewis, in friends like Tolkien and writers like Dante, Newman, and Chesterton. For those who are interested in a well-researched, well written, and eminently Catholic solution to the riddle of Lewis the Protestant, this book will serve. I put forward here, however, another, non-Catholic, one.

Hutchens speaks of perceiving the opinions of a differently-striped Christian “as patronizing and belittling” when said Christian explains where one has gone wrong; this is exactly what I experienced in discussion with Elena. I felt that she viewed my opinions on contraception as "systemically flawed" and could not view me for who I am, nor my statements for what they were, apart from [my] "sins that blind [me] to the truth."

Personal reasons aside, I highly recommend Hutchens' review. It is a very important piece of writing.