Customer Reviews

Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis

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I'm glad I bought this book. The layout and binding are attractive, and it is interesting how well the Lewis style comes across in Moynihan's translation. Nevertheless, I would rank _Latin Letters_ relatively low in importance among Lewis's books, somewhere below _Letters to an American Lady_. The letters are not terribly "meaty", and most of the substantial comments in the letters were also made by Lewis elsewhere. The book is only a little over a hundred pages, and taking into account the fact that roughly half those pages are taken up by the original Latin and that the remaining half has a generous amount of white space, there's really not a whole lot there.

As a footnote to these reviews, I thought I should mention that a quite extraordinary fact bearing upon the historical as well as personal interest of this book is that Don Giovanni Calabria, having been beatified on 17 April 1988, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 18 April 1999 as St. John Calabria. One can't help thinking it a pity that Lewis, on the principle that all his correspondents needed to be protected from the hounds of publicity, destroyed St. John's letters.

It is a pity that more of Lewis' correspondents did not address him in Latin, for his is really delightful, and he proves certainly as able to convey his thoughts easily and eloquently in the older language as in English. The letters of this collection really do not add up to a full book, and there is a certain amount of dead wood on both sides - but there is enough of the real Lewis in numerous comments (such as one about Ireland sectarianism for which his correspondent, Don Giovanni Calabria, felt compelled to tell him that "the Holy Spirit has dictated that sentence to you!") that we would not want to be without them. Remarkable also, and interesting, is the way in which Lewis, the holder of an Oxford triple First and one of the best-read men of his generation, addresses the only moderately well educated Father Calabria as a superior, purely because he is a priest - and not an Anglican priest either, mind you, but a Catholic. It is symptomatic of the seriousness with which he accepted the claims, not only of his religion, but of the Church.

In this book you can find a real cuantity of ecumenism, an a exceptional exaple to our world about it. This letters between an Anglican (Lewis) and a Catholic (Fr. Calabria), are full of the real God and love.

I, extremly recomend this Book!