Into the Archive: The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis

The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis (Paperback)

by C.S. Lewis (Author), Don Giovanni Calabria (Author), & 2 more

In September 1947, after reading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in Italian, Fr. (now St.) Giovanni Calabria was moved to write the author, but he knew no English and assumed (rightly) that Lewis knew no Italian. So he wrote his letter in Latin, hoping that, as a classicist, Lewis would know Latin. Therein began a correspondence that was to outlive Fr. Calabria himself (he died in December 1954, and was succeeded in correspondence by Fr. Luigi Pedrollo, which continued until Lewis’s own death in 1963).
        Translator/editor Martin Moynihan calls these letters “limpid, fluent and deeply refreshing. There was a charm about them, too, and not least in the way they were ‘topped and tailed’ — that is, in their ever-slightly-varied formalities of address and of farewell.”
 More than any other of his published works The Latin Letters shows the strong devotional side of Lewis, and contains letters ranging from Christian unity and modern European history to liturgical worship and general ethical behavior.
       This new edition is greatly enhanced by a new foreword from the eminent Lewis Scholar, Mark A. Noll, from the University of Notre Dame.  – Amazon

What that description does not exactly clarify is that this book includes the letters of Fr. Calabria and Fr. Pedrollo, which prompted Lewis’ letters. I am sure that I have some if not all of the letters from CSL in the 3 massive volumes of his collected letters, but being gathered here with the complete correspondence does give it some further context. As Peter Kreeft said, “If someone had told me there existed a long correspondence between C. S. Lewis and a saint … and that it was about ecumenism and reunion …I would think they were pulling my leg.”

“Giovanni Calabria (8 October 1873 – 4 December 1954) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest who dedicated his life to the plight of the poor and the ill. He established two congregations, the Poor Servants of Divine Providence and the Poor Sisters Servants of Divine Providence to take better care of poor people in various Italian cities and later abroad while underpinning the need to promote the message of the gospel to the poor. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988 and then canonized him a decade later in 1999. His liturgical feast is 4 December.” - Wikipedia