The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis Book

In September 1947, after reading The Screwtape Letters in Italian, Fr. GiovanniCalabria was moved to write the author, but he knew no English, so he addressed his letter in Latin. Therein began a correspondence that was to outlive Fr. Calabria himself (he died in December 1954 and was succeeded in the correspondence by Fr. Luigi Pedrollo). Translator/editor Martin Moynihan calls these letters Alimpid, fluent and deeply refreshing. There was a charm about them, too, and not least in the way they were >topped and tailed= B 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 on topics ranging from Christian unity and modern European history to liturgical worship and general ethical behavior. Moreover, these letters are often intimate and personal.

Biography

C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer and as a Christian thinker, and scholars sometimes divide his personality in two. Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal, for both his audiences, lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in."