“The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries – that ‘Christianity’ is a word of so many meetings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages ‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. And the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spencer and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, paradisial flavor, in Vaugan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe – Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed ‘paganism’ of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Fairie Queen and the Arcadia. It was, of course varied; and yet – after all – so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odor which is death to us until we allow it to become life: ‘an air that kills/ From yon far country blows.’ We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age.”
C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation