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Lewis's afiliation with theAnglicansmay well have played some part in the cooling of their friendship, in that land of so much bitter histor between folk professing divergent faiths.
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Gilthalian--
I think this point is critical, and, as Americans,we lose sight of it easily. Our own history has instances of prejudice and discrimination, but not in the same way as Great Britain. If you look at the history of England from the age of Henry VIII on, one of the critical questions is to what extent Catholics will be accepted as being true and loyal English. The priest holes in Catholic households, questions about suffrage and representation in parliament--angry feelings like these don't go away immediately. They last a long time. And they influence people's relationships. Tolkien's feelings about what happened to his mother in being cut off financially and personally from her family because of her Catholocism were with him his whole life.
And don't forget Ireland. You have to remember that Lewis was raised as an Ulster Protestant. Lewis himself admitted that he had been raised as a youth to mistrust Catholics. Lewis left his faith as a child, but when he came back to it, it was to a form of Protestantism similar to that which he'd had as a youth. Catholic/Protestant tensions were and still are a source of tension in Northern Ireland.
All this history had an impact. I'm not saing they disliked each other because of their religious differences, but there was an underlying layer of suspicion in both men which could lead to misunderstanding. Tolkien was always disappointed that, after their talks, Lewis had not gone one step further and entered the Catholic Church. He felt that Lewis had gone too far and too fast, in shifting from a non-believer to a Christian apologist. And Lewis must have felt some discomfort in revealing to Tolkien that he was marrying a divorcee, since Tolkien had to find out the information from the newspapers. Saddest of all--Tolkien declined all invitations to write Lewis's obituary or to submit an item to the memorial collection of essays. sharon, the 7th age hobbit