Friday, March 31, 2017

Austin Farrer: C.S. Lewis' Minister


One of the few great Anglican literary figures of the 20th century, who never become Catholic, was an outstanding scholar and preacher who administered the last sacraments to that other Anglican-Catholic who did not convert: C.S. Lewis. J.J.R. Tolkien, was another close friend.

I came upon him when reading the following.

"Ratzinger's homilies and meditations on [the liturgical] seasons are, I find, comparable in the English homiletic tradition to those of the Anglican Austin Farrer, who died as Warden of Keble College, Oxford: hard thinking, in which are embedded bright, crystalline images, This makes them stimulus for contemplation as well as for reflection."
Aidan Nichols, OP, The Thought of Benedict XVI, New York: T&T Clark, 2005, 203.

P.S. Among other scholarly contributions to philosophy and theology, "He presented his own solution to the Synoptic Problem, the so-called Farrer hypothesis in a short essay entitled 'On dispensing with Q'. Q was the hypothetical source of those parts of Luke's and Matthew's gospel which are not in Mark but which are pretty much identical. He argued against the possibility of reconstructing Q noting that while it might have been impossible to reconstruct Mark from the other gospels had it been lost, Mark had not been lost. 'I have a copy of it on my desk.'"

Wikipedia, cited March 31, 2017.