Alexander Roper (A. R., or Alec) Vidler (1899-1991) was an influential English Anglican priest, theologian, and editor of the journal Theology. As the dean of King’s College, Cambridge, he was a leading voice for a liberal-catholic reappraisal of Christian doctrine in the mid-20th century. His 1962 edited symposium, Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, argued for testing and re-expressing traditional beliefs to make them intelligible to the modern world, a program that some critics described as “demythologizing.”

In Letters to Malcolm, Vidler functions as Lewis’s principal contemporary foil. Lewis engages with Vidler’s essay in Soundings, which called for a church with “less religion” as a separate department of life and more engagement with secular society. Lewis finds some common ground with Vidler’s critique of departmental religion but ultimately rejects the broader liberal program he represents. Vidler’s work embodies the fashionable theological trend that Lewis believed risked eroding the supernatural core of Christianity by reducing it to non-supernatural ethics and revising doctrine to suit cultural tastes. Vidler therefore provides context for Lewis’s defense of doctrinal stability and the reality of the supernatural.

An Austrian-born Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber (1878-1965) is best known for his philosophy of personalism, or personal dialogue with God. Buber articulated this philosophy in his 1923 book Ich und Du (I and Thou). After emigrating from Nazi Europe in 1938, he became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his work profoundly influenced both Jewish and Christian religious thought in the 20th century.

Buber provides Lewis with the central conceptual framework for understanding prayer as a genuine, personal encounter. Lewis explicitly draws on Buber’s distinction between the “I-Thou” relationship and the “I-It” relationship. An I-It relationship is one of objective analysis or use, which treats the “other” as an object. An I-Thou relationship, by contrast, is a mutual, direct, and holistic meeting between subjects. For Lewis, authentic prayer must be an I-Thou encounter: “[God] speaks as ‘I’ when we truly call [God] ‘Thou’. (How good Buber is!)” (26). By invoking Buber, Lewis rejects a view of God as a passive object to be analyzed or a system to be manipulated. Instead, he models prayer as an act of unveiling the self before a living Person who meets and responds to the one who prays, thereby safeguarding the mystery and otherness of God.

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. As the principal author of the Book of Common Prayer (1549), his profound influence on the language and structure of Anglican worship is still felt today. Martyred during the Catholic restoration under Queen Mary I, his liturgical work remains his most enduring legacy.

For Lewis, Cranmer represents the gold standard of liturgical craftsmanship. He praises Cranmer’s prose as a powerful aid to devotion, arguing that its stability, dignity, and familiarity allow worshippers to focus on God rather than on the novelty of the service itself. Lewis’s defense of Cranmer’s enduring style is central to his argument against the constant liturgical “tinkering” popular in his day: “Cranmer may have his defects as a theologian; as a stylist, he can play all the moderns, and many of his predecessors, off the field” (7). Cranmer’s work exemplifies Lewis’s ideal of uniform, intelligible, and numinous common prayers that foster true worship.

English philosopher and author Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a core member of the Inklings, the informal literary group that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Barfield was a lifelong friend of Lewis whose work, particularly his theories on the evolution of consciousness and the nature of metaphor, had a deep and lasting influence on Lewis’s thought.

In Letters to Malcolm, Barfield supplies key philosophical concepts that underpin Lewis’s theology of creation and prayer. Lewis references Barfield’s ideas from his book Saving the Appearances (1957) to explain the relationship between God and the created world. Barfield’s insight helps Lewis articulate the paradox that every created thing both points to God and is distinct from [God]. Lewis adopts Barfield’s maxim that of each creature, we can say, “This also is Thou: neither is this Thou” (99). This idea allows Lewis to defend a sacramental view of reality, where created things are participatory signs of the divine, while simultaneously warning against the danger of idolizing mental or physical images.

As one of the most prominent English poets of the Augustan age, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was celebrated for his satirical verse, his translations of Homer, and his philosophical poem An Essay on Man (1734). His work often reflects the deistic and rationalist tendencies of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which sought to understand God through reason and the observation of nature.

In Letters to Malcolm, Pope serves as Lewis’s primary historical foil because Pope adhered to the idea of an impersonal, “Managerial God.” Lewis repeatedly critiques the view expressed in Pope’s An Essay on Man that the “first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial, but by general laws” (71). Lewis argues that this vision of a detached deity governing through immutable, general principles renders petitionary prayer meaningless. By dismantling Pope’s paradigm, Lewis defends a vision of a personal Providence who is attentive to the particular, individual needs of His creatures and whose creative act is more like a work of art than an impersonal system of laws.

Dame Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a celebrated English novelist and essayist who, late in life, returned to the Anglican faith. Her posthumously published letters revealed a vibrant and thoughtful spiritual life, which intersected with the Anglo-Catholic literary circles of her time.

Lewis uses Macaulay as a case study to argue for the legitimacy of diverse devotional practices. He discusses her habit of collecting and using “ready-made” prayers (prayers written by others), as described in her published letters. While Lewis’s fictional correspondent, Malcolm, dislikes this method, Lewis defends it as perfectly valid for her temperament. He recalls his personal acquaintance with her to add weight to his argument, stating, “I don’t doubt, then, that Rose Macaulay’s method was the right one for her” (11). Her example allows Lewis to advocate for a broad-minded church that respects different approaches to prayer, whether formal or extemporaneous.

John Arthur Thomas Robinson (1919-1983) was an English New Testament scholar and the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich. His 1963 book, Honest to God (1963), became a bestseller and a flashpoint for controversy, as it called for a radical rethinking of traditional Christian concepts of God, arguing for a less supernatural and more secularized faith.

Lewis refers to Robinson as “the Bishop of Woolwich” (18) and cites his work as a prime example of the fashionable theological liberalism he opposes. For Lewis, Robinson represents the trend of “demythologizing” Christianity by reducing its supernatural elements, such as miracles and the transcendence of God, to fit modern, secular assumptions. Robinson serves as an immediate, contemporary target for Lewis’s critique of attempts to empty the faith of its challenging, supernatural core in the name of cultural plausibility.

As a leader of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a towering figure in 19th-century British religious life. He later converted to Roman Catholicism and was made a cardinal. His sermons, essays, and spiritual autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), remain influential works of Christian thought.

Lewis engages with Newman to make a nuanced but crucial distinction between God and “religion.” He quotes one of Newman’s sermons to illustrate the danger of treating religion as a sovereign, self-contained department of life, rather than seeing all of life as falling under God’s claim. Lewis writes that Newman’s description of Heaven “makes my blood run cold” because he “has substituted religion for God” (39-40). Lewis thus uses Newman, a respected authority, to highlight a subtle error that even the most devout can make: idolizing the means of faith over its ultimate end.