Did C.S. Lewis misunderstand or did he truly repudiate the Reformed / Anglican doctrine of Total Depravity?

In the book [*The Problem of Pain*](https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-problemofpain/lewiscs-problemofpain-00-h.html) CS Lewis said explicitly that he disbelieved [the doctrine of Total Depravity](https://www.gotquestions.org/total-depravity.html) despite his - dedicating the whole chapter 4 (Human Wickedness) with 8 very good insights into what human depravity looks like (one of them, #6, is [here](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/65590/10672)) , and - affirming the doctrine of the Fall (which he discussed in chapter 5 - The Fall of Man) as an explanation of how human depravity came about A 2013 blog article [That time C.S. Lewis Got 'Total Depravity' Wrong (like everybody else)](https://derekzrishmawy.com/2013/07/11/that-time-c-s-lewis-got-total-depravity-wrong-like-everybody-else/) thinks C.S. Lewis misunderstood it: > While Lewis is making a very a good point about our analogical knowledge of good and evil, he happens to do so by trading on a widely-popular caricature of the doctrine of total depravity. But the blog article did not explain further whether his description of human wickedness is equivalent to the right understanding of Total Depravity which it describes as follows: > To be clear, the doctrine does not teach that all humanity is as “depraved” as possible. “Total” refers to the scope, not depth, of the problem of sin. It affirms that there is not a single area or part of our nature that has not been subject to sin’s corrupting influence; though created good, not our mind, will, reason, bodily instincts, or anything else that could be singled out, remains untouched by the Fall. As such, there is no leverage or foothold in human nature whereby it might reach up to God, or present any merit, without having first been enlivened by the Holy Spirit’s power. As Michael Horton says, “there is no Archimedean point within us that is left unfallen, from which we might begin to bargain or restore our condition” (The Christian Faith, pg. 433). Nor is there any impulse or instinct that is not subject to correction from God’s Word. > > ...We are able to do relatively good, yet not saving, acts through common grace and common virtue. Good of this sort is nothing to be sneered at and is a testimony to the permanence of the Image of God as well as the gracious, restraining work of the Holy Spirit. **My full question**: Based on all he wrote in *The Problem of Pain*, did C.S. Lewis really repudiate the Reformed / Anglican understanding of Total Depravity? Or did he misunderstand it and that his view of the human condition after the Fall was actually compatible with the right meaning of the doctrine? Note: If Total Depravity as understood by the Church of England is different than how Canon of Dort understood it, would the difference contributes to why C.S. Lewis misunderstood / repudiated the doctrine? Quotes from [*The Problem of Pain*](https://www.gotquestions.org/total-depravity.html) (emphasis mine) - Chapter 3 - Divine Goodness, first 3 paragraphs: > Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the following dilemma. > > On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. > > On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. **The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.** - Chapter 4 - Human Wickedness, concluding paragraphs: > **This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.** Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: **I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves.** This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. **No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.** > > How did this state of affairs come about? In the next chapter I shall give as much as I can understand of the Christian answer to that question.