The Third Lewis

In the early 1960s, the editors of the Christian Century sent a question to one hundred of the most famous literary and intellectual personalities of the day: “What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?” The editors were trying to map the books that had shaped the minds of their generation. C. S. Lewis was among those polled.

By that time, Lewis had already been famous for two decades, as a “novelist, essayist, theologian,” as the Christian Century summed him up, curiously leaving out something he considered essential to his intellectual identity. He was particularly admired for his Screwtape Letters, his war-years broadcast, Mere Christianity, and for his imaginative, fictional writings (especially The Chronicles of Narnia, published throughout the 1950s). Already in September 1947, he had been on the cover of Time magazine, whose feature article on him was tellingly titled, “Don vs. Devil.” And over those years, he had spent two hours a day patiently responding to the letters that poured in from his devoted admirers from across the Anglophone world. He had hosted journalist seeking interviews with him and had accepted dozens of invitations to give lectures and sermons. In sum, his cultural standing was founded on his perceived mastery of psychology, his ability to recast Christianity imaginatively in myth, and for his work in apologetics. As Rowan Williams, summing up fifty years of admiration, put it, Lewis’s gift was “what you might call pastoral theology: as an interpreter of people’s moral and spiritual crises; as somebody who is a brilliant diagnostician of self-deception.”

But there was, as his friend Owen Barfield once said, a third Lewis. In addition to the Christian apologist, whose sagacious words delivered over radio waves had been so comforting during England’s darkest hour, and in addition to Lewis the mythmaker, the creator of Narnia and fantastic tales of space travel, there was Lewis the scholar, the Oxford (and late Cambridge) don who spent his days lecturing to students on medieval cosmology and his nights looking up old words in dictionaries. This Lewis, as Louis Markos puts it, “was far more a man of the medieval age than he was of our own” [From Plato to Christ, 215]. This was the man who read fourteenth-century medieval texts for his spiritual reading, carefully annotating them with pencil; who summed himself up as “chiefly a medievalist”; the philologist, who wrote essays on semantics, metaphors, etymologies, and textual reception; “the distinguished Oxford don and literary critic who packed lecture theatres with his unscripted reflections on English literature” [Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life, xi]; the schoolmaster who fussed at students for not looking up treacherous words in their lexicons; the polyglot pedant who did not translate his quotations from medieval French, German, Italian, or ancient Latin and Greek in his scholarly books; the man who wrote letters to children recommending that they study Latin until they reached the point they could read it fluently without a dictionary; the critic who, single-handedly, saved bizarre, lengthy, untranslated ancient books from obscurity. Before he was famous as a Christian and writer of fantasy, he was famous among his students for his academic lectures, which bore such scintillating titles as “Prolegomena to Medieval Literature” and “Prolegomena to Renaissance Literature.” Long “before he ever thought of defending Christianity,” he dedicated himself to defending “the beauty and wisdom of the premodern literature of Europe” (Alan Jacobs, Narnian, 165]. It was this professorial Lewis who in a 1955 letter lamented that modern renderings of old poems make up a “dark conspiracy … to convince the modern barbarian that the poetry of the past was, in its own day, just as mean, colloquial, and ugly as our own” [Letters, 3:649]. This was Lewis the antiquarian, who devoted much—indeed, most—of his life to breathing in the thoughts and feelings of distant ages, and reconstructing them in his teaching and writing. We find him recommending to general audiences that they read one old book for every modern one (as in the epigraph), and advising those seeking spiritual advice to old books. […] In sum, this was C. S. Lewis the medievalist.

Even for the editors of Christian Century, who summed up Lewis as a novelist, essayist, and theologian, it was easy to forget that the man who had become a celebrity Christian had an ardent love for studying the technical features of medieval language (indeed, sound laws that regulate vowel changes!), manuscript transmission, old books of science, and medieval poetic form. To many of Lewis’s readers, it might seem absurd, maybe even irresponsible and escapist to devote the whole of one’s adult life to the study of dead languages (Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Provencal, medieval Italian, or Latin) or reconstructing the details of ancient bestiaries (allegorical readings on the spiritual meaning of animals). Sure, studying New Testament Greek is useful, but trying to understand the subtleties of medieval debates, say, on the exact nature of moon spots (as Dante does in Paradiso 2)? But Lewis, of course, did do exactly that: he devoted the entirety of his adult life to precisely these kinds of academic pursuits. But perhaps of even greater surprise is the fact that these scholarly pursuits were not separate from his personal life. Lewis did not stop thinking about medieval symbolism, cosmology, and allegory when he left the office. Indeed, what is most telling is that even in the midst of the messy and painful affairs of life and grief and loss, his mind habitually returned to the old books for comfort and consolation. For instance, in an intimate letter to Sheldon Van Auken, after his friend had lost his wife, Lewis’s mind could think of nothing better than to recommend his friend read Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in the Loeb edition, with Latin pages facing the English translation. He then followed up with the recommendation of a second medieval book: ‘As you say in one of your postcripts—your love for Jean must, in one sense, be ‘killed’ and ‘God must do it.’ You’d better read the Paradiso hadn’t you? Note the moment at which Beatrice turns her eyes away from Dante ‘to the eternal Fountain,’ and Dante is quite content” [Letters, 3:616]. Only a few years later, in 1961, when Lewis was suffering from grief over the loss of his own wife, Joy, his mind drifted back to the same passage in Dante. The last line in A Grief Observed is the same he quoted to Van Auken: “I am at peace with God. She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana” [A Grief Observed, 76].

This is what I mean by the “third Lewis” emerging alongside the first two Lewises we know better, the apologist and imaginative writer. This third Lewis is the writer who spent so much time studying medieval tales and arguments, ancient grammar and vocabulary, premodern rhetoric and the rhythmic flow of ancient speech that he could barely formulate an argument, write a letter, offer a word of consolation, or weave a fictional story of his own without opening up the dam and letting all the old ideas and emotions, stored up in his memory by long reading, break forth. Medieval literature, ancient languages, and the premodern way of looking at the universe were not just Lewis’s study or day job, but his passion, his love, his life’s work, his spiritual formation, and even his “vocation.” In his intellectual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he famously describes three moments in his youth in which he was moved to spiritual longing through reading. He comments, “The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else” [Surprised by Joy, 17]. The purpose of this book is to explore how this third Lewis is just beneath the surface even in his more appreciated imaginative and devotional writings. We will see that the great medievalist was not a successful modernizer of Christianity and writer of fiction despite the fact that he spent so much time studying old, dusty books, but because of them.

*Jason Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove, PA: IVP Academic, 2022), pp. 1-6.