The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

by Jason M. Baxter

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, we’ve seen how the man who referred to himself as “the last dinosaur” felt a closer kinship with the old writers than he did with those philosophers and theologians of his own age. Throughout his personal letters, his assessments of Kierkegaard, Maritain, Tillich, Sartre, and Barth remained tepid. In a blunt assessment for Corbin Scott Carnell, he reported, As for moderns, Tillich and Brunner I don’t know at all. Maritain I tried but did not admire. He seems to say in 10 pages of polysyllabic abstraction what Scripture or the old writers wd. say in a couple of sentences. Kierkegaard still means almost nothing to me. I read one book of Niebuhr’s—I can’t remember the title—and, on the whole, reacted against it. I tried Berdyaev, but he seemed to me terribly repetitive; one paragraph wd. do for what he spins out into a book.1 And Sartre? His thought was just a recycling of idealism (“Berkeleyan metaphysic”) now “in the mind of an atheist with a bad liver!”2 And although his French prose had “a sort of wintry grandeur,” Lewis just “couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher.”3 Barth? “Barth I have never read, or not that I remember.”4 His attitude toward modern philosophers and theologians was humorously indifferent. There was one exception though: the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whom Lewis read not long after the publication of the English translation of I and Thou in 1937, even if on the first reading he had a massive allergic reaction. For a long...