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

by Jason M. Baxter

This mystical impulse—this desire to look behind the veil of this world and speculate about what is behind—made up Lewis’s spiritual DNA. Indeed, for both Lewis and Dante, the Christian life culminates in something higher than morality. At the highest level of spiritual perfection, there is a kind of play, a joyful unfolding of freedom. And so it might come as a surprise to find the writer constantly disavowing it, pushing it away, and discouraging his friends and readers from trying to practice it. For example, in “The Weight of Glory,” after soaring to incredible heights of theological speculation, he turns back, reins himself in, and warns people about getting carried away: What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone seriously not to try.6 Likewise, in The Four Loves, when Lewis finally climbs the heights to discuss divine love, he breaks off his discussion after just one paragraph: “But all that is far away in ‘the land of the Trinity,’ not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation.”7 And, so too, in his personal letters, he often put distance b...