Friday, April 29, 2022

Becoming Boethius: The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis



Church Life Journal has a fascinating essay by Jason Baxter about C.S. Lewis as a medievalist. (And Chesterton gets mentioned!) 

"Perhaps to our surprise, this third Lewis, the medievalist, emerges in the 1962 list that he shared with The Christian Century. When Lewis replied to the editors, he mentioned ten books that shaped his sense of vocation and his philosophy of life, some of which we would expect: 1) George MacDonald’s Phantastes; 2) G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man; 3) Virgil’s Aeneid; 4) The Temple, by George Herbert; 5) William Wordsworth’s Prelude; 6) Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy; 7) Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; 8) The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell; 9) Descent into Hell, by Charles Williams; and 10) Arthur James Balfour, Theism and Humanism. Some of these books, even if they have been largely forgotten by us, make sense in light of Lewis’s interest in apologetics. ..."

The essay is an adaptation of the introductory chapter of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How the Great Book Shaped a Great Mind.

You can read the full essay here.


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