C. S. Lewis's List

The Ten Books That Influenced Him Most

David Werther, Susan Werther, David Werther, Susan Werther

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781628924138
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628924152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In 1962, The Christian Century published C. S. Lewis's answer to the question, "What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?" Lewis responded with ten titles, ranging from Virgil's Aeneid to James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson and from George Herbert's The Temple to Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy.

C. S. Lewis's List brings together experts on each of the ten books to discuss their significance for Lewis's life and work, illuminating his own writing through those he most admired.

1

George MacDonald, Phantastes

David L. Neuhouser

C. S. Lewis called George MacDonald his “master” and claimed that by reading Phantastes he had “crossed a great frontier.”¹ Not only was the reading of Phantastes an important step that led to his becoming a Christian, but it also brought Lewis to the study and enjoyment of the rest of MacDonald’s writings which in turn helped him in his spiritual journey even after he became a Christian. Reading Phantastes, in fact reading all of MacDonald, helped Lewis acquire the virtue of humility, which, as we will see, was a significant factor in his success as an author. MacDonald believed that faith in God led to seeing all of life as related, and to a greater love of the entire world. This integrated view of God, nature, and culture helped Lewis to produce better works of literature and scholarship, and indeed Lewis became much more successful as a writer after becoming a Christian. Phantastes, and many of MacDonald’s other books, influenced both the style and substance of Lewis’s work; MacDonald’s skill in making goodness and even holiness attractive (especially in his books of fantasy) was very appealing to Lewis and inspired him to do the same in his own works. Finally, the sheer number of similar ideas in the stories of Lewis and MacDonald testify to the great influence MacDonald had on Lewis.

Similarities

Despite the abundance of shared ideas in the works of these two writers, it is difficult to prove that whenever Lewis’s thought or style resembles MacDonald’s that MacDonald was the original source. One could just as easily argue that they had each received their inspiration from someone else or had arrived independently at the same thought. In a letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis comments on an idea that both he and Greeves had written about. “Perhaps, as you say, we both took it unconsciously from ‘Phantastes,’ who in turn borrowed it from the dryads, etc. of classical mythology . . . so we needn’t be ashamed of borrowing our trees, since they are really common property.”²

In another letter to Greeves, Lewis wrote that MacDonald “seems to know everything and I find my own experience in it constantly,”³ and Frank Riga suggests that this shared experience, “as much as any explicit literary influence, accounts for the similarity of their work.”⁴ Even if this were the whole story, the fact that Lewis found in MacDonald his own experience is an indication of how important it was for him to find a kindred spirit in MacDonald. What Lewis said about Charles Williams is likely true about MacDonald also. Lewis told Walter Hooper, “I have never been consciously influenced by Williams, never believed that I was in any way imitating him. On the other hand, there may have been a great deal of unconscious influence going on.”⁵ Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper comment that “Lewis could take all myth and ransack it for his dramatis personae, taking what he needed wherever he found it throughout literature, but making it so much his own that whatever ‘original’ researchers may find, there is no thought of anything like plagiarism.”⁶

Although it may be impossible to prove a direct correlation between ideas found in MacDonald’s work that appear in Lewis’s writings, we know that Lewis was familiar with these ideas, and that they certainly influenced both the style and content of his own work.⁷ As Lewis himself wrote in his diary on May 9, 1926, “One never re-reads an old favorite without finding that it has contributed more than one suspected to one’s habitual stock in trade.”⁸ Now “stock in trade” means the materials necessary to, or used in, a trade or business. So Lewis acknowledges that all that he has read is being used in his works.

MacDonald’s spiritual influence on Lewis

Although MacDonald clearly influenced Lewis’s literary work, I believe that his impact on Lewis’s spiritual life was far greater, and that this religious impact then further influenced Lewis’s writing. So, before looking more specifically into MacDonald’s influence on the writing of Lewis, I would like to show the profound influence on Lewis’s Christian faith.

Phantastes was the first book of MacDonald’s that Lewis read and in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology Lewis wrote, “What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where death came in) my imagination.”⁹ To “convert” means to change, but to baptize in a Christian sense means to kill something of the self, and Lewis’s mention of death shows that death is what he meant. Now Lewis could not have meant that he no longer had any imagination, but that his imagination, as it was then, was killed. Earlier in the preface he wrote,

A few hours later while reading Phantastes I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity.¹⁰

Phantastes was similar to the kind of romanticism that Lewis loved but there was a difference, a difference that Lewis much later realized was holiness. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote,

The woodland journeying in [Phantastes], the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. . . . But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness.¹¹

In a letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis commented on this quality in a passage of Love Is Enough by William Morris, that clarifies what he thought holiness does: “the light of holiness shines through Morris’s romanticism, not destroying but perfecting it.”¹²

Romanticism, though, was not the only thing that attracted Lewis. In S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  George MacDonald, Phantastes
• 2  G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
• 3  Virgil, The Aeneid
• 4  George Herbert, The Temple
• 5  William Wordsworth, The Prelude
• 6  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
• 7  Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
• 8  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
• 9  Charles Williams, Descent into Hell
• 10  Arthur James Balfour, Theism and Humanism
• Index
• Copyright