An Intercollegiate Studies Institute Partner Feature

released 11/4/2019

In this essay, literary scholar Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. The greatest apologetic challenge for Lewis was not so much responding to arguments, as it was persuading an audience whose horizon had been radically altered and shaped by modernity that that which was esteemed and revered in the pre-modern imagination was in fact desirable. The modern imagination seeks meaning in self-liberation, in the quest, in self-authenticating experimentation. By contrast, the world that Lewis presents is that of a finely choreographed dance, one in which perfect freedom is achieved when the individual listens to the music that precedes him and after mastering the steps joins the rest of the cosmos in a dance that he did not create, but which was nevertheless made for him.

This essay was originally published in Modern Age, Fall 1978, and is read by Ken Myers.

41 minutes

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