The Charlie Kirk Show - The Immortal C.S. Lewis with Dr. Jerry Root
Aired: 2023-04-06
Duration: 35:55


=== Read C.S. Lewis Today (14:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, Dr. Jerry Root.
[00:00:01]  We do a full hour in C.S. Lewis.
[00:00:03]  Very important, especially this holy week.
[00:00:05]  Listen to this episode, text it to your friends, and read C.S. Lewis.
[00:00:09]  Read C.S. Lewis.
[00:00:10]  Read C.S. Lewis.
[00:00:11]  It will bless you.
[00:00:12]  Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:15]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:16]  Here we go.
[00:00:17]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:18]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:20]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:24]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:27]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:28]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:29]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:00:31]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:00:38]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:00:46]  That's why we are here.
[00:00:49]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
[00:00:58]  This hour is going to really be focused on things that are eternal in nature and that are much more important than politics.
[00:01:06]  Politics is critical, obviously.
[00:01:08]  We talk about it all the time.
[00:01:09]  But politics is only part of a broader picture.
[00:01:14]  We're going to talk about morality and religion and eternity.
[00:01:17]  Joining us now is Dr. Jerry Root.
[00:01:20]  He's professor emeritus from Wheaton University.
[00:01:23]  We could talk about that, but definitely want to talk about, more importantly, his book, The Neglected C.S. Lewis.
[00:01:30]  And Dr. Root is with us now.
[00:01:32]  Doctor, welcome to the program.
[00:01:34]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:01:35]  I'm grateful.
[00:01:37]  Wonderful.
[00:01:37]  So, Dr. Root, I have personally been blessed by reading and studying C.S. Lewis.
[00:01:46]  I've only really touched on six or seven of his books, but I've enjoyed them thoroughly.
[00:01:50]  I mean, he was prolific.
[00:01:52]  But let me just start with a rather general question.
[00:01:56]  Who was C.S. Lewis and why does he matter?
[00:01:59]  C.S. Lewis taught at Oxford University for 29 years.
[00:02:03]  He also taught at Cambridge University for nine.
[00:02:06]  He grew up in Northern Ireland, and he was a guy who lost his mother when he was nine years old and became an atheist as a result of that.
[00:02:18]  And slowly, he worked his way back to faith.
[00:02:22]  And it was largely due to a conversation that he had with J.R.R. Tolkien, his very close friend.
[00:02:28]  But he had these longings that drove him and prompted him.
[00:02:34]  He also had not only the longings of the heart, he also had a very sharp mind.
[00:02:39]  And he needed to get over these intellectual barriers in order to come to fully embrace his faith.
[00:02:47]  He was a prolific author.
[00:02:49]  There are actually 73 titles under his name right now.
[00:02:53]  He wrote 56 of them while he was living, and the others he wrote after he died.
[00:02:58]  No, they're actually collections of essays, letters that he wrote, and so on that flush out the 73 volumes.
[00:03:05]  And he wrote in many literary genres.
[00:03:08]  He wrote narrative poetry.
[00:03:10]  He wrote lyric poetry.
[00:03:12]  He wrote profound literary criticism.
[00:03:15]  He's considered one of the greatest of the medievalists of the last century.
[00:03:19]  He wrote Christian apologetics.
[00:03:22]  He wrote wonderful novels.
[00:03:24]  He also wrote children's stories, science fiction.
[00:03:27]  He wrote a book on educational philosophy that everybody should read if they want to see what's going on in our educational world today.
[00:03:36]  He was very perceptive.
[00:03:38]  He saw problems decades before other people saw them.
[00:03:42]  And he addressed them, but he always addressed them after he became a Christian through a faith-integrated grid.
[00:03:49]  And Anybody who reads him will find that he will be a threshold to their own faith-integrated liberal arts understanding of life.
[00:04:00]  I believe he's the great apologist of the 20th century.
[00:04:03]  I believe he's the most impactful author of the last 100 years.
[00:04:06]  And he's up there with Aquinas and Augustine with his impact to spread the gospel.
[00:04:12]  Do you agree with that?
[00:04:13]  Well, it's interesting you say that.
[00:04:15]  His book, The Abolition of Man, which I think is a book everybody should start with when they've studied it multiple times.
[00:04:21]  Please continue.
[00:04:22]  It's skeletal structure of which he fleshes out all of their writings.
[00:04:26]  But Mortimer Adler, the philosopher at the University of Chicago, the last editor-in-chief of the last edition of the Encyclopedia of Britain.
[00:04:33]  Yeah, I actually bought all of them, but keep going.
[00:04:36]  So, yeah.
[00:04:37]  Well, and he's also the guy who put together the great books of the Western world.
[00:04:41]  In 1968, he included the abolition of man in the great books of the Western world.
[00:04:46]  So that meant he, like you, he put it up there with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, go on and on.
[00:04:55]  It's amazing.
[00:04:56]  And for those people, if you have not bought the original, they've done some copies of it, the great books of the West.
[00:05:06]  It's profound and it's actually just a nice thing to have in your home because people used to actually have them around.
[00:05:11]  You know, Charlie, interestingly enough, about that, I met with Adler a few different times.
[00:05:15]  Oh, wow.
[00:05:16]  And talking with them.
[00:05:19]  And I saw him lecture one time, and he said he didn't think he became educated till he was 60 years old.
[00:05:25]  So a student shot up his hand and said, if you didn't think you were educated till you were 60, you must have a standard by which you could make that judgment.
[00:05:33]  What's the standard?
[00:05:34]  And he said there were 102 major ideas discussed in Western civilization.
[00:05:40]  And Adler himself wrote an essay about each of those ideas.
[00:05:44]  And he said, I think you have to have not an exhaustive, but a working knowledge of all of those ideas.
[00:05:50]  And I think that's profound.
[00:05:52]  If you're in a reading group and you're going to discuss a novel each week, you know, maybe you're going to discuss C.S. Lewis's A Great Divorce, or the next week you might read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
[00:06:02]  And some idiot says, oh, hey, this week, let's read War and Peace.
[00:06:06]  And nobody shows up to the meeting because they're all guilty.
[00:06:09]  Nobody could read War and Peace in a week.
[00:06:11]  But I started thinking, what if you had a group discussion where you read one of those ideas a week?
[00:06:17]  102 in 10 years, you'd have some approximation to being what you might consider an educated person.
[00:06:24]  And I've had groups like that too, where we've read through those essays and discussed them and so on.
[00:06:28]  It's wonderful.
[00:06:30]  We could talk about the great books of the West.
[00:06:32]  It's not cheap, but I encourage everyone to buy it.
[00:06:35]  And I was actually exposed to it by another thinker I think really highly of.
[00:06:40]  So C.S. Lewis, kind of up there in the pantheon of great Christian apologists, can you just share briefly, did he ever struggle with his faith?
[00:06:52]  And if so, how did he get to a place to be such a clear author and defender of Christianity?
[00:07:01]  Well, when you say struggle, I don't know exactly what you mean.
[00:07:05]  When his wife died, certainly there was a grief, but I don't think that the grief that he experienced in any way put his faith in jeopardy, as some people want to suggest.
[00:07:16]  Instead, I would say the struggles that he had are the struggles anybody should have when they realize that what they know is not complete.
[00:07:24]  We can have a sure word about things.
[00:07:26]  We'll never get a last word about anything.
[00:07:28]  Any truth you know could still be paught more deeply.
[00:07:31]  It could be applied more widely and so on.
[00:07:33]  So Lewis wrote this two different quotes.
[00:07:36]  One is a statement he made in a sermon he preached at Oxford University called The Weight of Glory.
[00:07:41]  And he said, if our religion is objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent, for it's precisely the puzzling or repellent where we begin to discover we do not yet know and need to know.
[00:07:56]  So Lewis was never afraid to lean into the realm of things he didn't understand because he knew there were riches behind those things.
[00:08:04]  And there's an essay he wrote.
[00:08:05]  It's a brilliant essay.
[00:08:07]  And at the very end of it, he said, All academic exercise should end in doubt.
[00:08:13]  He doesn't mean that his work wasn't good and that what he said in that essay wasn't true.
[00:08:18]  He just means it wasn't complete.
[00:08:21]  And it kind of works like this.
[00:08:22]  The great theologian Lucy Pevensey in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in the second book, Prince Caspian, she sees Aslan, the Christ figure of those books, for the first time on her second trip into Narnia.
[00:08:36]  And she says to him, Aslan, you're bigger.
[00:08:39]  He says, oh, no, child, I am not.
[00:08:42]  But every year you grow, you'll find me bigger.
[00:08:45]  So consequently, there's those kinds of doubts in Lewis and those kinds of questions, but they're the questions that are not leading to existential despair.
[00:08:54]  They're the kinds of doubts that all of us should have when we're on the threshold of new discovery, new awe, new wonder, and ultimately new worship.
[00:09:03]  So there's three books I want to talk about throughout this hour that I think are very readable to the ordinary person.
[00:09:12]  Mere Christianity, a screw tape letter is an abolition of man.
[00:09:17]  And it's hard to even rank them because they're different.
[00:09:20]  But we're going to start with Mere Christianity.
[00:09:22]  I believe it is a great starting point for anybody that is thinking about the Christian faith.
[00:09:27]  And it's also a fabulous book if you've been a Christian for 40 years.
[00:09:31]  It's equal in its profundity and its depth and also its wisdom.
[00:09:39]  I want to also plug your book, though, Doctor, The Neglected C.S. Lewis.
[00:09:43]  I encourage you to check it out.
[00:09:44]  I want to ask you about the arguments you make in that book as well throughout the hour, but I do want to make sure we lay the foundation of C.S. Lewis's incredible work.
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[00:11:00]  We are discussing C.S. Lewis this hour.
[00:11:04]  We have received, and I've counted, well over 500 emails of people saying they're depressed and discouraged.
[00:11:08]  Well, then you should read C.S. Lewis because there's something bigger than you and what you're dealing with that is worthy of wonder.
[00:11:16]  Dr. Jerry Rood is with us.
[00:11:17]  His book is The Neglected C.S. Lewis that I encourage you guys to purchase and read and study.
[00:11:23]  But let's talk about Mir Christianity.
[00:11:25]  Dr. Mere Christianity, as we mentioned, was originally given in a time of crisis during the Blitz on the BBC radio and then was turned into the book.
[00:11:35]  I believe he added and clarified and edited some of the radio broadcasts.
[00:11:39]  Mere Christianity is one of the best-selling Christian books ever.
[00:11:43]  What is in that book that is so powerful and why should we study it?
[00:11:48]  Well, Lewis basically underscores a pilgrimage to faith that I think grows out of his own experience.
[00:11:55]  He had been an atheist and he works his way through the morass of atheism and its supporting worldview materialism, works his way through agnosticism, comes to a place where he causes the reader to look at Jesus Christ.
[00:12:10]  And they may have anger with the church.
[00:12:13]  They may have anger with some friend of theirs who hurt them, but he wants them to focus on Christ.
[00:12:18]  One thing that's interesting, too, quickly, he begins with what I call the shared imagination.
[00:12:23]  Lewis has 31 different ways he uses the word imagination.
[00:12:27]  One of them is called the shared imagination.
[00:12:29]  And that's when you enter into a shared experience with your reader so that you're on the same page at one place at least.
[00:12:37]  You may diverge after that, but he wants to begin there and then bring his reader into a more inferentially developed understanding of a particular idea.
[00:12:47]  And I was with my friend, and we were at Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco.
[00:12:53]  We were riding bikes along the coast and we came up to this place where the waves were breaking on the rocks.
[00:12:58]  It was absolutely beautiful.
[00:12:59]  My friend wanted me to see it.
[00:13:01]  And we're there extolling the beauty.
[00:13:03]  And this couple comes riding up and we're talking about the beauty with them.
[00:13:09]  And finally, I said, isn't it great to know who to thank?
[00:13:12]  Now, we have a shared experience of the beauty.
[00:13:15]  And when I said, isn't it great to know who to thank?
[00:13:18]  This guy immediately says, I'm an atheist, very aggressive.
[00:13:23]  And I said, I'll bet I can prove you in 10 minutes or not.
[00:13:27]  He said, try.
[00:13:28]  So pulling out my Lewis Mere Christianity kinds of ideas, I said, define for me first what an atheist is.
[00:13:37]  A lot of times we argue with people and we miss each other completely.
[00:13:40]  You want to make sure you've defined the terms.
[00:13:42]  He said, an atheist believes there's no possibility God exists.
[00:13:45]  I said, I don't think you have the credibility to make that judgment.
[00:13:49]  He said, what do you mean?
[00:13:50]  I said, well, the Widener Library at Harvard University has 19 million volumes under that roof.
[00:13:55]  Have you read all those books?
[00:13:58]  He said, no, of course not.
[00:13:59]  And I said, then how can you make the judgment that there's nothing in any of those books that might count against what you're thinking now?
[00:14:06]  I said, I don't think you have the reach to do that.
[00:14:08]  And then C.S. Lewis, I said, said, negative knowledge is always harder to assert than positive.
[00:14:13]  For me to say there's no spider in this room, I'd have to check every nook and cranny to make the claim stick.
[00:14:20]  I could see a spider screwing across the floor.
[00:14:23]  Proofs for God's existence are more complex than that, but nevertheless, the analogy works.
[00:14:28]  Negative arguments are harder to assert than positive ones.
[00:14:32]  I don't think you have the credibility to make that judgment.
[00:14:34]  Give me an honest agnostic, I said, over a dishonest atheist.
[00:14:38]  He said, you're right.
[00:14:40]  I'm an agnostic.
[00:14:41]  And then I said to him, well, if you're wrong on that one, the first one, maybe you're wrong on this one too.

=== Negative Knowledge vs Positive Proof (02:32) ===

[00:14:47]  And he said, what do you got for me?
[00:14:49]  We laughed together.
[00:14:50]  What do you got for me?
[00:14:51]  I said, there's a book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.
[00:14:54]  You might want to read it.
[00:14:55]  He says, send it to me.
[00:14:57]  I sent it to him.
[00:14:58]  I didn't give him my email address.
[00:15:00]  And within two weeks, I got back from him, I read Mere Christianity.
[00:15:04]  I'm moving in your direction.
[00:15:07]  It's powerful.
[00:15:08]  But the arguments in it are very good, building up to our need for Jesus to make any judgment.
[00:15:13]  We make judgments all the time.
[00:15:15]  And when we make a judgment, what's the standard of those judgments?
[00:15:18]  We may disagree about the judgment, but if there's no standard, then all judgments whatsoever are nonsensical.
[00:15:25]  In one of his literary critical works, Lewis said, all judgments imply a standard.
[00:15:29]  And he's looking for a transcendent standard that overarchs rulers and ruled alike, not a hypocritical standard where I do one thing and I apply something different to you.
[00:15:40]  So consequently, if there's that standard, we begin to see that all of us fall short even of our own standards.
[00:15:47]  I believe in a high ideal of love, but sometimes I have sharp words with the people I say I love most in the world.
[00:15:52]  I'm cooked even when I apply my own standard.
[00:15:55]  And if I become honest at that point, and some humility begins to sink in at that point, I then become honest enough to know that there's something lacking in my life.
[00:16:06]  I also become honest enough to know that maybe I need some forgiveness.
[00:16:10]  And that makes me open to wanting to turn towards the Christ who has the power to forgive and who loves unconditionally.
[00:16:20]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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=== Reality Validates Emotion (15:43) ===

[00:17:20]  So, Doctor, let's talk about the abolition of man.
[00:17:23]  It is a profound book, but it's interesting.
[00:17:28]  You could make the argument, especially if you read it when it was originally published in the 1940s, that C.S. Lewis was complaining about something that wasn't that big of a deal in the sense that, okay, it's a children's book, The Control of Language, a Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, which was published in 1939.
[00:17:47]  And he makes this mass almost a prophecy, a prediction of where this is going to head and talking about moral subjectivity versus the natural law.
[00:17:57]  But it turns out that C.S. Lewis was not being hyperbolic.
[00:18:02]  He was not exaggerating.
[00:18:04]  He basically found a singular example of a societal tumor and warned what will happen if this line of thinking metastasizes.
[00:18:15]  Tell us about the abolition of man.
[00:18:17]  He was very, like you suggested, by the way, Charlie, I'm really impressed by your comments, how deeply you understand Lewis.
[00:18:25]  Well done.
[00:18:26]  Thank you.
[00:18:27]  But the thing is, though, he was very present.
[00:18:30]  He saw ahead of time where problems were going to come.
[00:18:34]  And the educational institution is one area.
[00:18:37]  And he's talking about we're not paying enough attention to the kinds of ideologies that are inculcated into students' minds when we don't pay attention to their textbooks.
[00:18:47]  He's writing this when he does the abolition of man in the 40s.
[00:18:50]  It's incredible.
[00:18:52]  But the big core of that book is he's arguing for truth.
[00:18:57]  And for Lewis, truth is not reality.
[00:19:01]  Truth is what I think about reality when I think accurately about it.
[00:19:06]  So if I can get people to doubt reality, I have lost the possibility of truth even occurring.
[00:19:13]  If I can say you're not the gender you actually were born with, you're something else.
[00:19:17]  If I can begin to say all kinds of things that cause people to second guess reality itself, truth dies in the process.
[00:19:25]  And so Lewis talks about that in that book.
[00:19:27]  That first chapter is very profound.
[00:19:29]  He talks about the fact that Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was at a waterfall.
[00:19:34]  The account is recorded in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, 1803.
[00:19:40]  He's at the Coral Inn waterfall on the River Clyde, and he sees these two tourists watching the cataract, and one of them says it's pretty, and the other one says it's sublime.
[00:19:52]  And Coleridge endorses the one who says it's sublime and disagrees with the one who says it's pretty.
[00:19:57]  He doesn't disagree with the fact that both of them were making comments about the objective reality of the waterfall, but one of them was making a more robust statement about it.
[00:20:08]  It's sublime.
[00:20:09]  It has a platonic ideal of waterfulness, as opposed to the one saying it was just pretty.
[00:20:14]  And the authors of the Green Book, the book he's trying to deconstruct, say Coleridge had no right to make that judgment.
[00:20:21]  They weren't saying anything about the waterfall, but only something about their own feelings.
[00:20:25]  And what they did was they dissected the reality of the waterfall from any claim that the people were making.
[00:20:32]  But it gets worse than that because the authors of the Green Book, Gaius and Titius, as Lewis refers to them, they're making a judgment about Coleridge.
[00:20:41]  Coleridge's judgment is based on the reality.
[00:20:44]  Their judgment is not based on any reality whatsoever, but they're making a judgment and they're trying to assert it.
[00:20:50]  It's totally subjectivistic.
[00:20:52]  And in some senses, in that degree, breeds anarchy because it has nothing to do with reality whatsoever.
[00:20:59]  It has to do with whatever I want things to be.
[00:21:02]  And then he introduces a phrase that I don't think people quite understand, but I think we're living through it.
[00:21:09]  Men without chests.
[00:21:12]  What did C.S. Lewis mean by that?
[00:21:14]  Well, he says you have the brain, the head, and then you have the chest, the emotions.
[00:21:24]  You have the visceral also.
[00:21:26]  But the emotional features, Lewis says you can make true statements about emotion as well.
[00:21:32]  So if I don't understand that, my guess is I'm liable to go off course that way as well.
[00:21:41]  There has to be a reality that validates the emotion.
[00:21:45]  If you see a person who's just lost their spouse in a car accident or something like that, you don't expect them to be giddy.
[00:21:53]  You don't expect them to be happy.
[00:21:55]  That's incongruous with the reality that should support that emotion.
[00:21:59]  If you see a person who's morose in a situation that's happy, you need to have respect for that also.
[00:22:06]  If I'm going to a birthday party to celebrate with my friends, I want to go have a happy time.
[00:22:11]  If I get a phone call on the way that my friend was hurt in a car accident, I probably will call the friend who's having the birthday and say, something's come up.
[00:22:19]  I'll tell you about it later.
[00:22:20]  I won't be able to be there.
[00:22:21]  And I go to the hospital, see my friend there to grieve with them, to be with them, to mourn with them, and so on.
[00:22:27]  But you don't go spoil the birthday party because the emotion that's congruous with the accident is not congruous with the experience of the party.
[00:22:36]  So Lewis is talking about it in that regard.
[00:22:39]  The sentiments can be just.
[00:22:41]  If they can be just, then there must be a standard to judge whether this is the accurate sentiment or not.
[00:22:47]  So I think that's the way Lewis is using that concept.
[00:22:50]  I was moved and it was curious to me, and I'm not exactly sure why, maybe you can help me understand why Lewis decided to bring in the Tao or the T-A-O.
[00:23:02]  I'm not sure the pronunciation or the Tao, the way, which again, as soon as I hear the way, I think of kind of a hearkening back to core Christian theology.
[00:23:11]  But he was making an argument that I think of a universality of the human beings, you know, posture towards a specific telos, right?
[00:23:23]  A teleological purpose for existence.
[00:23:27]  Is that correct?
[00:23:28]  Charlie, you missed your calling.
[00:23:30]  You should have been a Lewis scholar.
[00:23:31]  You're nailing him pretty well, actually.
[00:23:33]  I'm impressed.
[00:23:34]  He uses the word, you could say Tao if you want, or Tao, but he uses an Eastern word and he defines it this way.
[00:23:42]  The Tao is a doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain things are really true and other things really false to the kind of thing we are and the kind of thing the universe is.
[00:23:52]  He uses an Eastern term because he wants to show, even in a Western world, these ideas are not merely Western.
[00:23:59]  They're universal.
[00:24:00]  In the appendix of that book, he gives quotes from all kinds of readings.
[00:24:05]  He gives quotes from Confucius's Analects.
[00:24:08]  He gives quotes from Western philosophers, Plato, Aristotle.
[00:24:12]  He gives quotes from Muslim scholars, Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, philosophers, all across time immemorial and across culture, because he's trying to show this concept of understanding reality so that I can begin to approximate truth is really important.
[00:24:29]  Now, the abolition of man is a pre-it's almost an introduction to Christianity by introducing people to the way we should be thinking about life if we're going to think well.
[00:24:40]  And if I think well about the reality, Lewis says, I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
[00:24:51]  If a person turns their eyes to reality, it opens the door for them to discover what's undergirding all of reality, and it's supernatural.
[00:24:58]  He gave a lecture at Oxford University called on the English syllabus.
[00:25:03]  This is in 1930s, just a few years after he had become a Christian.
[00:25:08]  And he said to the students, we have fulfilled our whole duty to you as your teachers, if we can help you see some given tract of reality.
[00:25:18]  So let's say I help a student get to a book and help them to interpret what the author is saying well in a way that's coherent and consistent with what the author intended.
[00:25:28]  Sometimes that's benefited by getting a community around the text so I can benefit from the perspectives of the people there, but it's still a perspective rooted in the reality of the text itself.
[00:25:38]  And Lewis saw if a person got connected to reality well, they can develop beyond that to the reality that undergirds all other reality in our world.
[00:25:49]  It's a very important book, Abolition of Man.
[00:25:52]  In the words of St. Augustine, if you argue with reality, welcome to hell.
[00:25:57]  So now I want to focus on your book because abolition of man and mere Christianity are usually actually not neglected.
[00:26:04]  So tell us, what is the neglected C.S. Lewis?
[00:26:08]  Well, first off, that's a book of mine, not the book.
[00:26:11]  I've got a bunch of books on Lewis, but the thing about this book, I like to write books about Lewis that look at things that other people are not writing about.
[00:26:21]  There's so much depth in Lewis.
[00:26:23]  But Lewis's best books, hand down, are his literary critical works.
[00:26:28]  And again, he's helping his readers see something of reality there.
[00:26:32]  And you can develop habits by doing that that will benefit your eyesight when you look or cast your gaze anywhere.
[00:26:39]  So we wanted to take, my friend Mark Neal and I did this together.
[00:26:44]  We wanted to take books that people weren't reading that we thought were really important and introduce the reader who maybe got to Lewis through the Narnian books or through his Christian apologetics, introduce them to these other rich resources in Lewis.
[00:26:59]  And they're really, actually, I think they're apologetic too, because he does faith integrated thinking about these great books.
[00:27:06]  There's one book, for example, Lewis wrote called English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama.
[00:27:13]  To write that book, he read every book written in English in the 16th century.
[00:27:18]  He read every book translated into English in the original language, it was written, French, Latin, Italian, and in translation, so his judgments would be fair-minded.
[00:27:27]  And consequently, it took him about 18 years to write it.
[00:27:30]  He wrote it for the Oxford History of English Literature.
[00:27:33]  It was quite a burden for him.
[00:27:34]  Oh, hell, he called it, his oh hell book, Oxford History English Literature.
[00:27:39]  But when he wrote that book, he was also writing Mere Christianity, the Narnian books.
[00:27:44]  He was writing his science fiction books.
[00:27:46]  He did a lot of other work, but he is really pouring into this.
[00:27:50]  And you discover as you read it in his comments, by the way, you laugh your way through.
[00:27:54]  It's full of mirth.
[00:27:55]  It's wonderful.
[00:27:55]  It's a 700-page book, but it's well worth the reading.
[00:27:58]  And as you read it, you find that he opens up more than wardrobe doors.
[00:28:04]  And there was one author he referred to, Michael Drayton, a 16th century poet.
[00:28:10]  And I read what Lewis said about Drayton.
[00:28:12]  I said, I don't want to leave Drayton untouched, man.
[00:28:14]  I've got to go read Drayton.
[00:28:15]  So I read all of Drayton's works as well.
[00:28:18]  Lewis does this.
[00:28:19]  He ignites your heart and soul and mind to grow and want to keep growing.
[00:28:25]  I think it's important.
[00:28:26]  I want to say one other comment about this.
[00:28:29]  I didn't go to college because I had any academic interest.
[00:28:31]  I think I read four books before college, not counting comic books.
[00:28:35]  I went to college to play sports.
[00:28:37]  In the beginning of my freshman year, I became a Christian, read through my Bible from cover to cover that day, and I try to do that every year ever since.
[00:28:45]  But somebody introduced me to Lewis, and I started reading Lewis, and my faith started to develop.
[00:28:52]  And when I would share Christ with the guys I was playing football with, they would ask me hard questions.
[00:28:57]  I didn't know the answers to questions, but I found Lewis was a rich source of answers to their questions.
[00:29:02]  I go to graduate from college, and a person wisely said to me, You do not get an education in college.
[00:29:09]  You lay a foundation for your education.
[00:29:12]  And commencement, the graduation exercises, means you will now commence your education by building on that foundation.
[00:29:19]  Pick an author who will take you places and make that author your life study.
[00:29:23]  I think he could have said, pick an artist or composer, a period of history, pick a worldview, whatever it might be.
[00:29:31]  I picked Lewis.
[00:29:32]  I go to grad school.
[00:29:33]  I'm studying theology.
[00:29:34]  I have to write a thesis.
[00:29:36]  There was no way I was going to write a thesis on the use of the optative mood in the Greek text of Philemon.
[00:29:41]  It wasn't going to hold me.
[00:29:42]  But I asked if I could write on Lewis, and they said, yeah.
[00:29:44]  So I put pen to paper and I started writing on Lewis.
[00:29:48]  I've been studying him for 53 years.
[00:29:50]  I've been teaching him for 43 years.
[00:29:52]  I've lectured on him in 89, 81 universities in 19 different countries, and I have never gotten to the bottom of him.
[00:30:01]  The neglected Lewis is to introduce people to a guy you're not going to get to the bottom of.
[00:30:08]  Doctor, we live in, let's just say, interesting times.
[00:30:13]  You've been studying C.S. Lewis for decades, and you have several books.
[00:30:18]  You have The Surprising Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Splendor in the Dark, the quotable C.S. Lewis, the neglected C.S. Lewis.
[00:30:28]  What can C.S. Lewis teach us for the times that we are living through?
[00:30:33]  Well, you know, one thing we were talking about the abolition of man in our last segment.
[00:30:39]  And I have to say, I've lectured on Lewis's apologetics all over Hillsdale College.
[00:30:44]  I've lectured on Lewis at Hillsdale, even.
[00:30:47]  And basically, it gets down to this issue of reality.
[00:30:51]  If you deny reality, and if you're not inclined to try to understand the real world, any truth claim you make has no tether to the world.
[00:31:02]  And it basically inflates your ego and makes you think that you are in your self-referential state, able to make these pronouncements.
[00:31:11]  And it ends up becoming a power play because other people were as anarchistic as you are.
[00:31:16]  You just start fighting, but you're not tethering to any kind of reality whereby you could resolve the conflict.
[00:31:22]  If you deny reality, you become prey to the propagandist when he comes.
[00:31:27]  And Lewis actually talks about that in the abolition of man.
[00:31:29]  It's really interesting.
[00:31:31]  There's also, sometimes people say to me, if Lewis was alive today, what would he say?
[00:31:35]  And I say, nobody could answer that question.
[00:31:37]  That'd be like using Lewis like a ventriloquist uses his dummy.
[00:31:41]  You begin to espouse your own ideas through him.
[00:31:44]  But you could take what he did say and you could see its immediate application to circumstances today.
[00:31:51]  You mentioned about how the abolition of man is something that's so contemporary by virtue of the things he's dealing with.
[00:31:59]  If you take, he would often write a book in propositional form and then write the same concept in imaginative form.
[00:32:06]  And his imaginative complement to the abolition of man is that hideous strength, the last of his science fiction books or science trilogy.
[00:32:20]  And if you read that book, you would think you were reading today's newspaper.
[00:32:25]  Lewis shows the crisis that goes on in the world that's in that book.
[00:32:30]  The people who deny reality, the people who use that as an opportunity to assert their own worldview in a tyrannical sort of way and control people and so on.
[00:32:41]  And you just say to myself, oh my word, how did he know this stuff?
[00:32:45]  It's amazing.
[00:32:48]  I think they were contemporaries, but how ahead of the curve prophetic people like Orwell and Huxley and Lewis and Kessler were is just amazing.
[00:33:01]  It's really extraordinary.

=== God Wants to Redeem You (02:51) ===

[00:33:03]  It's Holy Week.
[00:33:05]  You are also a professor of evangelism.
[00:33:09]  For people that are not sure whether or not they believe in Jesus or they believe in God, take two minutes and close the show with a call to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
[00:33:23]  There's nothing more important than knowing that the God who created us loves us deeply and unconditionally.
[00:33:31]  And consequently, because of that, he invites us into relationship with him.
[00:33:36]  We who have been estranged by him, we who have made rationalization and excuses for our bad behavior.
[00:33:42]  He still loves us.
[00:33:43]  He still pursues us.
[00:33:45]  And in Christ's coming, in his dying on the cross to forgive us of our sins, he opens the door for us to be reconciled to God.
[00:33:54]  I remember talking to a woman in the airport of Vienna, and she came, she was doing a survey for the airport.
[00:34:00]  She came up to me and she said she wanted to do a survey.
[00:34:03]  And I said to her, what's your name?
[00:34:04]  She said, Allegra.
[00:34:05]  I said, Allegra, are you from Vienna?
[00:34:08]  You can ask questions that are not intrusive.
[00:34:10]  Are you from Vienna?
[00:34:12]  She said, yes.
[00:34:13]  I said, what brought you?
[00:34:14]  She said, no.
[00:34:15]  She was from southern Austria.
[00:34:16]  I said, what brought you to Vienna?
[00:34:18]  She said, she was a student.
[00:34:19]  I asked her about that.
[00:34:20]  I said, what are you studying?
[00:34:22]  She said, anthropology.
[00:34:23]  I asked her about that.
[00:34:23]  I asked her about her family, found out there was a lot of estrangement in her family.
[00:34:28]  I found out that her boyfriend had gone to Florence to study art, and he had come back the day before to tell her he met somebody better in Florence.
[00:34:35]  This was a woman who was broken in her heart, broken in her relationships and estranged.
[00:34:40]  20 minutes, she's supposed to ask me questions.
[00:34:43]  She hasn't asked me a single question.
[00:34:44]  I've got 20 minutes.
[00:34:45]  I know her life and I know where her hurting is.
[00:34:49]  And I know where the target is for the gospel.
[00:34:51]  And I said to her, Allegra, I know you got to ask me your questions for your survey, but I've been sent here to tell you something as each of us have been sent into the world that God wants to redeem and reconcile to himself.
[00:35:03]  She goes through her questions, asks me what she wants to ask, and I said, what were you sent here to tell me?
[00:35:07]  I said, Allegra, the God of the universe knows you and he loves you.
[00:35:15]  Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.
[00:35:19]  Sometimes you have to say it three times for it to sink through.
[00:35:22]  I said, Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.
[00:35:25]  And she bursts into loud sobs and she says to me, but I've done so many bad things with my life.
[00:35:31]  And I could tell her, God forgave her and loved her.
[00:35:34]  Doctor, thank you so much.
[00:35:35]  We'll have you on again soon.
[00:35:36]  God bless you.
[00:35:37]  Thank you.
[00:35:38]  Bye.
[00:35:41]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:43]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:35:46]  Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
[00:35:51]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.