Once upon a dreary era, when the World of Functional Specialization had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses, romantic poets, Platonic idealists, rhetorical craftsmen, and even orthodox Christians, there appeared a man (almost as if from another world, one of the worlds of his own fiction: was he a man or something more like elf or angel?) who was all of these things as amateur, as well as probably the world’s foremost authority in his professional province, medieval and Renaissance English literature.
Before his death in 1963, C. S. Lewis found time to produce some sixty first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, Biblical studies, historical philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary, religious allegory, short stories, and children’s novels. Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world.
In this critical essay, Peter Kreeft guides readers on an exploration of this world through the words of Lewis himself, in a comprehensive tour of his faith and his fiction.
71 pages.
C. S. Lewis: A Critical Essay is in the following collections: