The Charlie Kirk Show - The Immortal C.S. Lewis with Dr. Jerry Root

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Dr. Jerry Root.

00:00:01.000 We do a full hour in C.S. Lewis.

00:00:03.000 Very important, especially this holy week.

00:00:05.000 Listen to this episode, text it to your friends, and read C.S. Lewis.

00:00:09.000 Read C.S. Lewis.

00:00:10.000 Read C.S. Lewis.

00:00:11.000 It will bless you.

00:00:12.000 Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:15.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:16.000 Here we go.

00:00:17.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:18.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:20.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:24.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:27.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:28.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:29.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:31.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:38.000 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.

00:00:46.000 That's why we are here.

00:00:49.000 Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.

00:00:58.000 This hour is going to really be focused on things that are eternal in nature and that are much more important than politics.

00:01:06.000 Politics is critical, obviously.

00:01:08.000 We talk about it all the time.

00:01:09.000 But politics is only part of a broader picture.

00:01:14.000 We're going to talk about morality and religion and eternity.

00:01:17.000 Joining us now is Dr. Jerry Root.

00:01:20.000 He's professor emeritus from Wheaton University.

00:01:23.000 We could talk about that, but definitely want to talk about, more importantly, his book, The Neglected C.S. Lewis.

00:01:30.000 And Dr. Root is with us now.

00:01:32.000 Doctor, welcome to the program.

00:01:34.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:01:35.000 I'm grateful.

00:01:37.000 Wonderful.

00:01:37.000 So, Dr. Root, I have personally been blessed by reading and studying C.S. Lewis.

00:01:46.000 I've only really touched on six or seven of his books, but I've enjoyed them thoroughly.

00:01:50.000 I mean, he was prolific.

00:01:52.000 But let me just start with a rather general question.

00:01:56.000 Who was C.S. Lewis and why does he matter?

00:01:59.000 C.S. Lewis taught at Oxford University for 29 years.

00:02:03.000 He also taught at Cambridge University for nine.

00:02:06.000 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.

00:02:18.000 And slowly, he worked his way back to faith.

00:02:22.000 And it was largely due to a conversation that he had with J.R.R. Tolkien, his very close friend.

00:02:28.000 But he had these longings that drove him and prompted him.

00:02:34.000 He also had not only the longings of the heart, he also had a very sharp mind.

00:02:39.000 And he needed to get over these intellectual barriers in order to come to fully embrace his faith.

00:02:47.000 He was a prolific author.

00:02:49.000 There are actually 73 titles under his name right now.

00:02:53.000 He wrote 56 of them while he was living, and the others he wrote after he died.

00:02:58.000 No, they're actually collections of essays, letters that he wrote, and so on that flush out the 73 volumes.

00:03:05.000 And he wrote in many literary genres.

00:03:08.000 He wrote narrative poetry.

00:03:10.000 He wrote lyric poetry.

00:03:12.000 He wrote profound literary criticism.

00:03:15.000 He's considered one of the greatest of the medievalists of the last century.

00:03:19.000 He wrote Christian apologetics.

00:03:22.000 He wrote wonderful novels.

00:03:24.000 He also wrote children's stories, science fiction.

00:03:27.000 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.

00:03:36.000 He was very perceptive.

00:03:38.000 He saw problems decades before other people saw them.

00:03:42.000 And he addressed them, but he always addressed them after he became a Christian through a faith-integrated grid.

00:03:49.000 And Anybody who reads him will find that he will be a threshold to their own faith-integrated liberal arts understanding of life.

00:04:00.000 I believe he's the great apologist of the 20th century.

00:04:03.000 I believe he's the most impactful author of the last 100 years.

00:04:06.000 And he's up there with Aquinas and Augustine with his impact to spread the gospel.

00:04:12.000 Do you agree with that?

00:04:13.000 Well, it's interesting you say that.

00:04:15.000 His book, The Abolition of Man, which I think is a book everybody should start with when they've studied it multiple times.

00:04:21.000 Please continue.

00:04:22.000 It's skeletal structure of which he fleshes out all of their writings.

00:04:26.000 But Mortimer Adler, the philosopher at the University of Chicago, the last editor-in-chief of the last edition of the Encyclopedia of Britain.

00:04:33.000 Yeah, I actually bought all of them, but keep going.

00:04:36.000 So, yeah.

00:04:37.000 Well, and he's also the guy who put together the great books of the Western world.

00:04:41.000 In 1968, he included the abolition of man in the great books of the Western world.

00:04:46.000 So that meant he, like you, he put it up there with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, go on and on.

00:04:55.000 It's amazing.

00:04:56.000 And for those people, if you have not bought the original, they've done some copies of it, the great books of the West.

00:05:06.000 It's profound and it's actually just a nice thing to have in your home because people used to actually have them around.

00:05:11.000 You know, Charlie, interestingly enough, about that, I met with Adler a few different times.

00:05:15.000 Oh, wow.

00:05:16.000 And talking with them.

00:05:19.000 And I saw him lecture one time, and he said he didn't think he became educated till he was 60 years old.

00:05:25.000 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.

00:05:33.000 What's the standard?

00:05:34.000 And he said there were 102 major ideas discussed in Western civilization.

00:05:40.000 And Adler himself wrote an essay about each of those ideas.

00:05:44.000 And he said, I think you have to have not an exhaustive, but a working knowledge of all of those ideas.

00:05:50.000 And I think that's profound.

00:05:52.000 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.

00:06:02.000 And some idiot says, oh, hey, this week, let's read War and Peace. 0.99

00:06:06.000 And nobody shows up to the meeting because they're all guilty. 1.00

00:06:09.000 Nobody could read War and Peace in a week.

00:06:11.000 But I started thinking, what if you had a group discussion where you read one of those ideas a week?

00:06:17.000 102 in 10 years, you'd have some approximation to being what you might consider an educated person.

00:06:24.000 And I've had groups like that too, where we've read through those essays and discussed them and so on.

00:06:28.000 It's wonderful.

00:06:30.000 We could talk about the great books of the West.

00:06:32.000 It's not cheap, but I encourage everyone to buy it.

00:06:35.000 And I was actually exposed to it by another thinker I think really highly of.

00:06:40.000 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?

00:06:52.000 And if so, how did he get to a place to be such a clear author and defender of Christianity?

00:07:01.000 Well, when you say struggle, I don't know exactly what you mean.

00:07:05.000 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.

00:07:16.000 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.

00:07:24.000 We can have a sure word about things.

00:07:26.000 We'll never get a last word about anything.

00:07:28.000 Any truth you know could still be paught more deeply.

00:07:31.000 It could be applied more widely and so on.

00:07:33.000 So Lewis wrote this two different quotes.

00:07:36.000 One is a statement he made in a sermon he preached at Oxford University called The Weight of Glory.

00:07:41.000 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.

00:07:56.000 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.

00:08:04.000 And there's an essay he wrote.

00:08:05.000 It's a brilliant essay.

00:08:07.000 And at the very end of it, he said, All academic exercise should end in doubt.

00:08:13.000 He doesn't mean that his work wasn't good and that what he said in that essay wasn't true.

00:08:18.000 He just means it wasn't complete.

00:08:21.000 And it kind of works like this.

00:08:22.000 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.

00:08:36.000 And she says to him, Aslan, you're bigger.

00:08:39.000 He says, oh, no, child, I am not.

00:08:42.000 But every year you grow, you'll find me bigger.

00:08:45.000 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.

00:08:54.000 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.

00:09:03.000 So there's three books I want to talk about throughout this hour that I think are very readable to the ordinary person. 0.55

00:09:12.000 Mere Christianity, a screw tape letter is an abolition of man.

00:09:17.000 And it's hard to even rank them because they're different. 0.86

00:09:20.000 But we're going to start with Mere Christianity.

00:09:22.000 I believe it is a great starting point for anybody that is thinking about the Christian faith.

00:09:27.000 And it's also a fabulous book if you've been a Christian for 40 years.

00:09:31.000 It's equal in its profundity and its depth and also its wisdom. 0.78

00:09:39.000 I want to also plug your book, though, Doctor, The Neglected C.S. Lewis.

00:09:43.000 I encourage you to check it out.

00:09:44.000 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.

00:09:54.000 Look, it's hard to trust anything anymore.

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00:11:00.000 We are discussing C.S. Lewis this hour.

00:11:04.000 We have received, and I've counted, well over 500 emails of people saying they're depressed and discouraged.

00:11:08.000 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.

00:11:16.000 Dr. Jerry Rood is with us.

00:11:17.000 His book is The Neglected C.S. Lewis that I encourage you guys to purchase and read and study.

00:11:23.000 But let's talk about Mir Christianity. 0.98

00:11:25.000 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.

00:11:35.000 I believe he added and clarified and edited some of the radio broadcasts.

00:11:39.000 Mere Christianity is one of the best-selling Christian books ever.

00:11:43.000 What is in that book that is so powerful and why should we study it?

00:11:48.000 Well, Lewis basically underscores a pilgrimage to faith that I think grows out of his own experience.

00:11:55.000 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.

00:12:10.000 And they may have anger with the church.

00:12:13.000 They may have anger with some friend of theirs who hurt them, but he wants them to focus on Christ.

00:12:18.000 One thing that's interesting, too, quickly, he begins with what I call the shared imagination.

00:12:23.000 Lewis has 31 different ways he uses the word imagination.

00:12:27.000 One of them is called the shared imagination.

00:12:29.000 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.

00:12:37.000 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.

00:12:47.000 And I was with my friend, and we were at Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco.

00:12:53.000 We were riding bikes along the coast and we came up to this place where the waves were breaking on the rocks.

00:12:58.000 It was absolutely beautiful.

00:12:59.000 My friend wanted me to see it.

00:13:01.000 And we're there extolling the beauty.

00:13:03.000 And this couple comes riding up and we're talking about the beauty with them.

00:13:09.000 And finally, I said, isn't it great to know who to thank?

00:13:12.000 Now, we have a shared experience of the beauty.

00:13:15.000 And when I said, isn't it great to know who to thank?

00:13:18.000 This guy immediately says, I'm an atheist, very aggressive.

00:13:23.000 And I said, I'll bet I can prove you in 10 minutes or not.

00:13:27.000 He said, try.

00:13:28.000 So pulling out my Lewis Mere Christianity kinds of ideas, I said, define for me first what an atheist is.

00:13:37.000 A lot of times we argue with people and we miss each other completely.

00:13:40.000 You want to make sure you've defined the terms.

00:13:42.000 He said, an atheist believes there's no possibility God exists.

00:13:45.000 I said, I don't think you have the credibility to make that judgment.

00:13:49.000 He said, what do you mean?

00:13:50.000 I said, well, the Widener Library at Harvard University has 19 million volumes under that roof.

00:13:55.000 Have you read all those books?

00:13:58.000 He said, no, of course not.

00:13:59.000 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?

00:14:06.000 I said, I don't think you have the reach to do that.

00:14:08.000 And then C.S. Lewis, I said, said, negative knowledge is always harder to assert than positive.

00:14:13.000 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.

00:14:20.000 I could see a spider screwing across the floor.

00:14:23.000 Proofs for God's existence are more complex than that, but nevertheless, the analogy works.

00:14:28.000 Negative arguments are harder to assert than positive ones.

00:14:32.000 I don't think you have the credibility to make that judgment.

00:14:34.000 Give me an honest agnostic, I said, over a dishonest atheist. 1.00

00:14:38.000 He said, you're right. 0.98

00:14:40.000 I'm an agnostic.

00:14:41.000 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.

00:14:47.000 And he said, what do you got for me?

00:14:49.000 We laughed together.

00:14:50.000 What do you got for me?

00:14:51.000 I said, there's a book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.

00:14:54.000 You might want to read it. 1.00

00:14:55.000 He says, send it to me.

00:14:57.000 I sent it to him.

00:14:58.000 I didn't give him my email address.

00:15:00.000 And within two weeks, I got back from him, I read Mere Christianity. 0.81

00:15:04.000 I'm moving in your direction. 0.99

00:15:07.000 It's powerful.

00:15:08.000 But the arguments in it are very good, building up to our need for Jesus to make any judgment.

00:15:13.000 We make judgments all the time.

00:15:15.000 And when we make a judgment, what's the standard of those judgments?

00:15:18.000 We may disagree about the judgment, but if there's no standard, then all judgments whatsoever are nonsensical.

00:15:25.000 In one of his literary critical works, Lewis said, all judgments imply a standard.

00:15:29.000 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.

00:15:40.000 So consequently, if there's that standard, we begin to see that all of us fall short even of our own standards.

00:15:47.000 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.

00:15:52.000 I'm cooked even when I apply my own standard.

00:15:55.000 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.

00:16:06.000 I also become honest enough to know that maybe I need some forgiveness.

00:16:10.000 And that makes me open to wanting to turn towards the Christ who has the power to forgive and who loves unconditionally.

00:16:20.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:17:20.000 So, Doctor, let's talk about the abolition of man.

00:17:23.000 It is a profound book, but it's interesting.

00:17:28.000 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.

00:17:47.000 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.

00:17:57.000 But it turns out that C.S. Lewis was not being hyperbolic.

00:18:02.000 He was not exaggerating.

00:18:04.000 He basically found a singular example of a societal tumor and warned what will happen if this line of thinking metastasizes.

00:18:15.000 Tell us about the abolition of man.

00:18:17.000 He was very, like you suggested, by the way, Charlie, I'm really impressed by your comments, how deeply you understand Lewis.

00:18:25.000 Well done.

00:18:26.000 Thank you.

00:18:27.000 But the thing is, though, he was very present.

00:18:30.000 He saw ahead of time where problems were going to come.

00:18:34.000 And the educational institution is one area.

00:18:37.000 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.

00:18:47.000 He's writing this when he does the abolition of man in the 40s.

00:18:50.000 It's incredible.

00:18:52.000 But the big core of that book is he's arguing for truth.

00:18:57.000 And for Lewis, truth is not reality.

00:19:01.000 Truth is what I think about reality when I think accurately about it.

00:19:06.000 So if I can get people to doubt reality, I have lost the possibility of truth even occurring. 0.99

00:19:13.000 If I can say you're not the gender you actually were born with, you're something else.

00:19:17.000 If I can begin to say all kinds of things that cause people to second guess reality itself, truth dies in the process. 0.87

00:19:25.000 And so Lewis talks about that in that book.

00:19:27.000 That first chapter is very profound.

00:19:29.000 He talks about the fact that Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was at a waterfall.

00:19:34.000 The account is recorded in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, 1803.

00:19:40.000 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.

00:19:52.000 And Coleridge endorses the one who says it's sublime and disagrees with the one who says it's pretty.

00:19:57.000 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.

00:20:08.000 It's sublime.

00:20:09.000 It has a platonic ideal of waterfulness, as opposed to the one saying it was just pretty.

00:20:14.000 And the authors of the Green Book, the book he's trying to deconstruct, say Coleridge had no right to make that judgment.

00:20:21.000 They weren't saying anything about the waterfall, but only something about their own feelings.

00:20:25.000 And what they did was they dissected the reality of the waterfall from any claim that the people were making.

00:20:32.000 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.

00:20:41.000 Coleridge's judgment is based on the reality.

00:20:44.000 Their judgment is not based on any reality whatsoever, but they're making a judgment and they're trying to assert it.

00:20:50.000 It's totally subjectivistic.

00:20:52.000 And in some senses, in that degree, breeds anarchy because it has nothing to do with reality whatsoever.

00:20:59.000 It has to do with whatever I want things to be.

00:21:02.000 And then he introduces a phrase that I don't think people quite understand, but I think we're living through it.

00:21:09.000 Men without chests. 0.79

00:21:12.000 What did C.S. Lewis mean by that?

00:21:14.000 Well, he says you have the brain, the head, and then you have the chest, the emotions.

00:21:24.000 You have the visceral also.

00:21:26.000 But the emotional features, Lewis says you can make true statements about emotion as well.

00:21:32.000 So if I don't understand that, my guess is I'm liable to go off course that way as well.

00:21:41.000 There has to be a reality that validates the emotion.

00:21:45.000 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.

00:21:53.000 You don't expect them to be happy.

00:21:55.000 That's incongruous with the reality that should support that emotion.

00:21:59.000 If you see a person who's morose in a situation that's happy, you need to have respect for that also.

00:22:06.000 If I'm going to a birthday party to celebrate with my friends, I want to go have a happy time.

00:22:11.000 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.

00:22:19.000 I'll tell you about it later.

00:22:20.000 I won't be able to be there.

00:22:21.000 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.

00:22:27.000 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.

00:22:36.000 So Lewis is talking about it in that regard.

00:22:39.000 The sentiments can be just.

00:22:41.000 If they can be just, then there must be a standard to judge whether this is the accurate sentiment or not.

00:22:47.000 So I think that's the way Lewis is using that concept.

00:22:50.000 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.

00:23:02.000 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.

00:23:11.000 But he was making an argument that I think of a universality of the human beings, you know, posture towards a specific telos, right?

00:23:23.000 A teleological purpose for existence.

00:23:27.000 Is that correct?

00:23:28.000 Charlie, you missed your calling.

00:23:30.000 You should have been a Lewis scholar.

00:23:31.000 You're nailing him pretty well, actually.

00:23:33.000 I'm impressed.

00:23:34.000 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.

00:23:42.000 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.

00:23:52.000 He uses an Eastern term because he wants to show, even in a Western world, these ideas are not merely Western.

00:23:59.000 They're universal.

00:24:00.000 In the appendix of that book, he gives quotes from all kinds of readings.

00:24:05.000 He gives quotes from Confucius's Analects.

00:24:08.000 He gives quotes from Western philosophers, Plato, Aristotle.

00:24:12.000 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.

00:24:29.000 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.

00:24:40.000 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.

00:24:51.000 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.

00:24:58.000 He gave a lecture at Oxford University called on the English syllabus.

00:25:03.000 This is in 1930s, just a few years after he had become a Christian.

00:25:08.000 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.

00:25:18.000 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.

00:25:28.000 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.

00:25:38.000 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.

00:25:49.000 It's a very important book, Abolition of Man.

00:25:52.000 In the words of St. Augustine, if you argue with reality, welcome to hell.

00:25:57.000 So now I want to focus on your book because abolition of man and mere Christianity are usually actually not neglected. 0.84

00:26:04.000 So tell us, what is the neglected C.S. Lewis?

00:26:08.000 Well, first off, that's a book of mine, not the book.

00:26:11.000 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.

00:26:21.000 There's so much depth in Lewis.

00:26:23.000 But Lewis's best books, hand down, are his literary critical works.

00:26:28.000 And again, he's helping his readers see something of reality there.

00:26:32.000 And you can develop habits by doing that that will benefit your eyesight when you look or cast your gaze anywhere.

00:26:39.000 So we wanted to take, my friend Mark Neal and I did this together.

00:26:44.000 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.

00:26:59.000 And they're really, actually, I think they're apologetic too, because he does faith integrated thinking about these great books.

00:27:06.000 There's one book, for example, Lewis wrote called English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama.

00:27:13.000 To write that book, he read every book written in English in the 16th century.

00:27:18.000 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.

00:27:27.000 And consequently, it took him about 18 years to write it.

00:27:30.000 He wrote it for the Oxford History of English Literature.

00:27:33.000 It was quite a burden for him.

00:27:34.000 Oh, hell, he called it, his oh hell book, Oxford History English Literature.

00:27:39.000 But when he wrote that book, he was also writing Mere Christianity, the Narnian books.

00:27:44.000 He was writing his science fiction books.

00:27:46.000 He did a lot of other work, but he is really pouring into this.

00:27:50.000 And you discover as you read it in his comments, by the way, you laugh your way through.

00:27:54.000 It's full of mirth.

00:27:55.000 It's wonderful.

00:27:55.000 It's a 700-page book, but it's well worth the reading.

00:27:58.000 And as you read it, you find that he opens up more than wardrobe doors.

00:28:04.000 And there was one author he referred to, Michael Drayton, a 16th century poet.

00:28:10.000 And I read what Lewis said about Drayton.

00:28:12.000 I said, I don't want to leave Drayton untouched, man.

00:28:14.000 I've got to go read Drayton.

00:28:15.000 So I read all of Drayton's works as well.

00:28:18.000 Lewis does this.

00:28:19.000 He ignites your heart and soul and mind to grow and want to keep growing.

00:28:25.000 I think it's important.

00:28:26.000 I want to say one other comment about this.

00:28:29.000 I didn't go to college because I had any academic interest.

00:28:31.000 I think I read four books before college, not counting comic books.

00:28:35.000 I went to college to play sports.

00:28:37.000 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.

00:28:45.000 But somebody introduced me to Lewis, and I started reading Lewis, and my faith started to develop.

00:28:52.000 And when I would share Christ with the guys I was playing football with, they would ask me hard questions.

00:28:57.000 I didn't know the answers to questions, but I found Lewis was a rich source of answers to their questions.

00:29:02.000 I go to graduate from college, and a person wisely said to me, You do not get an education in college.

00:29:09.000 You lay a foundation for your education.

00:29:12.000 And commencement, the graduation exercises, means you will now commence your education by building on that foundation.

00:29:19.000 Pick an author who will take you places and make that author your life study.

00:29:23.000 I think he could have said, pick an artist or composer, a period of history, pick a worldview, whatever it might be.

00:29:31.000 I picked Lewis.

00:29:32.000 I go to grad school.

00:29:33.000 I'm studying theology.

00:29:34.000 I have to write a thesis.

00:29:36.000 There was no way I was going to write a thesis on the use of the optative mood in the Greek text of Philemon.

00:29:41.000 It wasn't going to hold me.

00:29:42.000 But I asked if I could write on Lewis, and they said, yeah.

00:29:44.000 So I put pen to paper and I started writing on Lewis.

00:29:48.000 I've been studying him for 53 years.

00:29:50.000 I've been teaching him for 43 years.

00:29:52.000 I've lectured on him in 89, 81 universities in 19 different countries, and I have never gotten to the bottom of him.

00:30:01.000 The neglected Lewis is to introduce people to a guy you're not going to get to the bottom of.

00:30:08.000 Doctor, we live in, let's just say, interesting times.

00:30:13.000 You've been studying C.S. Lewis for decades, and you have several books.

00:30:18.000 You have The Surprising Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Splendor in the Dark, the quotable C.S. Lewis, the neglected C.S. Lewis.

00:30:28.000 What can C.S. Lewis teach us for the times that we are living through?

00:30:33.000 Well, you know, one thing we were talking about the abolition of man in our last segment.

00:30:39.000 And I have to say, I've lectured on Lewis's apologetics all over Hillsdale College.

00:30:44.000 I've lectured on Lewis at Hillsdale, even.

00:30:47.000 And basically, it gets down to this issue of reality.

00:30:51.000 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.

00:31:02.000 And it basically inflates your ego and makes you think that you are in your self-referential state, able to make these pronouncements.

00:31:11.000 And it ends up becoming a power play because other people were as anarchistic as you are.

00:31:16.000 You just start fighting, but you're not tethering to any kind of reality whereby you could resolve the conflict.

00:31:22.000 If you deny reality, you become prey to the propagandist when he comes.

00:31:27.000 And Lewis actually talks about that in the abolition of man.

00:31:29.000 It's really interesting.

00:31:31.000 There's also, sometimes people say to me, if Lewis was alive today, what would he say?

00:31:35.000 And I say, nobody could answer that question.

00:31:37.000 That'd be like using Lewis like a ventriloquist uses his dummy.

00:31:41.000 You begin to espouse your own ideas through him.

00:31:44.000 But you could take what he did say and you could see its immediate application to circumstances today.

00:31:51.000 You mentioned about how the abolition of man is something that's so contemporary by virtue of the things he's dealing with.

00:31:59.000 If you take, he would often write a book in propositional form and then write the same concept in imaginative form.

00:32:06.000 And his imaginative complement to the abolition of man is that hideous strength, the last of his science fiction books or science trilogy.

00:32:20.000 And if you read that book, you would think you were reading today's newspaper.

00:32:25.000 Lewis shows the crisis that goes on in the world that's in that book.

00:32:30.000 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.

00:32:41.000 And you just say to myself, oh my word, how did he know this stuff?

00:32:45.000 It's amazing.

00:32:48.000 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.

00:33:01.000 It's really extraordinary.

00:33:03.000 It's Holy Week.

00:33:05.000 You are also a professor of evangelism.

00:33:09.000 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.

00:33:23.000 There's nothing more important than knowing that the God who created us loves us deeply and unconditionally.

00:33:31.000 And consequently, because of that, he invites us into relationship with him.

00:33:36.000 We who have been estranged by him, we who have made rationalization and excuses for our bad behavior.

00:33:42.000 He still loves us.

00:33:43.000 He still pursues us.

00:33:45.000 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.

00:33:54.000 I remember talking to a woman in the airport of Vienna, and she came, she was doing a survey for the airport.

00:34:00.000 She came up to me and she said she wanted to do a survey.

00:34:03.000 And I said to her, what's your name?

00:34:04.000 She said, Allegra.

00:34:05.000 I said, Allegra, are you from Vienna?

00:34:08.000 You can ask questions that are not intrusive.

00:34:10.000 Are you from Vienna?

00:34:12.000 She said, yes.

00:34:13.000 I said, what brought you?

00:34:14.000 She said, no.

00:34:15.000 She was from southern Austria.

00:34:16.000 I said, what brought you to Vienna?

00:34:18.000 She said, she was a student.

00:34:19.000 I asked her about that.

00:34:20.000 I said, what are you studying?

00:34:22.000 She said, anthropology.

00:34:23.000 I asked her about that.

00:34:23.000 I asked her about her family, found out there was a lot of estrangement in her family.

00:34:28.000 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.

00:34:35.000 This was a woman who was broken in her heart, broken in her relationships and estranged.

00:34:40.000 20 minutes, she's supposed to ask me questions.

00:34:43.000 She hasn't asked me a single question.

00:34:44.000 I've got 20 minutes.

00:34:45.000 I know her life and I know where her hurting is.

00:34:49.000 And I know where the target is for the gospel.

00:34:51.000 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.

00:35:03.000 She goes through her questions, asks me what she wants to ask, and I said, what were you sent here to tell me?

00:35:07.000 I said, Allegra, the God of the universe knows you and he loves you.

00:35:15.000 Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.

00:35:19.000 Sometimes you have to say it three times for it to sink through.

00:35:22.000 I said, Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.

00:35:25.000 And she bursts into loud sobs and she says to me, but I've done so many bad things with my life.

00:35:31.000 And I could tell her, God forgave her and loved her.

00:35:34.000 Doctor, thank you so much.

00:35:35.000 We'll have you on again soon.

00:35:36.000 God bless you.

00:35:37.000 Thank you.

00:35:38.000 Bye.

00:35:41.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:43.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:46.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

00:35:51.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 06, 2023

The Immortal C.S. Lewis with Dr. Jerry Root

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