C.S. Lewis as Historian of Religion

Common Places

A lecture with Q&A given by Davenant Residential Teaching Fellow, Dr. Joseph Minich, entitled "C.S. Lewis as Historian of Religion." C.S. Lewis wore many hats: children’s author, Christian apologist, literary scholar. But can he be read as a theorist of the history of religion? And can reconstructing his theoretical history speak into contemporary controversies about the doctrine of God? By putting Lewis in conversation with some of his major influences (e.g. Owen Barfield) and by reading his fiction (Narnia, The Ransom Trilogy, Till We Have Faces) in conversation with several didactic works (especially Miracles), this lecture argues that we can in fact infer an implicit “history of religion” in Lewis that reconstructs religious knowing from the time of Adam, to the Ancient Near East, to the dawn of philosophical thought. Lewis’ implicit narrative reconstruction is likewise an attempt to situate his own modern moment within that same history. And while Lewis was not unaware of the risks of the modern project, he also took its goods for granted, and anticipated their preservation into the future. This lecture, then, likewise covers Lewis’ anticipation concerning the possible future of religion. Moreover, one might read Lewis’ own intellectual project is an attempt to enact a certain possible future, to publicly gesture man (through the renewal of an atrophied imagination) toward the telos of Christ, who is the human destiny. Joseph Minich (Ph.D, The University of Texas at Dallas) is a Residential Teaching Fellow at The Davenant Institute in Landrum, South Carolina. He is the author of Enduring Divine Absence (Davenant Press, 2017) and Bulwarks of Unbelief (Lexham Press, 2023), the editor of several works with The Davenant Press, as well as the founding editor of Ad Fontes. He is also a host of The Pilgrim Faith Podcast.