The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, by Jason Baxter

Book Review, #2

**This review was first published in the fall 2022 issue of Seed & Harvest magazine.

Jason Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove, Il, 2022), 166 pages.

C.S. Lewis once remarked that The Abolition of Man was, among all the books he had written, his personal favorite. It is a book of moral philosophy, and to the novice, it can be difficult to understand. However, The Abolition is also the most pessimistic and prophetic of all Lewis’s works. In its three chapters, he warns that the moral and intellectual relativism gripping Western culture will have dire consequences, and his warnings have come true with remarkable accuracy. The continuing relevance of The Abolition of Man is, therefore, its clear diagnosis of our current cultural sickness. For this reason, we should be grateful for Jason Baxter’s recent attempt to explain the books and ideas that shaped C.S. Lewis’s own mind, including the ideas found in The Abolition. 

What Baxter shows us is that, at the heart of C.S. Lewis's entire corpus lay the conviction that definitive Truth has been revealed in Jesus Christ and that the Christian life is a matter of being conformed to God and God’s Truth, in and through Jesus Christ. Lewis, in other words, was a Christian realist. He believed not only in God’s reality itself but in the human ability to apprehend, embrace, be assimilated to, and communicate that reality to other people. Although we can never master this Truth, we can and must be willingly mastered by it.

Although The Abolition of Man is purely philosophical, it was motivated by Lewis’s concern that too many people in the Western world have given up on the idea of absolute truth and embraced moral relativism.  This little book by Jason Baxter provides an accessible and beautiful investigation into the ancient and medieval sources of Christian realism that Lewis’s many works, and especially The Abolition seek to retrieve. From Boethius to Dante to Nicholas of Cusa, Baxter explains Lewis’s dependance on some of the greatest minds of the Christian tradition, and in the process, he gives the reader a better appreciation for the deep and compelling Christian consensus running down through the ages. Moreover, during this time of deep uncertainty and confusion, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis assures us of our own ability to know and embrace the goodness, truth, and beauty of God, which are given to us in Jesus Christ.