With the prior post, I have completed my case for C.S. Lewis being the “most erudite person in history.” Now I move on to determining who among the nominated candidates best represents that distinction.
This post is the first round of the “playoffs.” Please forgive the sports metaphor. I grew up in Indiana and my father was a member of Indiana University’s 1940 NCAA Championship team. Basketball is in my DNA.
My Premise Repeated
Three months ago, I posited a premise that C.S. Lewis might be the “most erudite person in history.” My question to you is this:
Do you agree that this premise is plausible?
I am not asking whether you believe I have proved my premise to be true, for that is not possible. This is not a scholarly work. It was never my mission to “solve the unsolvable riddle”. I concede that I have not attempted to determine who truly is the “most erudite person in history.” I am more like the attorney who is simply trying to prove something about his client.
I have expended little effort to build a comprehensive list of candidates. I have nominated one other candidate, Mortimer Adler. Moreover, I have encouraged my readers to make suggestions, and some of you have. But no one went so far as to present a case for their candidate, nor did I anticipate that they would. I have no permission to assign such an arduous task to my readers.
This is my issue. I raised the question, and it is “on me” to provide an answer. In the end, you may not agree with my conclusion, or even that my posited premise merits an answer. But there is method to my madness. At a minimum, my purpose has been to entertain, perhaps even edify, my readers. Beyond that, I do have a deeper agenda–one that transcends mere intellectual diversion. It is an aspiration, perhaps an overzealous one, which will be revealed in my final post in this series.
I have endeavored to present a reasonably complete case for Lewis’ candidacy. This includes a broad set of parameters for the assessment, followed by individual posts where I appraised C.S. Lewis’ credentials on each one. Perhaps my degree of success varied by parameter. I only hope you might agree that I “nailed down” the big ones.
But to be clear, I have not expended much effort to build a case for any other candidate—not even Mortimer Adler, whom I nominated.
The Candidates
Throughout this series, I asked for input from my readers as to who they think might also have valid credentials. Some of my readers did, in fact, suggest nominees.
I defined this query from the beginning as being about “erudition”— meaning profundity of wisdom or learning derived from extensive reading of literary works. It is not about IQ. Nor is it about wisdom, creativity, innovation, or any other dimension of genius. C.S. Lewis truly was “a great genius,” there are people who better fit those specific categories than does Lewis. How so?
To start, C.S. Lewis’ IQ was never (to my knowledge) measured. Nor has anyone even speculated upon his IQ as the creators of the “Stanford-Binet IQ test did in ranking three people as tied for #1 on the list of the most brilliant people in history: Johann W. von Goethe, John Stuart Mill, and Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Lewis was wise, but not wiser than Socrates or Solomon. Lewis was creative, but not more creative than Bach or Beethoven. (As an orchestral music lover, it is interesting to note that nearly all artists listed among the greatest geniuses ever were composers.) Lewis was clever, but not more innovative than Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison.
However, C.S. Lewis was, in my humble opinion, more erudite that any person in history. To that end, I have focused solely upon the “genius of erudition,” and even that narrow category is impossible to ascertain with verity.
The Candidates
At present, there are ten candidates on my list for consideration. This includes (in chronological order):
- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
- John Milton (1608-1674)
- Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
- Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)
- Umberto Eco (1932-2016)
Of these, I know nothing of Gottfried Leibniz. This German polymath was primarily a mathematician and scientist. Since these are not of interest to me, he does not hit my “radar screen”. I suspect Lewis might also have been “light on his Leibniz.”
Regrettably, I am mired in unknowingness when it comes to Samuel Johnson and John Milton. To be sure, I am aware that Lewis holds both writers in particularly high regard, but I have not yet cracked the books of either. (Amazon recently released a Kindle book and an audiobook version of Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost, so I hope to make progress on John Milton soon.)
I am, of course, quite familiar with Thomas Jefferson, not only from history books about the Founding Fathers, but also classes on American history, television documentaries and family visits to Monticello in Charlottesville.
I have expended no energy to ascertain his relative “erudition,” I only know that in 1814, when the U.S. Library of Congress was torched by the British, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library of approximately 6,000 books (said to be the largest personal library in the United States) to the LOC. This is comparable in size to C.S. Lewis’ personal collection. But since Jefferson had not yet founded the University of Virginia (1819), he had no local access to a world-class library as is true with Lewis and The Bodleian.
In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, the host, President John F. Kennedy said:
“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
I consider Winston Churchill to be one of my two most admired heroes, along with George Washington. (One changed the world, the other saved it.) But Churchill’s biographies are very long, thus it is Ken Burns PBS documentaries for me.
I am unfamiliar with the writings of Umberto Eco, the Italian medievalist, philosopher, and cultural critic. He warrants reading, but I have fallen short on this.
I am reasonably well versed in the works of G.K. Chesterton and Mortimer Adler. But I know C.S. Lewis (far and away) the best.
I am sure the names of other worthy candidates will yet come to light in the days following this post . . . but, to reiterate, this series is about advocating C.S. Lewis’ astonishing credentials, not searching for that one irrefutable “bibliophile extraordinaire”.
With Umberto Eco’s passing in 2016, all my candidates are now members in the “Man of Letters Chapter Eternal”. There are no living candidates on the list.
So, who among the living am I missing? Steven Hawking? Steven Pinker? Noam Chomsky? Peter Singer? Richard Dawkins? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sam Harris? Michael Shermer? James “The Amazing” Randi?
These are bright people, to be sure, but they are all atheists. In light of their wrong-headed answers to the single most important question in life, they are all summarily dismissed. (This is a voucher I get to cash as series author.)
Marilyn vos Savant? Once identified as the person with the highest tested IQ in the world (228 on the Stanford-Binet test), she was later downgraded to a score of 186 (pfft!). Whatever her IQ, her most compelling accomplishment is earning a living writing the weekly “Ask Marilyn” article in Parade Magazine. She’s out.
Lastly, there is Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame? He is the highest-earning game show contestant in history (with $4,522,700). There can be no doubting that he has read a great many books. But has he done anything useful with all that knowledge rolling around in his head? I think not. He’s out, too. (/sarc, off)
Seriously, If I were to speculate on which living person is most erudite today, I would have two candidates to suggest:
- Jordan B. Peterson
- Vishal Mangalwadi
Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, author, and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Peterson gained fame by refusing to bow to Canada’s “compelled speech” gender-identity pronoun laws. I think of Peterson as similar to C.S. Lewis in the breadth and depth of his wisdom. Peterson has conducted many interviews on YouTube on a wide range of topics with other profound thinkers—believers and unbelievers alike.
More than any other public intellectual today, Peterson is connecting with the younger generation, especially young men. By any measure, Jordan Peterson is “public enemy #1” to Progressives across the world. He is, in my opinion, the wisest person in the West today.
Vishal Mangalwadi is an Indian philosopher, social reformer, author and itinerant lecturer widely regarded as India’s foremost Christian intellectual. He has authored many books, most notably The Book That Made Your World, released in 2011 and This Book Changed Everything, released in 2019.
Vishal is an uncapped fire hydrant of knowledge not only about India, but also about Western history and culture, Christian theology and philosophy. His last two books on the impact of the Holy Bible on Western civilization (Luther, in particular) should be read by all Christians.
In the spirit of full disclosure, Vishal is a dear friend with whom I worked closely in 2011 to review and suggest edits to his BTMYW book, and to host his the “premier” of this book at a large forum in Atlanta in 2011. Vishal is a member of the Board of Trustees of the C.S. Lewis Foundation.
(Recently Dr. Peterson hosted Dr. Mangalwadi on his YouTube channel. It is an \interesting discussion.)
Because I know these two men primarily as wise people and have no insight into their reading practices, I have decided not to include them in my list of candidates.
Culling the Field
This series is about “erudition”, not raw genius. In turn, “erudition” is about knowledge gained from reading books that quality as literature. Because of this rather delimiting criterion, all those great thinkers whose lives were lived prior to the invention of the printing press in 1544 are “washed out,” if only because there were so few books to read in their day. This would have excluded such geniuses as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, had they made the list. It does exclude Blaise Pascal, who did make the list.
Realistically, it is doubtful that anyone who lived out their life prior to the turn of the 20thcentury would have had access to well-stocked libraries. That phenomenon is mostly a 20th century thing. This effectively rules out Thomas Jefferson, for surely there were no “world-class” libraries in America during his years. Sadly, this criterion also casts shade on the credentials of John Milton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Samuel Johnson.
Winston Churchill was truly a great man, a personal hero and a prolific writer. His History of the English-Speaking Peoples and The Second World War are highly regarded works. But I think he was too busy saving England AND the world to keep up with his reading.
With that, we are now down to four, including:
- Mortimer J Adler
- G.K. Chesterton
- Umberto Eco
- C.S. Lewis
All these men lived out their lives primarily in the 20th century. All had access to world-class libraries. All were great thinkers. All were prodigious writers. And all are worthy candidates for “most erudite person in history.”
ON TO THE FINAL FOUR!
Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29
Erudition Series Index
