A few days ago, I “officially” launched an informal discourse hosted by the C.S. Lewis Forum to address this question:
“Is C.S. Lewis the most erudite person who ever lived.”
Over the next several weeks I will post a series of thoughts (with supporting graphics) designed to (1) trigger interest in the question and (2) promote active engagement in the dialogue.
Of course, there is no way to produce absolute and undeniable proof that this proposition is true. I cannot prove my premise to be true, any more than any naysayer can prove it to be false. It is mere speculation on my part. This limitation is evident to anyone who is dialed in on this beguiling conjecture. Nonetheless, my intention is to present a case for Lewis that might seem plausible to people who know his life and writings well. If nothing else, we can have a bit of fun and engage in communal dialogue on a subject we all love: C.S. Lewis.
By way of background, I have frequently used this speculation when I teach my courses on Lewis. I do this to promote a sense of wonder among my hearers about this great man. To be sure, it makes Lewis’ intellectual prowess in leading the Socratic Club all that much more amusing. If true, imagine the plight of those Oxford skeptics who mustered sufficient courage to enter the arena with Lewis. I doubt there were many who ventured into that fire a second time.
Whether or not this hypothesis is provable does not really matter. I believe it is plausible, and I hope some of you may come to share that belief. Not definitively provable, but plausible. To that end, I am keenly interested in your thoughts on this.
So, let’s proceed.
The first step is to define the word “erudition”. The undergirding assumption of the question is that C.S. Lewis was a genius. I don’t anticipate anyone in the Forum will have a problem with that. But the deeper issue is this: What kind of genius was he? I propose that Lewis is the reigning champion in the “genius of erudition.” Of course, I could be wrong.
The image that I used to introduce this question depicts five different kinds of genius:
1) Wisdom, or sagaciousness . . . Socrates or Solomon?
2) Artistic talent, or creativity . . . Beethoven or Bach?
3) Innovation, or inventiveness . . . Tesla or Edison?
4) Intelligence, or brilliance (as in IQ) . . . Einstein or von Goethe?
5) Erudition, or learnedness . . . C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton?
The graphic is designed to justify “erudition” as a category of genius, alongside four others. I suspect there are more than five categories of genius, perhaps many more, but completing that list is not our task.
To begin, I would ask that everyone review the graphic to validate their framework for “erudition” and especially how it differs from “wisdom” and “intelligence”. This definition is crucial for a number of reasons, but the most salient is the fact that “being erudite” can easily be confused with “being wise” and “being smart.” They may overlap but they are not the same. C.S. Lewis was, of course, all three.
Erudite people can be wise and/or blessed with high IQs. But erudite people sometimes lack common sense and they might even be intellectual plodders. Thus, the most erudite people in history may not have been especially wise or brilliant. Moreover, we all know people who seem to have high-speed CPUs in their noggin, but little to no accurate data on their “hard drive.” The distinction is paramount.
So, we turn to the dictionary for instruction. Actually, I reviewed at least a dozen dictionaries on my iPad, plus several on-line thesauruses and encyclopedias. The gist is summarized on the graphic.
The main thing is this: “erudition” is literary learnedness that is acquired by reading books. To acquire great knowledge through primary research in a laboratory is noble, and it is quite likely that scientists and mathematicians may produce greater contributions to humanity than “bookish” people, but primary laboratory research is not learning though literature. In truth, the vast majority of research is secondary in nature (another person does it, I read about it later).
Not everyone will like this definition. It seems confining. But it also seems credible to me that “literary learning” relates to certain fields more than others–great literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, and religion. To be “erudite” means to have great stores of information about these fields– math and science not so much.
I have a simple test that may be silly, but it works for me. If I were having serious problems in life–moral, physiological, spiritual or financial–who would I turn to for counsel? A wise person? Certainly. An erudite person? Absolutely. A mathematician or scientist? Probably not.
Erudition means not just having once read some book or taken some course at university. Much of that we mere mortals have long since forgotten. Erudition means meaningful information that was intellectually processed and stored in the brain (or imagination), fully comprehended and with total recall.
There are implications of this specific definition. For example, Socrates may have been the wisest person who ever lived, but he read relatively few books. Socrates lived nearly 1,900 years before Gutenberg, and he died 115 years before the founding of the Great Library at Alexandria. There were simply very few books in his era–and thus no way for Socrates to be the “most erudite” person in history. The same is true for Solomon, Aristotle, and Aquinas. In truth, this problem of limited access to literature is true for nearly anyone who lived before the 19th century. Abraham Lincoln was very wise, but almost no one had any books in their homes in his day, other than the Holy Bible.
Beethoven and Bach were indisputable geniuses, but neither is thought of as being “erudite”. They might have been the two greatest “creative geniuses” (certainly among musicians) who ever lived, but I doubt very much that they learned about music theory from books.
This may seem an overly confining definition, but such precision is essential to address the question posed:
“Is C.S. Lewis the most erudite person who ever lived?”
So, let’s proceed.
Please note: I will be posting entries on the C.S. Lewis Forum at a faster rate than on other CSL Facebook groups. If you want to keep pace, please consider joining the C.S. Lewis Forum.
Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Erudition Series Index
