The second factor for us to consider in assessing the erudition of C.S. Lewis is his access to massive collections of books. Did it give him an unusual advantage over other bibliophiles and geniuses? The answer is important to this exploration.
Because Lewis spent most of his life at Oxford and then Cambridge University, it may seem rather obvious that he had no problem getting hold of virtually any book he needed for his research or pleasure. But haven’t others had similar access to university libraries? If so, why is this one of the twelve factors?
There are three questions here. The first question is this: Did Lewis have greater access to books than anyone else in history? The answer to that is: YES (qualified by the second question). Relative to anyone born before the middle of the 19th century, it is reasonable to believe Lewis had far greater access to massive collections of books. The simple truth is that books were not nearly as accessible to Lewis’ predecessors. Libraries were fewer in number, and the collections much smaller–moreover, the further back you go in history, the more pronounced the gap.
Socrates and Solomon are (arguably) the wisest persons in history, but in their day books (as we know them) did not exist. Scrolls, parchments and hand-copied manuscripts were rare and exceedingly expensive. The same holds true for Confucius, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Al-Jazari, Thomas Aquinas and Copernicus (who died only a few years before the invention of the printing press).
This limitation also applies to more recent scholars, including Leonardo da Vinci (born two years after Gutenberg’s invention), Desiderius Erasmus, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Emanuel Swedenborg, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Certainly, these geniuses were great scholars and profound thinkers. But were they “erudite”? Perhaps they were well-read in the context of the limited libraries of their day but compared to Lewis and other profuse modern readers (where “literary learning” is the benchmark) they were dilettantes.
Advantage Lewis.
The second question is this: Did Lewis have greater access to books than his contemporaries? I am thinking here of G.K. Chesterton, Mortimer Adler and Umberto Eco. These three are, in my mind, credible candidates for the designation “most erudite person in history.”
Here the answer is: NO. To be sure, C.S. Lewis lived during a time when books were widely accessible. Moreover, he lived at a time when the world’s base of knowledge was not corrupted by the untruths and intellectual garbage found on the Internet. Nor was Lewis distracted by the television. But the same can also be said about G.K. Chesterton (1874 to 1936), and perhaps even Mortimer Adler (1902 to 2001). Umberto Eco (1932 to 2016) perhaps not so much.
The truth is that Lewis’ access to books might not have been all that great a differentiator relative to these three erudite geniuses (or others from the 20th century). G.K. Chesterton lived in London where he had easy access to the British Library, the largest library in England, and countless other London-based academic and Parliamentary collections. It is thought that he was a profuse reader, and he certainly had access to the same sort of massive collections as Lewis. So, for me to suggest that Lewis had access to larger collections than Chesterton would not sustain scrutiny.
Mortimer Adler lived most of his life in New York and Chicago. So he, too, had unfettered access to several of America’s largest and most magnificent libraries. Adler also taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago–great academic institutions with noteworthy collections. And if that alone were not sufficient reason to consider his candidacy, Adler was Chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica for more than 20 years. Here again, for me to posit that Lewis had an advantage in access to books over Mortimer Adler would be foolish.
The same is likely true for Umberto Eco. He is renowned for his erudition (indeed, it is his “brand”), and though he lived most of his years in Bologna, Italy, he was far more widely traveled than Lewis or Chesterton. Eco’s academic home base was the University of Bologna, but he served multiple stints as visiting professor at Oxford and Harvard, and also at Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, NYU and Indiana University. It is also reported that Umberto Eco owned 50,000 books in two personal collections, although he confessed, he had not read most of them. (Apparently, Eco had them available to support his research, that’s my excuse for owning uncracked books too). Certainly, Lewis had no real advantage over Umberto Eco in gaining access to books to support his research.
Advantage: none.
The third, and most important question is this: Did C.S. Lewis have greater access to books at an early age? Here, I think the answer is: PROBABLY. I believe it is instructive to consider the progression of Lewis’ intellectual development over the course of his life.
Consider the following collections:
- Little Lea 2,500 books
- Kirkpatrick’s 1,500 books
- Personal (in his rooms) 3,000 books
- Personal (at the Kiln’s) 3,000 books
- Bodleian Library 13,300,000 books (at present)
- Magdalen College 500,000 books (rough estimate)
- Cambridge Library 9,000,000 books (at present)
- Pepys’ Library 3,000 books (willed by Pepys)
Over the years from his childhood (in 1905) till his final years, Lewis had access to books, books and more books. It is true that during the student and adult phases of his life Lewis had unfettered access to books. But again, so too did Chesterton, Adler and Eco. What is differentiating here is not that Lewis had unrestrained access to The Bodleian Library, or the Magdalen College Library, or the Samuel Pepys Library. What is important from this list of eight collections is the first two, and especially the first one. How so?
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis described Kirkpatrick’s cottage as “filled with books.” One cannot doubt that the Great Knock had tasked Lewis with reading many, if not most, of the (estimated) 2,000 books during their one-on-one tutelage sessions over nearly three years.
Still, I believe the most important library in Lewis’ life was the one owned by his father, Albert, and his mother, Flora, and housed in his childhood home known as Little Lea in Belmont, a suburb of Belfast. How many children at Lewis’ young age of seven had access to a house so full of books? In Surprised by Joy, Lewis said this about Little Lea:
“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also of endless books. My father bought all the books he read, and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the dining room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds. Reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”
This happened at an age when young Jacksie Lewis would not only develop a great love of books but would also learn how to read them . . . and read at an amazing speed (more on that in the next post).
Advantage: Lewis?
Is it possible that C.S. Lewis had read several thousand books before Chesterton, Adler and Eco even got ramped up? That we cannot say for sure, but I think it is plausible.
Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
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