From "The Great Shift" to Professor Kirke: Lewis's masters and their fictional counterparts

• William T. Kirkpatrick, the logician, who may became the Professor Kirke.
• George MacDonald, the acknowledged master, guide of the narrator in The Great Divorce.
• G.K. Chesterton, whose reasoning appears in The Fundamentals of Christianity.
• Plato, cited by Kirke: « Everything is in Plato! »

This article completes « Lewis's Sources of Inspiration » (section Understanding), dedicated to the sources of Narnia, and « Lewis's Favorite Reads ». Here we look for where the masters of his thought reappeared in his fiction.

William T. Kirkpatrick, « The Great Knock »

The master. From 1914 to 1917, Lewis lived in Great Bookham, in Surrey, with his father's former headmaster, nicknamed « The Great Knock ». An atheist and rationalist, with an unyielding logic, Kirkpatrick would greet the teenager at the train station by pointing out something banal about the landscape: « What do you base that assertion on? » Every conversation turned into an argument. Lewis loved it. He learned to think, to read Homer in Greek, Dante in Italian.

The double. Lewis portrayed his master affectionately in Surprised by Joy, and may have given him his name: Professor Digory Kirke. When Peter and Susan come to tell him that Lucy is making up stories, the old professor responds with a reasoned argument and is surprised: « But what do they teach children at school? »

George MacDonald, the acknowledged master

The master. In March 1916, at a train station, Lewis bought a book at random: Phantastes, by the Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824–1905). He would say that this reading « baptized his imagination »: he discovered holiness without yet knowing its name. He would consider it his master for life and publish an anthology of his thoughts in 1946.

The double. MacDonald appears in person, as a guide for the narrator, in The Great Divorce. And his tales (The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie) are among the ancestors of Narnia: children, underground kingdoms, wisdom through the wonderful.

G.K. Chesterton, the story differently

The master. Wounded in 1918, Lewis read Chesterton's essays in the hospital and found them funny and good, without adhering to his faith. Around 1925–1926, The Everlasting Man showed him for the first time a Christian vision of history that « made sense. » He would count it among the books that most marked him.

The double. We find in The Fundamentals of Christianity the famous reasoning that Jesus cannot be merely a « great moralist, » already outlined by Chesterton.

Ancients and their echoes

• Plato, for the idea that the visible world is the shadow of a more real world. Echo: Professor Kirke exclaims in The Last Battle: « Everything is in Plato! », when the children discover a Narnia truer than the old one.
• Boethius, Roman philosopher of the 6th century, whose The Consolation of Philosophy accompanied Lewis throughout his life, and is found in The Discarded Image.
• Dante, for the ordered cosmos and the journey toward the light. Echo: the populated heavens of the cosmic trilogy and the living stars of Narnia.
• Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, his favorite poet, one of the leading experts on him. Echo: the chivalry of Narnia.
• Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century moralist, for his common sense and frankness.
• Saint Augustine, and that heart « without rest » which announces « Joy. »

Friends as masters

Owen Barfield, who demolished his materialism; Tolkien, who showed him that myth can be true; Charles Williams, who made him feel the presence of the invisible. Each has his own page in this section.

The lesson from the masters

Lewis advised reading at least one old book for every three new ones, because every age has its blind spots and only old books allow us to see our own. By slipping his masters into his novels, he made millions of children read a bit of Plato and MacDonald, without suspecting it.

See also

• Les sources d'inspiration de Lewis
• Lewis's Favorite Reads
• The Great Divorce
• Surprised by Joy
• The Fundamentals of Christianity
• L'Image du monde
• Arthur Greeves and Owen Barfield: the two friendships that shaped Lewis
• A Lion in the English Pasture: Charles Williams, the Invisible at the Inklings' Table
• J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
• Digory Kirke