C. S. Lewis’s Aeneid
During the early 1960s, the Christian Century published a series of answers by prominent authors to the question, "What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?" The June 6, 1962, issue featured advice columnist Ann Landers, who provided an impressively erudite list, and C. S. Lewis.
Lewis's list holds much interest, but few surprises. George MacDonald's Phantastes and G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, the two Christian books that captivated Lewis at the height of his skeptical period, receive top billing, followed closely by the great English poems of vocation, Herbert's The Temple and Wordsworth's The Prelude. Other books on the list are The Consolation of Philosophy, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Charles Williams's Descent into Hell, Arthur Balfour's Theism and Humanism and Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (a sure defense against mistaking Aslan for a tame lion).
Notably, all but one of the books Lewis mentions are Christian. The one exception, the one permanent debt he records to a pre-Christian book, is Virgil's Aeneid, the epic poem in which the Trojan Aeneas, lacerated by war and Juno's wrath, travels to Italy under divine summons and lays the foundation of Rome. Long before Lewis became a Christian, the Aeneid acted upon him almost as a Christian epic; long after he became a Christian, the Aeneid remained central to his understanding of vocation. Lewis's debt to the Aeneid, already evident from his discussion of the epic in A Preface to Paradise Lost, is now more clear than ever, thanks to the publication this spring by Yale University Press of Lewis's "lost" Aeneid translation, skillfully reconstructed by classicist A. T. Reyes.
