CCC Gainesville | Blog
Three Great Men Died That Day:
C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and JFK
Fifty years ago, three great men died within a few hours of each other: C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. In 1982, philosophy professor Peter Kreeft imagined the three of them in conversation after their deaths.
Positioning Lewis as a proponent of ancient Western theism, Kennedy as a modern Western humanist, and Huxley as an ancient Eastern pantheist, Kreeft wrote a conversational book entitled Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley.
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One of the Reasons C.S. Lewis Remains So Widely Read 50 Years after His Death, ByJohn Piper:
Lewis’s unwavering commitment to what is True and Real and Valuable, as opposed to what is trendy or fashionable or current, has been another kind of liberation for me, namely, from “chronological snobbery.” He loved the wisdom of the ages, not the whimsy of the passing present. He called himself a Neanderthaler and a dinosaur.
He didn’t read newspapers.
He never wore a watch.
He never learned to type.
He did not own or drive a car.
He cared nothing about cutting a good appearance and wore the same old clothes until they were threadbare.
He was incredibly free from the addicting powers of the present moment.
The effect of this on me has been to make me wary of what he called “chronological snobbery.” That is, he has shown me that “newness” is no virtue, and “oldness” is no fault. He considered the present time to be provincial with its own blind spots. He said once: every third book you read should be from outside your own (provincial) century. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the centuries.
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