Reflecting the Eternal (P/B)

The characters, plots, and potent language of C. S. Lewis's novels reveal everywhere the modern writer's admiration for Dante's Divine Comedy. Throughout his career Lewis drew on the structure, themes, and narrative details of Dante's medieval epic to present his characters as spiritual pilgrims growing toward God.

Dante's portrayal of sin and sanctification, of human frailty and divine revelation, are evident in all of Lewis's best work. Readers will see how a modern author can make astonishingly creative use of a predecessor's material-in this case, the way Lewis imitated and adapted medieval ideas about spiritual life for the benefit of his modern audience.

Nine chapters cover all of Lewis's novels, from Pilgrim's Regress and his science-fiction to The Chronicles of Narnia and Till We Have Faces. Readers will gain new insight into the sources of Lewis's literary imagination that represented theological and spiritual principles in his clever, compelling, humorous, and thoroughly human stories.

This book is an impressive feat of C.S. Lewis scholarship, both for its theme (the presence of the greatest Christian poetic storyteller in one of the greatest Christian prose storytellers) and for its comprehensive and complete treatment of that theme, which admirably combines clarity with profundity, accuracy in detail with "big picture" wisdom, and theological theory with moral practice.

-Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston CollegeAuthor of C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium, Between Heaven and Hell, and Back to Virtue