by Mike Gray

For the author of the Narnia series of stories, “The Great Knock” wasn’t a thing but a person. Historian Lyle W. Dorsett, writing in his The Essential C. S. Lewis, explains:

Young C. S. Lewis was not only separated from his brother for long intervals of time after 1910, he never developed a close relationship with his father. The widower never sufficiently recovered from his grief to be a close companion or guide. A significant change took place in Lewis’s life in autumn 1914. In September he was sent to Great Bookham, Surrey, in southern England, for tutoring by a brilliant former headmaster and family friend, William T. Kirkpatrick. “The Great Knock,” as the Lewises dubbed Kirkpatrick, became a father substitute for the bright young pupil, thereby giving him a role model and stability over the next three years. Lewis lived in the Kirkpatrick home, where Mrs. Kirkpatrick fed him and “The Great Knock” introduced him to the classics in Greek, Latin, and Italian literature. Young Jack Lewis also made a start in German. Kirkpatrick not only pushed the teenaged Ulster lad to read great literature in the original languages, he taught him to think critically and analytically as well as how to express himself logically and clearly.

[However] “The Great Knock” taught C. S. Lewis more than how to think and read intelligently. An atheist, rationalist, and pessimist, the retired schoolmaster reinforced his pupil’s already well-formed disdain for people who could believe in the existence and goodness of God without palpable evidence. Truth, as C. S. Lewis learned, is eminently worth pursuing. But the teaching he received insisted that the pathway to truth came only through reason.

Kirkpatrick’s teachings left permanent marks on C. S. Lewis. The writer’s clear language, careful thoughts, meticulous logic, and persuasive evidence reflect the old teacher’s care in developing a brilliant young mind.

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalled his old teacher:

Having said that he was an Atheist, I hasten to add that he was a “Rationalist” of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type. For Atheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itself with politics and learned to dabble in dirt.

Both The Essential C. S. Lewis and Surprised by Joy are available at Amazon.com.