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C. S. Lewis was a scholar and professor who became one of the premier lay theologians of the 20th century. He chose to communicate the truths of Christian faith both in essays and in fiction writing, with powerful effects that have resonated into the 21st century.

Lewis's friend Charles Williams, arguably the linchpin of the "Inklings" literary circle to which Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others belonged, also wrote both essays and imaginative literature with a deeply Christian message.

Dorothy Sayers, detective novelist, playwright, and essayist, corresponded with both Lewis and Williams. And she developed her own powerful Christian apologetic, which she also expressed in both nonfiction and fiction.

These three "literary Brits" shared more than a lively Christian faith, the writing of imaginative literature, and a strong mutual regard. Together they launched a holy war on their era's scientific materialism and the spiritual declension that accompanied it. Each lifted up in their writings a rich, world-embracing Christian vision against the grey deadness of secularization. For each, this was a life-and-death battle, with the future of the Western world hanging in the balance. They saw their age's new creed of hard-nosed scientific pragmatism draining the world of spirit and meaning—indeed, as Lewis put it, threatening to tear out of us our very hearts, abolishing humanity itself.

In that precarious moment of Western history, on the war-torn front of secularization, Lewis, Williams, and Sayers took cues from the venerable four-star general of 20th-century Christian literary antimodernism, journalist and amateur medievalist G. K. Chesterton. To be precise, although they never came to share Chesterton's Roman Catholic faith, Lewis, Williams, and Sayers took a very "Chestertonian" approach to their own antimodern campaign: they turned for help to the pulsating, faith-filled energy of the medieval worldview.

This was hardly historical dilettantism. Each of the three was a professional medievalist with an Oxford University connection. Lewis was an Oxford (and later Cambridge) professor of medieval and renaissance literature whose imaginative works similarly marinated in the medieval. Williams was a polymath editor at Oxford University Press and sometime lecturer on Milton who dwelt long and lovingly on medieval themes in his poetry, plays, and novels. And Sayers did her graduate work at Oxford in medieval French and found time between writing detective novels and translating Dante's Divine Comedy to publish translations of other medieval works.

Nor was their Chestertonian medievalism slavish. That jovial Catholic had looked to such figures as Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, and to a medieval-guild-based economic vision of homesteading and small crafts. But Lewis, Williams, and Sayers found their inspiration in a medieval source that Chesterton had left largely unmined. Litterateurs all, they sat together at the feet of a different medieval master: the great 13th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Interestingly, while the three Oxonians joined in loving Dante, they could hardly have been more varied in their devotion. Each found in the great Florentine poet a distinctive tonic for the ills of modernity.

For Lewis it was Dante's vivid rendering of the medieval cosmology—the "Discarded Image" of a pre-scientific age—that captivated him, transposing his own worldview into a more spiritual key. In the planetary spheres of Dante's Ptolemaic universe Lewis found, not accurate science, but a vividly sacramental sense of the aliveness of all things, to be treasured in the face of much that was deadening in modernity. Lewis fell in love with the living cosmos and the individuality of the planets themselves, rooted in Pagan mythology but thoroughly Christianized by medieval authors. "The characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology," he said, "seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols."

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