Editor’s note: Below is the definitive take-down of the idea that C.S. Lewis said that “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” In recent years, the attribution has taken on a life of it’s own and it is our hope to clear Lewis’s name of it.
I am grateful to Hannah Peckham for doing such an excellent job writing this. You should follow her tumblr, because it’s one of the best, and on Twitter too.
In the nearly fifty years since C.S. Lewis’ death, his writing has profoundly influenced the way many Christians understand their faith. In an odd twist, however, one of his most famous quotations is not even his.
The statement “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body” makes the rounds, in a seemingly cyclical pattern, on the internet and in print. John Piper tweeted it last year; Ravi Zacharias included the quotation in at least one of his books. It can also be found in several New Age handbooks, a guide for psychics, and a devotional for fathers. This pithy summation of the distinction between body and soul is almost exclusively attributed to Lewis, although a few recent authors baldly claim it as their own.
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