On
November 22, 1963, within the span of several hours, three well-known men died:
President John F. Kennedy, English author Aldous Huxley, and Christian scholar
C. S. Lewis.[1] Due
to the tragic assassination of the President of the United States in Dallas,
Texas, Lewis’ passing went relatively unnoticed. C. S. Lewis likely would have
appreciated the quiet and unassuming way that he slipped into glory.
C. S. Lewis was an author, an apologist, a
brother, a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature, a poet, a
philosopher, an Oxford don, a Cambridge professor, a loving husband, and a
professing atheist who became a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. Lewis deeply
loved language, and spent his lifetime in the honest and sometimes painful
pursuit of truth. Clyde Kilby recalls his initial impression of Lewis when he
first read one of his books:
I discovered a writer who like
a philosopher claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, yet who
with the humblest Christian gave that life a Living Center. My impression was
of a man who had won, inside and deep, a battle against pose, evasion,
expedience, and the ever-so-little lie and who wished with all his heart to
honor truth in every idea passing through his mind. And now, some forty books
later, I have no reason to change my basic impression of the man.[2]
Could it be this fundamental
honesty that makes Lewis’ writings so accessible, though the majority of his
books have dealt with deeply meaningful and challenging subject matter? James
Como comments on this seeming paradox in Lewis, a scholarly genius whose
literary output has been embraced and understood by millions of readers across
the cultural spectrum:
Possessed of a highly nuanced,
as well as an astonishingly well-furnished intellect, a religious faith devoid
of anything remotely facile, rhetorical gifts arguably unmatched in this
century in their adroitness and versatility, inexhaustible powers of invention,
and a will to deploy all of these, C. S. Lewis is a far more complex and
sophisticated figure than the ease of his style and popularity of his work
suggest.[3]
What follows is a brief
biography of Lewis’ life and an abbreviated overview of his major works, with a
generous sprinkling of his own words along the way. While the life and person
of C. S. Lewis is far too complex to capture in a post of this length, it is
hoped that the reader would catch a glimpse of this many-sided scholar whom God
led to become arguably the most significant Christian writer of his century.
Then perhaps one might be encouraged to delve more deeply into the writings of
this remarkable man, and to ultimately allow Lewis to speak for himself.
A Brief and Selective Biography
“I was born in the winter of
1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor and of a clergyman’s daughter.”[4] So
begins Surprised By Joy,
the autobiography of C. S. Lewis. In the book’s preface, we get a refreshingly
candid glimpse of the author’s humility as he warns his readers of what is to
follow: “I have tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear
such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the
least waste of time.”[5]
Childhood
Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast,
Ireland. This was prior to the 1922 partitioning of the country into the
Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and though Belfast was primarily a
Protestant city, at the time of Lewis’ birth there remained a considerable
population of Roman Catholics.[6] His
father was Albert James Lewis, a police court solicitor, who was educated at
Lurgan College (1877-1879) under the headmaster William T. Kirkpatrick, who
would eventually tutor both of Albert’s sons. Lewis’ mother was Florence
Augusta ‘Flora’ Hamilton, the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Hamilton. She was
well educated, having earned degrees in both mathematics and logic from Queen’s
College.[7] Clive
was Albert and Flora’s second child, having followed Warren ‘Warnie’ Lewis, who
was born in 1895.[8] “The
other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, he never seemed to
be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates, from the first.
Yet we were very different.”[9] With
good Christian parents and a close older brother, Lewis enjoyed what began as a
secure and happy childhood.
Clive and Staples, Lewis’ given
names, were a family legacy from his mother’s side that he despised. At the age of just
three-years-old, Lewis announced to his family that his name was now ‘Jacksie.’
It was later shortened to ‘Jack,’ and
stuck for the rest of his life.[10] Hence
the initials C. S., rather than Clive Staples, appear on most of his published
material. Literature
was an important formative influence in the young Lewis, stretching his mind
and inspiring imaginative exploration as a child:
I am a product of long
corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude,
distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the
tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never
got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing
room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the
landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern
attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’
interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books
most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy
afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.[11]
In 1907, at the age of nine, as
his family was preparing to vacation in France, Lewis demonstrated his budding
love of language with his careful and accurate use of words. He burst into his
father’s study and proclaimed, “I have a prejudice against the French.” When
his father asked him why, Lewis replied, “If I knew why it
would not be prejudice.”[12]
A few months after returning to
Ireland from their French holiday, Lewis’ mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Flora was operated upon at home, improved for a short time, but then succumbed
to the illness and died on August 23, 1908.[13] Albert
Lewis was devastated by the death of his wife. “My father never fully recovered
from this loss.”[14] Lewis
later recalled the profound effect of her death: “With my mother’s death all
settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my
life. . . It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like
Atlantis.”[15]
Education and World War I
Just a month after his mother’s
death, Lewis began a six-year odyssey through a series of four English boarding
schools, beginning with the Wynyard School and ending with Malvern College. The
results ranged from decent to disastrous, as “Lewis simply does not seem to
have fitted in to the public school culture of the Edwardian Age.”[16] While
still reeling from his wife’s passing, Albert Lewis had made what were
in hindsight some poor choices in regards to Lewis’ educational journey in
England. But his decision in the summer of 1914 to withdraw his son from
Malvern College and place him under the private tutelage of his old headmaster,
William T. Kirkpatrick, was one of his best.
Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis would
eventually nickname the “Great Knock,” was to have a profound influence on
Lewis’ mind and spirit during their two and a half years together. He was highly
educated, with an incisive mind that had little patience for small talk and
other frivolous pursuits. “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical
entity, that man was Kirk.”[17] An
avowed atheist and evolutionist, Kirkpatrick would undergird Lewis’ emerging
atheism with rational arguments against the existence of God.[18] Yet
Lewis’ ability to reason and think critically were refined and sharpened under
Kirkpatrick’s instruction. Tracking with the flow of an argument by Lewis was
later described to be “like watching a master chess player who makes a
seemingly trivial and unimportant move which ten minutes later turns out to be
a stroke of genius.”[19] For
many young men, this unrelenting logic and laser-focused discussion would have
been intolerable. But not for Lewis: “Some boys would not have liked it; to me
it was red beef and strong beer.”[20]
Halfway through his schooling
with Kirkpatrick, Lewis was waiting at a train station in Leatherhead when he
purchased Phantastes, a faerie Romance,
a fantasy novel by George MacDonald (Fantasy was a favorite literary genre of
Lewis). As he read the book, he was deeply moved. “That night, my imagination
was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took
longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for buying Phantastes.”[21] Little
did he know it at the time, but the writings of George MacDonald, a committed
Christian, had planted a seed of faith that would one day bloom in Lewis’
heart.[22]
Having completed his
instruction under the “Great Knock,” Lewis entered Oxford University at the age
of eighteen to continue his education. However, before beginning his studies,
he enlisted in the British army and sailed for France.[23] Lewis
saw horrific carnage fighting with the Somerset Light Infantry in the trenches
of the First World War. On April 14, 1918, Lewis was part of a frontal assault
on the German-held village of Riez du Vinage. Though costly, the attack was
successful. But in the enemy’s counterattack, shrapnel from a German shell that
exploded close by had wounded Lewis. The same shell had also killed British
Sergeant Harry Ayres, who had been standing next to Lewis.[24] When
he heard what had happened, Lewis’ brother Warnie was so anxious that he
borrowed a motorcycle and raced the fifty miles from Doullens to the field
hospital in Etaples.[25] He
was relived to find that Lewis’ wounds were not life threatening. After
recovering from his wounds, Lewis returned to England.
In January of 1919, Lewis
finally began his studies at Oxford. Over the next six years, Lewis excelled
academically, taking three First Class Honours, in the classics, humanities and
English literature.[26] On
October 1, 1925, at the age of twenty-six, he began serving in an official
Fellowship as a Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, a position he
had been elected to earlier that year.[27] Lewis
had established a foothold in the academic world.
Conversion
The conversion of C. S. Lewis
from settled atheist to theist, and ultimately to committed Christian, was a gradual
process that played out over several years. Building on the suffering he
experienced both at the death of his mother and in the trenches of World War I,
God was chipping away at Lewis’ philosophical atheistic convictions. Lewis came
to realize that as hard as he might try to suppress the knowledge of God, there
was much more at play than philosophical gymnastics. God was not an abstract
theory to be discussed. Rather, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was alive
and active. “As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley
of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to
stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became a
living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer.”[28] While
the books of George MacDonald were plowing the stubborn calluses that had grown
over his heart, God was also bringing fellow scholars along side of Lewis to
dismantle his intellectual objections to theism. “I made two other friends,
both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who
were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile.”[29] Finally,
Lewis could resist no longer. “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and
knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert
in all England.”[30]
World War II, Cambridge and
Marriage
During the dark days of World
War II, Lewis was asked by the British Broadcasting Corporation to give a
series of talks on the radio explaining the truths of the Christian faith.
Lewis knew his biggest challenge would be to communicate such lofty and
precious truths in a way the average person could understand. “We must learn
the language of our audience . . . you must translate every bit of your
Theology into the vernacular.”[33] Lewis
did just that, and in August of 1941 he delivered four broadcast talks on basic
Christianity, which were extraordinarily well received. Additional talks
followed and Lewis’ audience grew, as he became the “voice of faith” for
England.[34] These
broadcast talks would later be published as Mere Christianity. The name of C. S. Lewis
became well known, and he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in
1947. He now entered one of his most prolific times as a writer, producing such
varied works as The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Miracles, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and, in 1950, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.[35]
In 1955, after thirty years as
a professor at Oxford, Lewis became the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance
English at Cambridge University. On his fifty-sixth birthday, when Lewis gave
his first lecture at Cambridge, the hall was filled to capacity. In the
audience was a woman named Joy Davidman, whom Lewis would marry in a civil
ceremony in April of 1956.[36] At
this time, Lewis’ feelings for Joy were those of an extremely close friendship,
and the civil marriage was performed in order to legally allow her to remain in
England.
 |
| C.S. Lewis and his wife, Joy |
Just six months after their
secular wedding, Joy was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of cancer.
During her series of treatments and surgeries, Lewis’ friendship deepened into
love, and he joined with Joy in Christian marriage on March 21, 1957. The two
enjoyed several years together, including a belated honeymoon in Greece, when
the cancer entered a period of remission. But the disease returned and on July
13, 1960, Joy Davidman Lewis died.[37] Beside
himself with grief, Lewis entered a time of deep mourning during which he
struggled to understand God’s role in his wife’s death. His diary from this
period was later published as A Grief Observed,
perhaps the most brutally honest chronicle of a widowers’ anguish ever
produced.[38] After
being diagnosed with an enlarged prostate gland, C. S. Lewis gradually weakened
and then followed his wife into glory on November 22, 1963.
Overview of Major Works
The writings of C. S. Lewis are
indeed prodigious. Walter Hooper assembled a complete bibliography of Lewis’
writings, including his books,
short stories, essays, articles, pamphlets, poems, diaries and personal
letters. This Lewis bibliography is over eighty pages long.[39] Lewis’
collected personal letters alone account for some 3,500 pages of text.[40] While
space does not allow a complete listing of his works, it is hoped that the
following representative list will provide a sense of both the depth of thought
and the range of genres that Lewis fashioned.
Out of the Silent Planet: (1938)
The first book in Lewis’ science-fiction space trilogy, a series that which
would eventually include Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
The Problem of Pain: (1940)
“. . . we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in
our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[41]
The Screwtape Letters: (1942)
Kilby’s description: “In this witty, brilliant story Screwtape, an Under
Secretary to the High Command of Hell, writes letters of instruction and
warning to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter in charge of a young male
‘patient.’”[42]
The Abolition of Man: (1943)
Lewis comments on the public education system, expressing his deep concern that
student’s hearts are being emptied. “The operation of The Green Book (school
text) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests.”[43]
The Great Divorce: (1946)
Lewis’ chilling dream of a bus trip from hell to the outer edge of heaven, and
the souls from hell who all, save one, refuse to enter Paradise.
The Chronicles of Narnia: (1950-1956)
Lewis’ imaginative classic began in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
and was completed by six additional volumes.
Mere Christianity: (1952)
Lewis’ broadcast talks to his fellow countrymen during World War II were
originally published in three volumes, but later collected and published in one
book, which McGrath describes as “Lewis’ idea of ‘mere Christianity’ being put
into practice—a consensual, nonclerical, transdenominational vision of the
Christian faith.”[44]
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: (1929-1963)
His personal correspondence provides a valuable window into Lewis’ private
life, friendships, and contemplation. Owen Barfield remembers his longtime
friend: “For anyone who knew C. S. Lewis well, the aspect of him which is
likely to be most sharply etched in his memory is his conversation and letters.
The two were very much alike. More than any man I have ever known, he contrived
to make his private letters read like just a continuation of his
conversations.”[45]
Till We Have Faces: (1956)
Lewis’ personal favorite of all his works, a retelling of the ancient Greek
myth of Cupid and Psyche. Kilby comments on the theological depth of this book:
“Although the worship of Ungit had many evil aspects, its basic assumptions,
‘water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth,’ were correct—the
assumption that man should worship, that he is dependent on the gods for rain
and for life itself, that blood is the correct sacrifice, that one person may
have to die for all the people’s sins, and that consolation is found in the
temple.”[46]
Conclusion
In the first tale of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
Lewis poignantly describes the overwhelming grief of Susan and Lucy as they
look upon the disfigured and lifeless body of Aslan lying on the Stone Table:
“I hope that no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan
and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and
cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in
the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen
again.”[53] Observing
the profound bond between the life and literature of C. S. Lewis, Alan Jacobs
writes: “Obviously, only one whose misery had taken him to this devastated
‘quietness’ could write these sentences. Lewis had known such misery as a
child; he knew it again as a middle-aged man.”[54]
C. S. Lewis was an author and
apologist, a brother and husband, a scholar, philosopher, and poet, yet despite
his enormous genius and diversity of gifts, he lived a life that was
astonishingly consistent with his writings. Once a professing atheist, by the
grace of God Lewis became a faithful follower of Jesus Christ, and he never
forgot the deep reality
that there are only two possible destinations for each and every person we ever
meet. In an address entitled The Weight of Glory,
C. S. Lewis spoke of this eternal truth:
All day long we are, in some
degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in
the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the
circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one
another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts,
civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a
gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and
exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.[55]
[1]Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere
Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley (Downers
Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2008), 9.
[3]James Como, Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S.
Lewis (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), x.
[4]C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New
York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 1.
[16]Alister McGrath, C.
S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet, (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), 26.
[22]Alan Jacobs, The
Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 63-64.
[33]C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and
Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 96-98.
[38]Michael Ward, Planet
Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 211.
[45]Owen Barfield, Owen
Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1989), 3.
[47]C. S. Lewis, Mere
Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the
Three Books, Broadcast Talks, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality (New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 52.
[48]Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds
of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity
Press, 1994), 158-165.
[50]C. S. Lewis, Mere
Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the
Three Books, Broadcast Talks, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality,
136-137.
[51]Alister McGrath, Mere
Apologetics: How to Help Seekers & Skeptics Find Faith (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books, 2012), 112.
[53]C. S. Lewis, The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins Publishers,
2004), 183.
