Clive Staples Lewis was a British-Irish writer who is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia series as well as his Christian apologetics such as The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. He was also a contemporary, friend, and fellow Oxford don along with his fellow fantasy author JRR Tolkien.
CS Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland on November the 29th, 1898 to a solicitor and the daughter of a Church of Ireland vicar. Amongst his friends, he was known as ‘Jack’, a name he insisted on being called after his dog, which was killed in a car accident when Lewis was just four. At the age of seven, he moved to England with his family, an experience which he recalled later as a disconcerting one. As a child he disliked the English landscape and described English accents as sounding like ‘the voices of demons’ and the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ as ‘dull’.
His experiences at school in England contributed little to alter his opinion of his new home. The boarding school he was sent to along with his elder brother in Hertfordshire, which he would often refer to in later life as ‘Belsen’, was a brutal experience even by the standards of the day until it was eventually closed following a complaint about the mistreatment of one of its other pupils shortly before the headmaster was committed to a lunatic asylum.
It was, nevertheless, during this period that the origins of his later works began to germinate. Influenced by children’s author Beatrix Potter, he would often write his own stories featuring anthropomorphised animals, a practice which he would later carry into his Narnia chronicles.
In 1917, CS Lewis won a place at University College Oxford and moved there to study. However, in common with many of his young men of that generation, he found the pressure to enter the military and fight irresistible, and so, after only a few months, he abandoned his studies and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Sommerset Light Infantry, finding himself, on his 19th Birthday, leading men into battle on the Western Front.
The horrors he saw, such as ‘horribly smashed men…. still moving like half-crushed beetles’ confirmed his lapse into atheism as a teenager, which in later years he ascribed to stemming from an ‘anger at God for not existing’.
In April 1918, he was wounded by a British shell that fell short in no-man’s land that killed two of his comrades; whilst he was recuperating from his wounds, he composed a poem called ‘Death in Battle’:
Open the gates for me,
Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,
In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast,
Open the gates for me!
Sorely pressed have I been
And driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,
But the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,
All’s cool and green.
But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,
And now—alone!
Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!
I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own—
When I find thee,
O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.
Lewis, however, never joined the ranks of the great war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, probably in large part due to the fact that following four years of carnage, the British public felt more affinity with those whose poetry bitterly criticised the war and any semblance of jingoism.
Lewis was not, however, at any point converted to pacifism as Siegfried Sassoon was and, like Tolkien, would go on to defend the concept of ‘righteous war’ in defence of good against evil, and he would later join the Home Guard to defend Britain against the Nazis during World War II.
Following a promise to his fellow Irishman and comrade Edward ‘Paddy’ Moore, who was killed during the war, CS Lewis forged a close relationship with Moore’s mother Jane, eventually moving in with her and Paddy’s sister on the outskirts of Oxford. Lacking a parental figure following the death of his mother in 1908 and due his strained relationship with his father, Lewis would often introduce her as his mother although it has often been suggested that they did, in fact, become lovers. He lived with Mrs Moore until the late 1940s until she developed dementia and had to move into a nursing home where she died in 1951.
Following the War, Lewis returned to Oxford and resumed his studies and eventually became a professor within the English faculty at the University, where he met Tolkien, with whom he co-founded ‘the Inklings’, a literary group which would meet in The Eagle and Child Pub to discuss literature and poetry.
Although he had grown up in a typically religious Ulster Protestant family, he had turned to atheism as a teenager, a belief he stuck with throughout his war years and throughout much of the 1920s. However, as he recounted in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, he began to tentatively and ‘reluctantly’ turn towards prayer from 1929 and was inspired by the writings of George Macdonald, a pioneering Scottish fantasy author and Christian Universalist, and GK Chesterton, an English Catholic philosopher, to make these tentative steps back to his Christian faith.
Finally, one day in 1931, after staying up all night until 3 in the morning talking to his friends JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he was finally inspired to fully embrace Christianity once again, although somewhat to his friend Tolkien’s disappointment, he did not embrace the Catholic faith but instead reacquainted himself with his own dormant Anglican faith. However, he did embrace a much more ecumenical approach in this faith, perhaps as the result of the sectarianism he had witnessed in his homeland that had seen it fragmented into a predominantly Protestant North and a predominantly Catholic South.
Lewis became active in the Church of England and frequently gave lectures and wrote pamphlets and books defending Christianity, of which perhaps the most famous is Mere Christianity, which he adapted from a BBC radio series he presented between 1942-1944, during which he formulated the famous ‘Lewis Trilemna’ which posed the question of Jesus as ‘Lord, Liar or Lunatic’ in response to a tendency amongst many self-identified Christians to drift away from the idea of Jesus as the Son of God towards the more Arianist concept of him being merely being a ‘great moral teacher’.
Lewis suggested that as Jesus himself stated that he was the Son of God, to state that he was merely a ‘great moral teacher’ could only imply that if not Lord, he was either a liar or a lunatic (on the level, in Lewis’ own words, of a man who declared himself to be a poached egg). This apologetic work has been credited, arguably, as the one responsible more than any other for the conversion of many former atheists to Christianity, including Dr Francis Collins, the American geneticist responsible for leading the human genome project.
His fictional works were also peppered with Christian allegories unlike those of his friend Tolkien, who, though a devout Catholic, considered Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia to be too blatant and unsubtle in their attempt to promote the Christian faith. The sacrifice of the Lion Aslan and his subsequent resurrection was, as he later admitted, a direct allegory of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the struggle of the children and citizens of Narnia against the satanic forces of the White Witch was an expression of his rejection of pacifism in favour of a righteous war against evil.
One of his shorter works, The Screwtape Letters is even less allegorious and is told in the form of correspondence between a demon called Screwtape to his young nephew Wormwood, offering him advice in his quest to try and corrupt and capture his first human soul, a quest which is ultimately unsuccessful, much to Wormwood’s great sorrow.
Despite Lewis’ many disagreements with Tolkien over ecumenical issues (and his occasional use of the vulgar epithet ‘papists’ when referring to Catholics), he provided positive encouragement to his friend to write his Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was finally published in 1954 to great and lasting acclaim.
In 1952, a year after Jane Moore’s death, CS Lewis met Joy Davidman, an American academic, former communist, and atheist who, like Lewis, had converted to Christianity after reading the works of George A MacDonald as well as Lewis’s own apologetics. Following her divorce in 1953, Davidman moved permanently to England with her sons, partly due to her anglophilia (or as she described it ‘anglomania’) as well as the activities of HUAC that were making life difficult for those with links to communists in the US during the 1950s.
However, in 1956, the British Government, concerned at her prior links to the Communist International, declined to renew her visa, and she was in danger of being deported back to the United States. In order to avoid this, CS Lewis offered a marriage of expedience in order to allow her to stay. Following Joy’s diagnosis of terminal bone cancer the following year, the two realised they were genuinely in love with each other, and despite the Church’s opposition to Lewis marrying a divorcee and the disapproval of many within his social circle, including Tolkien, the two were married in a religious ceremony by an obliging Anglican priest who was a close friend of the couple.
Despite a brief remission, Davidman died in 1960, and Lewis was devastated by the loss, causing him to waver in his Christian faith for a while, which he recorded in his book A Grief Observed. He wrote: “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
In spite of a long grieving process beset with doubts, Lewis did not abandon his faith in the midst of his dark night of the soul. Still, his spirit was broken, and his own health began to deterioriate rapidly. Three years after his wife’s death, he succumbed to kidney failure on November 22, 1963. His death, along with that of his fellow British author Aldous Huxley, was overshadowed by the assassination in Dallas, Texas of President John F Kennedy.
Fittingly, a fellow Christian Apologist and author Peter Kreeft wrote a book based on this coincidence called Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley in which the three meet up in purgatory to discuss matters of faith and philosophy.
Lewis’s Stories centred around Narnia continued to be loved by successive generations of children in the years following his death and have been adapted on both the small and silver screens. Although his fictional works are arguably surpassed by those of his friend Tolkien, as a Christian apologist he is perhaps unmatched, and his works continue to inspire new converts half a century after his death.
I was unaware of the background on this author and I thoroughly enjoyed it.