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C.S. Lewis

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C.S. Lewis
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  • Born: 29 November 1898
  • Birthplace: Belfast, Ireland
  • Died: 22 November 1963 (natural causes)
  • Best Known As: Author of The Chronicles of Narnia

Name at birth: Clive Staples Lewis

C.S. Lewis was a high-powered Oxford and Cambridge professor and one of the 20th century's most famous converts to Christianity. An atheist from boyhood, he converted at age 33 and devoted much of the rest of his life to writing about faith. His series of allegorical books known as The Chronicles of Narnia remains especially popular with children. (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the seven in the Narnia series, was published in 1950; The Last Battle, the final book, was published in 1956.) Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925-1954, when he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he remained until 1963. Lewis and his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien were part of the casual Oxford literary group known as The Inklings.

Lewis died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated... The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was made into a 2005 feature film with Liam Neeson providing the voice of Aslan, the heroic lion.

 
 
Biography: Clive Staples Lewis

The British novelist and essayist Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was an established literary figure whose impact is increasingly recognized by scholars and teachers.

On November 29, 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland. He was the son of A. J. Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora August Hamilton Lewis, whose father was a clergyman. The death of his mother occurred when he was a child. After spending a year in studies at Malvern College, he continued his education privately under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick, formerly headmaster of Lurgan College.

During World War I he served as a second lieutenant in the infantry, interrupting his career as scholar begun in 1918 at University College, Oxford. Wounded in the war, he returned to Oxford, where in 1924 he was appointed lecturer at University College. In 1925 he was appointed fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, England, where he lectured on English literature.

Lewis early grew disillusioned with religion and only later "converted" to Christianity, joining the Anglican Church. Taciturn about the details of his early life, his autobiography, Surprised by joy: The Shape of My Early Life, fails to provide enlightenment and leaves the Lewis scholar to speculations about his childhood and early disenchantment with emotional Christianity. Perhaps his headmaster, a clergyman who urged him to "think" by application of the rod, contributed to his dissuasion.

His autobiography does reveal, however, that he had little interest in sports as a boy and that he was a voracious reader. Among his early favorite authors was G. K. Chesterton who was himself a paradoxical and religious writer.

Widely read as an adult, his knowledge of literature was prodigious and made of him a superb conversationalist much sought after for his company. Lewis thoroughly enjoyed sitting up into the wee hours in college rooms" … talking nonsense, poetry, theology, and metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes."

His subjects at Oxford were medieval and Renaissance English literature, in which he became a scholar, lecturer, and tutor of renown. His reputation was made secure by his English Literature in the 16th Century (1954) and Experiment in Criticism (1961). Aside from scholarly writings, his output included science-fiction, children's stories, and religious apology.

In 1926 his first publication, Dymer, a narrative versification in Rime Royal, appeared under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Dymer revealed something of his satirical gift. The Pilgrims' Regress, an allegory published in 1933, presented an apology for Christianity. It was not until the appearance of his second allegorical work, The Allegory of Love (1936), however, that Lewis received acclaim by winning the coveted Hawthornden prize.

His Pilgrims' Regress is a work of allegorical science fiction, in which a philologist is kidnapped by evil scientists. The Screwtape Letters (1942), for which he is perhaps best known, is a satire in which the devil, here known as Screwtape, writes letters instructing his young nephew, Wormwood, how to tempt souls to damnation.

Of his seven religious allegories for children titled Chronicles of Narnia (1955) he commented that, "stories of this kind could steal past … inhibitions which had dissuaded him from his own religion." … "An obligation to feel can freeze feeling." His later rejoining of Christianity was philosophical, not emotional.

Lewis was married, rather late in life, in 1956, to Joy Davidman Gresham, the daughter of a New York Jewish couple. She was a graduate of Hunter College and for a time belonged to the Communist Party. She had previously been married twice. When her first husband suffered a heart attack, she turned to prayer. Reading the writings of Lewis, she began to attend Presbyterian services. Later, led by his writings to Lewis himself, she divorced her second husband, Williams Gresham, left the Communist Party, and married Lewis. Her death proceeded her husband's by some three years. C. S. Lewis died, at his home in Headington, Oxford, on November 24, 1963. A major collection of his works is held by Wheaton College in Illinois.

Further Reading

Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) was written at age 57. Later biographical information is contained in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966) as edited by W. H. Lewis. Further insights to the artist's life are provided in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and other Reminiscences (1979), edited by James T. Como. C. S. Lewis's works include: "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938); "Rehabilitations" (1939); "The Personal Heresy" with E. M. W. Tillyard (1939); "A Preface to Paradise Lost" (1942); "The Case for Christianity" (1942); "Perelandra" (1943); "Christian Behavior" (1943); "Abolition of Man" (1943); "Beyond Personality" (1944); "That Hideous Strength" (1945); "Miracles" (1947); "Weight of Glory" (1949); "Mere Christianity" (1952); and "Studies in Words" (1960).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Clive Staples Lewis

(born Nov. 29, 1898, Belfast, Ire. — died Nov. 22, 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.) Irish-born British scholar and writer. Lewis taught first at Oxford (1925 – 54) and later at Cambridge (1954 – 63). An early volume, the critical Allegory of Love (1936) on medieval and Renaissance literature, is often considered his finest scholarly work. He became known in England and the U.S. for several series of BBC radio broadcasts during the war years on the subject of Christianity. Many of his books embrace Christian apologetics; the best known is The Screwtape Letters (1942), a satirical epistolary novel in which an experienced devil instructs his young charge in the art of temptation. Also well known are The Chronicles of Narnia (1950 – 56), a series of seven children's stories (including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950) that have become classics of fantasy; and a science-fiction trilogy, known mostly for its first volume, Out of the Silent Planet (1938).

For more information on Clive Staples Lewis, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C. S. (1898-1963). Lewis was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, and then took the chair of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge until a few months before his death. His most significant scholarly book was English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). His influence with the wider public came from broadcasts during the war, from his Christian apologetics The Problem of Pain (1940) and The Screwtape Letters (1942), and from his heavily allegorical and highly successful Narnia books for children, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).

 
Fairy Tale Companion: C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963), British author, scholar, and popular theologian. Lewis and his older brother Warren, sons of a Belfast solicitor, enjoyed a protected middle‐class childhood whose happiness and security were destroyed by the death of their mother from cancer in 1908, followed by a grim succession of boarding schools. After World War I, Lewis returned to Oxford, where he achieved a triple First Class degree at University College. In 1925 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College. His scholarly reputation in medieval and Renaissance English literature was established when his book The Allegory of Love won the Hawthornden Prize in 1936. In 1954 he was offered a professorship at Cambridge University, where he taught until his retirement. Meanwhile, he was becoming increasingly well known as a popular theologian. A militant atheist in his teens, as he relates in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis finally surrendered to Christianity in 1931. After recasting his spiritual journey as a fantastic allegory in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), he began experimenting, more successfully, with other modes. The Problem of Pain (1940) and Mere Christianity (1952) were straightforward expository works. The Screwtape Letters (1942), on the other hand, inspired by his study of Paradise Lost, entertains the reader with a series of letters from a senior devil, instructing his junior in effective techniques of damnation. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was the first of a science‐fiction trilogy in which spiritual concepts were expressed in terms of an original mythology. A struggle between cosmic good and evil that begins on Mars continues on Venus in Perelandra (1943) and concludes on Earth in That Hideous Strength (1945), subtitled A Modern Fairy‐Tale for Grown‐Ups. Lewis's planets are vividly imagined; not surprisingly, he went on to create an entirely imaginary world in his fantasy series for children, The Chronicles of Narnia.

Narnia, as Doctor Cornelius tells Prince Caspian, was not made for human beings. ‘It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts' (Prince Caspian). Lewis filled Narnia with all the mythical creatures that appealed to him, whatever their origin—gods and centaurs from Greek mythology, giants and dwarfs from Germanic folklore, talking animals from Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. Contributing to the eclectic effect is the variety of literary sources, from Homer, Malory, and Milton to Hans Christian Andersen, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, and The Arabian Nights. George MacDonald, in particular, taught Lewis how to infuse the literary fairy tale with Christian meaning. Aslan the Lion, the Son of the Emperor‐beyond‐the‐Sea, represents the animal form that divine incarnation might assume in a world like Narnia. In the first of the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), four children from our world enter a Narnia frozen in perpetual winter by the White Witch (clearly inspired by Andersen's Snow Queen). Aslan dies voluntarily at the Witch's hands, trading his life for one of the children's, but he is miraculously resurrected and leads his forces to victory against her. Despite the unmistakable analogy to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, Lewis did not begin the story consciously intending to teach Christianity. ‘Suddenly’, he says, ‘Aslan came bounding into it … But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him’ (Of Other Worlds). Lewis realized that he might circumvent children's negative associations with religious subjects by ‘stripping them of their stained‐glass and Sunday school associations’ and recasting them in an imaginary world. Although the Narnian stories are not allegories—and have been misused by being treated as such—they are permeated with Christian concepts. Prince Caspian (1951), for example, raises the question of faith in a secular age. The four children return to Narnia only to learn that several hundred years have passed; human beings have taken over, the trees are ‘asleep’, and the surviving mythical creatures, driven into hiding, are unsure whether Aslan even exists. The triumphant return of Aslan, however, and the restoration of Narnia to its former self can represent the victory of imagination over materialism as readily as that of faith over disbelief. The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952) and The Silver Chair (1956) follow the classic fairy‐tale pattern of the quest‐journey. The former is both the most ‘Arthurian’ of the series, with its echoes of the Grail quest, and the most Homeric, in its voyaging among strange islands. In The Magician's Nephew (1955), Lewis depicted the creation of his imaginary world, and in The Last Battle (1956), a Carnegie Award‐winner, its final apocalypse. As a whole, The Narnia Chronicles—beautifully illustrated by Pauline Baynes—are considered one of the finest achievements of 20th‐century children's fantasy.

Lewis's last novel for adults, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), is an interesting reworking of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, set in a small kingdom on the fringes of ancient Greek civilization, and narrated by Psyche's ugly sister Orual, whose deep but possessive love for Psyche makes her hostile to the Divine Love towards which her sister, an anima naturaliter Christiana, is instinctively drawn.

Lewis's essays on children's literature and fairy tales, though few, have had considerable influence. In ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ he argued that children's literature should be judged as literature—a radical view in 1952—and defended the fairy tale from charges of being escapist and too frightening for children. ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said’ described Lewis's attraction to the genre and its special power. Both essays appear in Of Other Worlds (1966).

Bibliography

  • Manlove, Colin, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Patterning of a Fantastic World (1993).
  • Schakel, Peter J., Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia (1979).
  • Wilson, A. N., C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1990).

— Suzanne Rahn

 
Irish Literature Companion: Clive Staples Lewis

Lewis, C[live] S[taples] (1898-1963), scholar and man of letters. Born in Belfast he was educated at University College, Oxford, interrupting his studies there to serve in the First World War. After being wounded in 1918 he was discharged, published Spirits in Bondage (1919), and resumed his studies, becoming a Fellow in English at Magdalen in 1925. His rediscovery of the significance of orthodox Christianity in the modern world in 1929 was reflected in The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933). His belief that literature could strengthen moral awareness informed his Allegory of Love (1936), a study of courtly love. These concerns are also evident in his science fiction in the trilogy Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943, later retitled Voyage to Venus) and That Hideous Strength (1945). The Problem of Pain (1940) established him as an exponent of belief. The Screwtape Letters (1942), advice from an experienced devil to a younger colleague on how to tempt sinners, was followed by Mere Christianity (1952); Miracles (1947); The Four Loves (1960); and A Grief Observed (1961), on the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. The seven tales of the Narnia Chronicles for children began with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) and ended with The Last Battle (1956). Other literary studies included A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and The Discarded Image (1964).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Lewis, C. S.
(Clive Staples Lewis), 1898–1963, English author, b. Belfast, Ireland. A fellow and tutor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, C. S. Lewis was noted equally for his literary scholarship and for his intellectual and witty expositions of Christian tenets. Among his most important works are The Allegory of Love (1936), an analysis of the literary evolution of romantic love during the Middle Ages; The Screwtape Letters (1942, rev. ed. 1961), an ironic treatment of the theme of salvation; and a history of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). He is also the author of Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and That Hideous Strength (1945), outer-planetary fantasies with deep Catholic and moral overtones; the “Chronicles of Narnia,” a series of allegorical fantasies set in the mythical kingdom of Narnia, including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and The Silver Chair (1953); many works of literary criticism, including Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966); and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1954). From 1954 until his death he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge.

Bibliography

See his Selected Literary Essays (1970) and Narrative Poems (1970), both ed. by W. Hooper; his letters, ed. by his brother W. H. Lewis (1966, repr. 1975); biographies by C. S. Kilby and D. Gilbert (1973), and R. L. Green and W. Hooper (1974); studies by P. G. Schakel, ed. (1977), W. Griffin (1986), C. N. Manlove (1987), L. W. Dorsett (1988), and G. B. Sayer (1988).

 
Quotes By: C. S. Lewis

Quotes:

"We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn."

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, All right, then, have it your way."

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

"The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world."

"Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods."

See more famous quotes by C. S. Lewis

 
Wikipedia: C. S. Lewis


C. S. Lewis

Born: 29 November 1898(1898--)
Belfast, Ireland
Died: 22 November 1963 (aged 64)
Oxford, England
Occupation: Novelist, Scholar, Broadcaster
Genres: Fantasy, Science fiction, Christian apologetics, Children's literature
Influences: H. Rider Haggard, Christianity, Arthur Balfour, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, William Blake, Irish, Norse, and Greek Mythology
Influenced: J. K. Rowling, Stephen R. Donaldson, J. I. Packer, Peter Kreeft, J. R. R. Tolkien, widespread

Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was an Irish author and scholar. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature, Christian apologetics, literary criticism, and fiction. He is best known today for his series The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". Due in part to Tolkien's influence, Lewis converted to Christianity, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England" (Lewis 1952, p. 6). His conversion had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Late in life he married the American writer Joy Gresham, who died of bone cancer four years later at the age of 45.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and continue to sell more than a million copies a year; the books that compose The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than 100 million copies. A number of stage and screen adaptations of Lewis's works have also been produced, the most notable of which is the 2005 Disney film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Biography

Childhood

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland on November 29 1898. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863–1929), a solicitor whose father, Richard, had come to Ireland from Wales. His mother was Flora Augusta Lewis née Hamilton (1862–1908), the daughter of a Church of Ireland minister. He had one older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis (Warnie). At the age of four, shortly after his dog Jacksie was hit by a car, Lewis announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jacks which became Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life. At six his family moved into "Little Lea", the house the elder Mr. Lewis built for Mrs. Lewis, in Strandtown, Northern Ireland.

Little Lea
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Little Lea

Lewis was initially schooled by private tutors before being sent to the Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1908, the same year that his mother died of cancer. Lewis's brother had already enrolled there three years previously. The school was closed not long afterwards due to a lack of pupils—the headmaster Robert "Oldie" Capron was soon after committed to an insane asylum. Tellingly, in Surprised By Joy, Lewis would later nickname the school "Belsen". There is some speculation by biographer Alan Jacobs that the atmosphere at Wynyard greatly traumatized Lewis and was responsible for the development of "mildly sadomasochistic fantasies". (Gopnik 2005) Four of the letters that the adolescent Lewis wrote to his life-long friend Arthur Greeves (out of an overall correspondence of nearly 300 letters) were signed "Philomastix" ("whip-lover"), and two of those also detailed women he would like to spank. (Hooper 1979, pp. 160–170)

After Wynyard closed, Lewis attended Campbell College in the east of Belfast about a mile from his home, but he left after a few months due to respiratory problems. As a result of his illness, Lewis was sent to the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the preparatory school Cherbourg House (called "Chartres" in Lewis's autobiography).

In September 1913 Lewis enrolled at Malvern College, where he would remain until the following June. It was during this time at the age of 15 that he abandoned his childhood Christian faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult.[1]Later he would describe "Wyvern" (as he styled the school in his autobiography) as so singularly focused on increasing one's social status that he came to see the homosexual relationships between older and younger pupils as "the one oasis (though green only with weeds and moist only with fetid water) in the burning desert of competitive ambition. […] A perversion was the only thing left through which something spontaneous and uncalculated could creep" (Lewis 1966, p. 107). After leaving Malvern he moved to study privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's old tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College.

As a young boy, Lewis had a fascination with anthropomorphic animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and illustrating his own animal stories. He and his brother Warnie together created the world of Boxen, inhabited and run by animals. Lewis loved to read, and as his father’s house was filled with books, he felt that finding a book he had not read was as easy as "finding a blade of grass."

As a teenager, he was wonderstruck by the songs and legends of what he called Northernness. These legends intensified a longing he had within, a deep desire he would later call "joy". He also grew to love nature—the beauty of nature reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North reminded him of the beauties of nature. His writing in his teenage years moved away from the tales of Boxen, and he began to use different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his newfound interest in Norse mythology and the natural world. Studying with Kirkpatrick (“The Great Knock”, as Lewis afterwards called him) instilled in him a love of Greek literature and mythology, and sharpened his skills in debate and clear reasoning.

World War I

Lewis in 1919, at the age of 21
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Lewis in 1919, at the age of 21

Having won a scholarship to University College, Oxford in 1916, Lewis enlisted the following year in the British Army as World War I raged on, and was commissioned an officer in the third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his nineteenth birthday, and experienced trench warfare.

On 15 April 1917, Lewis was wounded during the Battle of Arras, and suffered some depression during his convalescence, due in part to missing his Irish home. On his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was discharged in December 1918, and soon returned to his studies. Lewis received a First in Honour Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature) in 1920, a First in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1922, and a First in English in 1923.

While being trained for the army Lewis shared a room and became close friends with another cadet, "Paddy" Moore. The two had made a mutual pact that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families. Paddy was killed in action in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced Lewis to his mother, Jane King Moore, and a friendship very quickly sprang up between Lewis, who was eighteen when they met, and Jane, who was forty-five. The friendship with Mrs. Moore was particularly important to Lewis while he was recovering from his wounds in hospital, as his father refused to visit him.

Jane Moore

Lewis was known to have had a close personal relationship with Jane Moore (1871/2–1951). She was the mother of his friend, Paddy Moore (1898–1918). In keeping a promise to Paddy after his death in France during WWI, Lewis lived with and cared for Mrs. Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s. He routinely introduced Moore as his "mother". Lewis, whose mother had died when he was a child and whose father was distant and demanding, came to draw affection from his friendship with Moore. "All I can or need to say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged", he wrote of her in his autobiography. He also said to his friend George Sayer: "She was generous and taught me to be generous, too." The nature of their relationship is unknown, although it is most probable that he looked to her as his "mother." His stepson, Douglas Gresham, writes in his biography of Lewis that it will remain a mystery.

In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that Jane and Greeves were "the two people who matter most to me in the world."

In 1930, Lewis, Moore, her daughter Maureen and Warnie moved into "The Kilns", a house in Risinghurst, Headington. They all contributed financially to the purchase of the house, which passed to Maureen, then Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs, when Warren died in 1973.

Moore suffered from dementia in her later years and was eventually moved into a nursing home, where she died in 1951. Lewis visited her every day in this home until her death.

"My life"

Plaque on a park-bench in Bangor, County Down
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Plaque on a park-bench in Bangor, County Down

Lewis experienced a certain cultural shock upon first arriving in England: "No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England," Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. "The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape … I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal."

From boyhood Lewis immersed himself firstly in Norse and Greek and then in Irish mythology and literature and expressed an interest in the Irish language, though he seems to have made little attempt to learn it. He developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats, in part because of Yeats’s use of Ireland’s Celtic heritage in poetry. In a letter to a friend Lewis wrote, "I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, W. B. Yeats. He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology." In 1921, Lewis had the opportunity to meet Yeats on two occasions, since Yeats had moved to Oxford.

Surprised to find his English peers indifferent to Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement, Lewis wrote: "I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish—if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish." Early in his career, Lewis considered sending his work to the major Dublin publishers, writing: "If I do ever send my stuff to a publisher, I think I shall try Maunsel, those Dublin people, and so tack myself definitely onto the Irish school." After his conversion to Christianity, his interests gravitated towards Christian spirituality and away from pagan Celtic mysticism.

Lewis occasionally expressed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek chauvinism toward the English. Describing an encounter with a fellow Irishman he wrote: "Like all Irish people who meet in England we ended by criticisms of the inevitable flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race. After all, ami, there is no doubt that the Irish are the only people … I would not gladly live or die among another folk."

Due to his Oxford career Lewis did indeed live and die among another folk, and he often expressed regret at having to leave Ireland. Throughout his life, he sought out the company of his fellow Irish living in England and visited Northern Ireland regularly, even spending his honeymoon there (The Old Inn 2007). He called this "my Irish life".

Conversion to Christianity

Although raised in a church-going family in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became an atheist at the age of 13, and remained as such until he was 31 years old. His separation from Christianity began when he started to view his religion as a chore and as a duty; around this time he also gained an interest in the occult as his studies expanded to include such topics. Lewis quoted Lucretius as having one of the strongest arguments for atheism:

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa (Lucretius)
"Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see."

Though an atheist at the time, Lewis later described his young self (in Surprised by Joy) as being paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing".

Lewis's interest in fantasy and mythology, especially in relation to the works of George MacDonald, was part of what turned him from atheism. In fact, MacDonald's position as a Christian fantasy writer was very influential on Lewis. This can be seen particularly well through this passage in The Great Divorce, chapter nine, when the semi-autobiographical main character meets MacDonald in Heaven:

…I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the new life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness. (Lewis 1946, pp. 66–67)

Influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, and by the book The Everlasting Man by Roman Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton, he slowly rediscovered Christianity. He fought greatly up to the moment of his conversion noting, "I came into Christianity kicking and screaming." He described his last struggle in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 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. (Lewis 1966)

After his conversion to theism in 1929, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931. Following a long discussion and late-night walk with his close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Church of England — somewhat to the disappointment of the devout Catholic Tolkien, who had hoped he would convert to Roman Catholicism (Carpenter 2006).[2]

A committed Anglican, Lewis upheld a largely orthodox Anglican theology, though in his apologetic writings, he made an effort to avoid espousing any one denomination. In his later writings, some believe he proposed ideas such as purification of venial sins after death in purgatory (The Great Divorce) and mortal sin (The Screwtape Letters), which are generally considered to be Catholic teachings. Regardless, Lewis considered himself an entirely orthodox Anglican to the end of his life, reflecting that he had initially attended church only to receive communion and had been repelled by the hymns and the poor quality of the sermons. He later came to consider himself honoured by worshipping with men of faith who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses to all the hymns.

Joy Gresham

Joy Gresham
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Joy Gresham

In Lewis's later life, he corresponded with and later met Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background and also a convert from atheism to Christianity.[3] She was separated from her husband and came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas. Lewis at first regarded her as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend, and it was at least overtly on this level that he agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK. Lewis's brother Warnie wrote: "For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met… who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun" (Haven 2006). However, after complaining of a painful hip, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and the relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Since she was divorced, this was not straightforward in the Church of England at the time, but a friend, the Rev. Peter Bide, performed the ceremony at Joy's hospital bed in 1956.

Joy's cancer soon went into a remarkable yet brief remission, and the couple lived as a family (together with Warren Lewis) until her eventual relapse and death in 1960. The year she died, the couple took a brief holiday in Greece and the Aegean in 1960; Lewis was fond of walking but not of travel, and this marked his only crossing of the English Channel after 1918. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed describes his experience of bereavement in such a raw and personal fashion that Lewis originally released it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk to keep readers from associating the book with him. However, so many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief that he made his authorship public.

Lewis continued to raise Joy's two sons after her death. Douglas Gresham is an active Christian and remains involved in the affairs of the Lewis estate, though David Gresham returned to his mother's original Jewish faith. The two brothers are now estranged (Neven 2001).

Illness and death

In early June 1961, Lewis began experiencing medical problems and was diagnosed with inflammation of the kidneys which resulted in blood poisoning. His illness caused him to miss the autumn term at Cambridge, though his health gradually began improving in 1962 and he returned that April. Lewis's health continued to improve, and according to his friend George Sayer, Lewis was fully himself by the spring of 1963. However, on July 15 1963 he fell ill and was admitted to hospital. The next day at 5:00 pm, Lewis suffered a heart attack and lapsed into a coma, unexpectedly awaking the following day at 2:00 pm. After he was discharged from hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns though he was too ill to return to work. As a result, he resigned from his post at Cambridge in August. Lewis's condition continued to decline and in mid-November, he was diagnosed with end stage renal failure. On November 22 1963, Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm and died a few minutes later, exactly one week before what would have been his 65th birthday. He is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington, Oxford (Friends of Holy Trinity Church).

Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley (Kreeft 1982).

C. S. Lewis is commemorated on 22 November in the church calendar of the Episcopal Church.

Career

The scholar

Magdalen College
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Magdalen College

Lewis taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, from 1925 to 1954, and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Using this position, he argued that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance. Much of his scholarly work concentrated on the later Middle Ages, especially its use of allegory. His The Allegory of Love (1936) helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives like the Roman de la Rose. Lewis wrote several prefaces to old works of literature and poetry, like Layamon's Brut. His preface to John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost is still one of the most important criticisms of that work. His last academic work, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964), is a summary of the medieval world view, the "discarded image" of the cosmos in his title.

Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the "Inklings", including J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warnie Lewis. At Oxford he was the tutor of, among many other undergraduates, poet John Betjeman, critic Kenneth Tynan, mystic Bede Griffiths, and Sufi scholar Martin Lings. Curiously, the religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-Establishment Tynan retained a life-long admiration for him (Tonkin 2005).

Of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy:

When I began teaching for the English Faculty, 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. They were H.V.V. Dyson … and J.R.R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both. (Lewis 1966, p. 173)

The author

C.S. Lewis with his books
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C.S. Lewis with his books

In addition to his scholarly work, Lewis wrote a number of popular novels, including his science fiction Space Trilogy and his fantasy Narnia books, most dealing implicitly with Christian themes such as sin, the Fall, and redemption.

The Pilgrim's Regress

Main article: The Pilgrim's Regress

His first novel after becoming a Christian was The Pilgrim's Regress, his take on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress which depicted his own experience with Christianity. The book was critically panned at the time, particularly for its esoteric nature—as to read it requires a close familiarity with classical sources.

In a footnote of the biography D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939–1981 by Iain Murray, Murray notes the following: "Lewis is said to have valued ML-J's appreciation and encouragement when the early edition of his Pilgrim's Regress was not selling well. Vincent Lloyd-Jones and Lewis knew each other well, being contemporaries at Oxford. ML-J met the author again and they had a long conversation when they found both themselves on the same boat to Ireland in 1953. On the later occasion, to the question, 'When are you going to write another book?', Lewis replied, 'When I understand the meaning of prayer'" (Murray 1990).

Space Trilogy

Main article: Space Trilogy

His Space Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy novels (also called the Cosmic Trilogy) dealt with what Lewis saw as the then-current dehumanizing trends in modern science fiction. The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, was apparently written following a conversation with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien about these trends; Lewis agreed to write a "space travel" story and Tolkien a "time travel" one. Tolkien’s story, "The Lost Road", a tale connecting his Middle-earth mythology and the modern world, was never completed. Lewis’s character of Ransom is based in part on Tolkien, a fact that Tolkien himself alludes to in his Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. The second novel, Perelandra, illustrates a new "Garden of Eden", a new "Adam and Eve", and a new "serpent figure" to tempt them. The story illustrates a hypothesis of what could have happened if "our Eve" would have resisted more firmly the temptation of the serpent. The last novel in the Trilogy also contains numerous references to Tolkien's fictional universe, and can be seen partially as a homage to Tolkien. The minor character Jules, from That Hideous Strength, is an obvious caricature of H. G. Wells. Many of the ideas presented in the books, particularly in That Hideous Strength, are dramatizations of arguments made more formally in Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.

Another science fiction novel, The Dark Tower, was begun, but remained unfinished; it is not clear whether it was intended as part of the same series as the completed novels. The manuscript was eventually published in 1977, though controversy arose about its authenticity.

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Mountains of Mourne
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The Mountains of Mourne
Main article: The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children and is considered a classic of children's literature. Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the series is Lewis's most popular work having sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages (Kelly 2006)(Guthmann 2005). It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema. The series has been published in several different orders, and the preferred reading order for the series is often debated among fans; though Douglas Gresham has stated that Lewis preferred that they be read in "Narnian chronology", not the order in which they were published (Drennan 1999).

The books contain many allusions to Christian ideas which are easily accessible to younger readers; however, the books are not weighty, and can be read for their adventure, colour and richness of ideas alone. Because of this, they have become favourites of children and adults, Christians and non-Christians. In addition to Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters from Greek and Roman mythology as well as traditional British and Irish fairy tales. Lewis reportedly based his depiction of Narnia on the geography and scenery of the Mourne Mountains and "that part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough" (Guardian Unlimited 2005). Lewis cited George MacDonald's Christian fairy tales as an influence in writing the series.

The Chronicles of Narnia present the adventures of children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the fictional realm of Narnia, a place where animals talk, magic is common, and good battles evil. In the majority of the books, children from our world find themselves transported to Narnia by a magical portal. Once there, they are quickly involved in setting some wrong to right with the help of the lion Aslan who is the central character of the series.

Other works

Lewis wrote a number of works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, The Great Divorce, is a short novella. A few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are met by people they had known on earth. The proposition is that they can stay (in which case they can call the place where they had come from “Purgatory”, instead of “Hell”): but many find it not to their taste. The title is a reference to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a concept that Lewis found a "disastrous error" (Lewis 1946, p. vii). This work deliberately echoes two other more famous works with a similar theme: the Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Another short work, The Screwtape Letters, consists of letters of advice from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, on the best ways to tempt a particular human and secure his damnation. Lewis’s last novel was Till We Have Faces — many believe (as he did) that it is his most mature and masterful work of fiction, but it was never a popular success. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the unusual perspective of Psyche's sister. It is deeply concerned with religious ideas, but the setting is entirely pagan, and the connections with specific Christian beliefs are left implicit.

Before Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, he published two books: Spirits in Bondage, a collection of poems, and Dymer, a single narrative poem. Both were published under the pen name Clive Hamilton.

Lewis penned A Grief Observed after the death of his wife (see Joy Gresham above).

The Christian apologist

In addition to his career as an English professor and an author of fiction, Lewis is regarded by many as one of the most influential Christian apologists of his time; Mere Christianity was voted best book of the twentieth century by Christianity Today magazine in 2000. Lewis was very much interested in presenting a reasonable case for the truth of Christianity. Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles were all concerned, to one degree or another, with refuting popular objections to Christianity. He also became known as a popular lecturer and broadcaster, and some of his writing (including much of Mere Christianity) originated as scripts for radio talks or lectures (Lewis 1952, p. v).

Due to Lewis's approach to religious belief as a skeptic, and his following conversion, he has become popularly known as "The Apostle to the Skeptics." Consequently, his books on Christianity examine common difficulties in Christianity, such as "How could a good God allow pain to exist in the world?", which he examined in detail in The Problem of Pain.

Lewis also wrote an autobiography entitled Surprised by Joy, which places special emphasis on his own conversion. (It was written before he met his wife, Joy Gresham; the title of the book came from the first line of a poem by William Wordsworth.) His essays and public speeches on Christian belief, many of which were collected in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, remain popular today.

His most famous works, the Chronicles of Narnia, contain many strong Christian messages and are often considered allegory. Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs. Hook in December of 1958:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all. (Martindale & Root 1990)

Trilemma

Main article: Lewis's trilemma

In the book Mere Christianity, Lewis famously criticized the idea that Jesus was merely a human being, albeit a great moral teacher:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Lewis 1952, p. 43)

Lewis, who did not invent this argument but did much to popularise it, argues that Jesus made many claims to divinity, either explicitly or implicitly. As a result, he said, there are only three possible options:

  1. Jesus was telling falsehoods and knew it, and so he was a liar.
  2. Jesus was telling falsehoods but believed he was telling the truth, and so he was insane.
  3. Jesus was telling the truth, and so he was divine.

Lewis’s argument was used by the Christian apologist Josh McDowell in his book More Than a Carpenter (McDowell 2001). The term "trilemma" (which Lewis did not use) is often used to refer to this argument. Although widely repeated in Christian apologetic literature, it has been largely ignored by professional theologians and biblical scholars.[4]

Lewis's trilemma appeared at a time when scholars such as Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann had portrayed Jesus's miracles and resurrection as myths. The concept that Jesus was not God but a wise man had gained ground in academic circles. The trilemma opposes the idea that Jesus was not divine, without relying on miracles for proof. In accepting the premise that Jesus had claimed divinity, he contradicted a viewpoint, popularized by H. G. Wells in his Outline of History, that Jesus had made no such claim.

(Lewis restated the trilemma's structure in the first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Professor Kirke advises the young heroes that their sister's claims of a magical world must logically be taken as either lies, madness, or truth.)

Universal morality

One of the main theses in Lewis' apologia is that there is a common morality known throughout humanity. In the first five chapters of Mere Christianity Lewis discusses the idea that people have a standard of behaviour to which they expect other people to adhere. This standard has been called Universal Morality or Natural Law. Lewis claims that all over the earth people know about this law and that they break it. He goes on to claim that there must be someone or something behind such a universal set of principles. (Lindskoog 2001b, p. 144)

These then are the two points that I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can not really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. (Lewis 1952, p. 21)

Lewis also portrays Universal Morality in his works of fiction. In The Chronicles of Narnia he describes Universal Morality as the "Deep magic" which everyone knew. (Lindskoog 2001b, p. 146)

In the second chapter of Mere Christianity Lewis recognizes that "many people find it difficult to understand what this Law of Human Nature [...] is". And he responds first to the idea "that the Moral Law is simply our herd instinct" and second to the idea "that the Moral Law is simply a social convention". In responding to the second idea Lewis notes that people often complain that one set of moral ideas is better than another, but that this actually argues for there existing some "Real Morality" to which they are comparing other moralities. Finally he notes that sometimes differences in moral codes are exaggerated by people who confuse differences in beliefs about morality with differences in beliefs about facts:

I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house. (Lewis 1952, p. 26)

Legacy

A statue of Digory from The Magician's Nephew in East Belfast, Northern Ireland
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A statue of Digory from The Magician's Nephew in East Belfast, Northern Ireland

Lewis continues to attract a wide readership. Readers of his fiction are often unaware of what Lewis considered the Christian themes of the works. His Christian apologetics are read and quoted by followers of a wide range of religious denominations, including Roman Catholics and Mormons (Pratt 1998).

Lewis has been the subject of various biographies, a few of which were written by some of his close friends, such as Roger Lancelyn Green and George Sayer); at least one play attributed to his life; and a 1993 film, Shadowlands, based on an original stage and television play. The film fictionalises his relationship with Joy Gresham.

Many books have been inspired by Lewis, including A Severe Mercy by his correspondent Sheldon Vanauken. The Chronicles of Narnia have been particularly influential. Modern children's literature such as Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter have been more or less influenced by Lewis's series (Hilliard 2005). Pullman, a critic of Lewis, considers him a negative influence (Ezard 2002). Authors of adult fantasy literature such as Tim Powers have also testified to being influenced by Lewis's work.

Most of Lewis’s posthumous work has been edited by his literary executor,