C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis a British writer and scholar (1898-1963), known to his friends as Jack, whose work as a medievalist and literary critic was matched by his achievement as a Christian apologist and as the author of the seven Chronicles of Narnia. He was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and later professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge.

Early Life and Education

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in November 1898, the son of a solicitor, and he was a bookish and imaginative child who invented with his brother a world of talking animals and chivalric adventures that anticipated Narnia. His mother died when he was nine, and the loss left him with a wound that he later described as a central fact of his inner life.

He was educated by private tutors and at Malvern College, whose public-school severities he detested, and then privately by a tutor named W. T. Kirkpatrick, an atheist and a fine teacher who trained him in logic and strict argument. After serving in the trenches of the First World War and being wounded, he returned to his studies at University College, Oxford, where he took a triple first in classics, philosophy and English.

He became a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 and taught there for nearly thirty years. His early academic work was on medieval and Renaissance literature, above all his study The Allegory of Love (1936), which revived interest in the medieval love tradition. He was a scholar of wide learning and a brilliant conversationalist who gathered around him a circle of writers and friends.

Conversion and Christian Apologetics

Lewis was an atheist in his youth and came slowly and reluctantly to Christian faith, helped by the arguments of his friends and by wide reading. In 1929 he came to believe in God, and in 1931 he became a Christian, an event he described in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy. He joined the Church of England and became one of its most effective lay spokesmen.

During the war he gave broadcast talks on the radio, later published as Mere Christianity (1952), in which he presented the common core of Christian belief in plain and forceful English. The book has become a classic of popular theology and has influenced the faith of many readers. He also wrote The Problem of Pain and Miracles, in which he addressed the difficulties of belief with an unusual combination of logic and imagination.

His apologetics were controversial as well as popular. He debated with prominent atheists and materialists of his day, and his arguments, particularly the moral argument for the existence of God, continued to be discussed long after his death. He was a formidable controversialist who tried to meet his opponents on their own ground.

Narnia and the Fiction

The Chronicles of Narnia, published between 1950 and 1956, are his best-known work. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe introduces the children who discover a magic land through a wardrobe, and the six books that follow tell the whole history of Narnia from its creation to its end. They combine the pleasures of adventure and fairy tale with a Christian symbolism that is present but not obtrusive.

Lewis said that the stories grew from a picture of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy wood, and that he did not set out to write allegory so much as to embody, in story, the beliefs he held. The books have been translated into many languages and adapted for stage, television and cinema, and they remain among the most beloved of children's classics.

He also wrote a science-fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, which explore moral and theological themes through the medium of interplanetary fiction, and a powerful novel of spiritual experience, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche that many consider his finest work of fiction.

Scholarship, Criticism and Ideas

Lewis was a distinguished literary scholar as well as a popular author. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, a volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, and An Experiment in Criticism, in which he argued that good reading is an act of surrender to the work rather than an exercise of power over it, are among his enduring contributions to criticism.

The Discarded Image, his study of the medieval and Renaissance picture of the universe, is a lucid guide to the cosmology that shaped the literature of those centuries. His academic writing is marked by the same clarity and the same willingness to explain that distinguish his works for general readers, and it showed his conviction that literature is a humane study inseparable from life.

His thought combines an orthodox Christian faith with a high regard for reason, imagination and the pleasures of this world. He held that the longing for another and better country, which he called joy, is not a flight from reality but a clue to its deepest meaning, and this idea runs through his criticism, his fiction and his apologetics alike.

Friendship, Influence and Legacy

Lewis was a member of the informal literary group known as the Inklings, which included J. R. R. Tolkien, with whom he shared a love of myth and of the literature of the North. Tolkien helped to bring him to Christian faith, and their friendship, though later strained, was among the most fruitful literary friendships of the century.

His late marriage to the American writer Joy Davidman and her death from cancer in 1960 are recorded in A Grief Observed, one of the most honest accounts of bereavement ever written. The book, published under a pseudonym, shows how the intellectual defences of his apologetics were tested by personal suffering, and it deepened his standing as a witness to faith.

He died in Oxford in November 1963. His reputation has grown steadily since, and the Chronicles of Narnia are among the best-loved books in the English language. He is remembered as a scholar, a story-teller and a defender of the faith, a writer whose learning and imagination combined to make the central questions of human life compelling to a very wide audience.

See also

• The Chronicles of Narnia
• Mere Christianity
• Inklings
• Christian apologetics