C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis (born November 29, 1898, Belfast, Ireland [now in Northern Ireland]—died November 22, 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) was an Irish-born scholar, novelist, and author of about 40 books, many of them on Christian apologetics, including The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. His works of greatest lasting fame may be The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children’s books that have become classics of fantasy literature.

Early life, education, and war service

Reading and education were valued highly in the Lewis household. Lewis’s father, Albert Lewis, was a solicitor, and his mother, Florence Hamilton Lewis, graduated from the Royal University of Ireland (now Queen’s University Belfast) at a time when it was not common for women to earn degrees. His parents belonged to the Church of Ireland, in which Lewis was baptized. Lewis and his older brother, Warren (“Warnie”), like their parents, were avid readers. Lewis was something of a prodigy: He was reading by age three and by five had begun writing stories about a fantasy land populated by “dressed animals,” influenced by the stories of Beatrix Potter, which were being published as Lewis grew up. Selections of those early stories were collected in Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985).

After receiving their early education at home, Lewis and his brother attended English boarding schools. Very little learning occurred at the first of these, Wynyard School in Watford, outside London, overseen by a brutal authoritarian headmaster. Lewis’s education was rescued by excellent teachers at Campbell College in Belfast, Cherbourg House in Malvern, and at Malvern College, though he did not fit the latter socially and was intensely unhappy there. He left it after a year to be prepped for the University of Oxford entrance exams by W.T. Kirkpatrick, whose tutoring enabled Lewis to win, in 1916, a scholarship in classics at University College.

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After serving in France with the Somerset Light Infantry in World War I, he began his studies at Oxford and achieved an outstanding record, taking a double first in Honours Moderations (Greek and Latin texts) and Greats (classical history and philosophy) and then staying on for an additional first in English language and literature, completing it in one year instead of the usual three. He became a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925, a position he held until 1954. From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.

Return to Christianity

In his youth Lewis aspired to become a notable poet, but after his first publications—a collection of lyric verse (Spirits in Bondage) in 1919 and a long narrative poem (Dymer) in 1926, both published under the name Clive Hamilton—attracted little attention, he turned to scholarly writing and prose fiction. His first prose work to be published (except for some early scholarly articles) was The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism (1933), an account of his search to find the source of the longings he experienced from his early years, which led him to an adult acceptance of the Christian faith. Lewis had rejected Christianity in his early teens and lived as an atheist through his 20s. He turned to theism in 1930 (although Lewis misdated it to 1929 in Surprised by Joy) and to Christianity (joining the Church of England) in 1931, partly with the help of his close friend and devout Roman Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis described these changes in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), an account of his spiritual and intellectual life through his early 30s.

Fiction, literary scholarship, and Christian apologetics

Lewis’s first successful work of fiction was Out of the Silent Planet (1938), a novel into which he wove Christian allusions and themes. The book gives voice to Lewis’s concerns about the secularization of society and affirms that a return to traditional religious belief is the only means of its salvation. A fan of author H.G. Wells, Lewis said in a letter that with Out of the Silent Planet he was “trying to redeem for genuinely imaginative [and spiritual] purposes the form popularly known…as ‘science-fiction.’ ” It and many of Lewis’s later books were read aloud and critiqued at meetings of the Inklings, a group of fellow writers who influenced him significantly.

Out of the Silent Planet was followed by the equally successful Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). Those three novels, which form one of the earliest and best of science-fiction trilogies, center on an English linguist named Elwin Ransom who voyages to Mars and Venus and becomes involved in a cosmic struggle between good and evil in the solar system. The third book is valued particularly for the way it presents in narrative form ideas about the importance to individuals and societies of belief in traditional objective values that Lewis had developed earlier in his nonfiction The Abolition of Man (1943). These works and others by Lewis amounted to a defense of objective morality against trends toward subjectivism in modern education and against increasing philosophical skepticism in Europe in the mid-20th century.

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Lewis at the same time was becoming known in literary circles, initially by publishing articles and book reviews. His first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936), was highly praised and established his reputation as a leading figure in British literary studies. His later books on literature include A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (with E.M.W. Tillyard, 1939), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), Studies in Words (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964).

Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (1940) and four series of radio talks on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during World War II (later collected as Mere Christianity, 1952) brought him wide recognition as a lay expositor of Christian beliefs. Crucially, the BBC talks were impartial (they were relevant to Christians of all denominations), and they provided moral guidance to Britons seeking meaning and stability amid the war’s devastation. But those talks were far exceeded in popularity by The Screwtape Letters (1942), a work of epistolary fiction consisting of 31 letters in which an elderly, experienced devil named Screwtape instructs his junior, Wormwood, in the subtle art of tempting a young Christian convert. It became a best-seller in Britain and the United States.

His other books explaining and defending Christianity include Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), and The Four Loves (1960). The posthumously published Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), in which Lewis returned to the epistolary form, is a series of letters to an imaginary friend, Malcolm, dealing mostly with various kinds of approaches to problems arising from prayer, as well as other matters concerning liturgy, worship, and doctrine.

The Chronicles of Narnia

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In 1950 Lewis published what has become his most widely known book, the children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He went on to write six additional stories between 1951 and 1956, and together the series came to be known as The Chronicles of Narnia. The series, which describes the conflicts between good and evil that occur in the fictional kingdom of Narnia, is unified by Aslan, a noble lion, which is the form in which the Son of God usually appears in Narnia. The books were hugely popular, and numerous television and film adaptations appeared.

The Narnia books appeal widely because of their mythical qualities—the way they deal with the marvelous and supernatural, exploring basic issues of existence, such as origins, endings, meaning, and purpose. And they appeal, at least to some readers, because of their connections with Christianity, although Lewis said frequently that he did not intend the stories to be allegories and preferred to think of them as “supposals.” He wrote to a fifth-grade class in Maryland, “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.” Rather than trying to retell Bible stories in a different setting, Lewis was telling a new creation story that would echo other stories, classical and Christian, yet stand on its own and enrich the imaginative experiences of his readers.

The Narnian chronicles were followed by Lewis’s last work of fiction, the one he thought his best: Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the viewpoint of one of Psyche’s sisters, whom Lewis names Orual. It is the least popular of his novels but the most highly praised by literary critics.

Marriage and final years

Late in life Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American woman of Jewish heritage who had become a Christian in part through reading Lewis’s books. The two began a correspondence in 1950, while she was still married to writer William Gresham; by 1954 she and her husband, who had been unfaithful, were divorced, and she was living in England, becoming a close friend of Lewis. They wed in a secret civil ceremony in April 1956 to give her the legal right to remain in England. Six months later she was diagnosed with advanced cancer. In March 1957 they were married by an Anglican priest, who prayed that she would be healed. In what she and Lewis thought of as a miracle, her cancer went into a period of remission, allowing them several years of happiness together, until the cancer returned and she died, in July 1960.

Under the name N.W. Clerk, Lewis published A Grief Observed (1961), in which he poured out his sorrow and spiritual doubt and outlined the stages he went through in his grief process. (The story of their relationship was fictionalized in Shadowlands, a 1985 made-for-television movie revised for the stage in 1989 and revised again into a 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.) In early 1963 Lewis wrote his last book, Letters to Malcolm, and in the summer of 1963 he retired from his post at Cambridge, a few months before his death at age 64.