C.S. Lewis was a British author, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian who lived from November 29, 1898, until November 22, 1963. He taught English literature at Magdalene College in Cambridge from 1954 to 1963 and Magdalen College in Oxford from 1925 to 1954. Although The Chronicles of Narnia is his best-known book, he is also renowned for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain, as well as his other fiction, including The Screwtape Letters and The Space Trilogy.
The author of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, was good friends with C.S. Lewis. Both men were active members of the Inklings, an unofficial Oxford literary society, and taught English at the University of Oxford. Lewis was christened in the Church of Ireland, but during his childhood, he drifted away from his faith, according to his 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy. At the age of 32, C.S. Lewis became a “ordinary layman of the Church of England” after returning to Anglicanism under the influence of Tolkien and other friends. Lewis’s work was greatly influenced by his faith, and he received widespread praise for his radio broadcasts about Christianity throughout the war.
He authored over 30 books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into over 30 languages. In addition to being the best-selling books, The Chronicles of Narnia has gained popularity on theater, television, radio, and film. Christian academics from a wide range of denominations frequently reference his philosophical works.
C.S. Lewis married American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; she passed away at the age of 45 from cancer four years later. Lewis passed away at the age of 64 from renal failure on November 22, 1963. On the 50th anniversary of his passing in 2013, Lewis received a memorial at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
C.S. Lewis
On November 29, 1898, C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ulster, Ireland (before to the split). He was the son of solicitor Albert James Lewis (1863-1929), whose father, Richard Lewis, had immigrated to Ireland from Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Lewis’s mother was Florence Augusta Lewis née Hamilton (1862–1908), also called Flora. She was the great-granddaughter of Bishop Hugh Hamilton and John Staples, and the daughter of Thomas Hamilton, a clergyman in the Church of Ireland. She was Queen’s College Belfast’s first female graduate in mathematics. “Warnie” or Warren Hamilton Lewis was Lewis’ older brother. On January 29, 1899, his maternal grandfather baptized him at St. Mark’s Church in Dundela.
C.S. Lewis, then four years old, took the name Jacksie after his dog was killed by a horse-drawn carriage. He initially refused to answer to any other name, but he eventually came to accept Jack, which became his lifelong nickname among friends and family. His childhood home, “Little Lea,” in the Strandtown neighborhood of East Belfast, was moved into by his family when he was seven years old.
He was captivated by anthropomorphic animals as a child, and he frequently penned and painted his own animal tales after falling in love with Beatrix Potter’s works. He and his brother Warnie invented the fantasy land of Boxen, which is populated and governed by animals. From a young age, Lewis had a passion for reading. He subsequently said that it was as simple as “finding a new blade of grass” in a field to find anything to read because his father’s home was stocked with books.
C.S. Lewis received individual tutoring until he was nine years old, at which point his mother passed away from cancer in 1908. After that, his father sent him to live and attend Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. Three years before, Lewis’s brother had enrolled there. Shortly after, the school’s lack of students led to its closure. After that, C.S. Lewis went to Campbell College, which is approximately a mile from his house in Belfast’s east, but he departed after a few months because of respiratory issues.
After that, he was transferred back to England to attend the preparatory school Cherbourg House, which Lewis called “Chartres” in his autobiography, in the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire. He became an atheist during this time, rejecting the Christianity he had been taught as a child. He also became fascinated with European mythology and the occult during this period.
C.S. Lewis started attending Malvern College in September 1913 and stayed there until June of the following year. He thought the school was socially competitive, and some of his housemates, including Donald Hardman, had conflicting opinions about him. Later, Hardman recalled:
He was a bit of a rebel; he had a wonderful sense of humour and was a past master of mimicry. I think he took his work seriously, but nothing else; never took any interest in games and never played any so for as I can remember unless he had to. … I met him in Oxford after the war and noticed he had changed, but was staggered to find him the author of The Screwtape Letters. When I knew him I can only describe him as a riotously amusing atheist. He really was pretty foul mouthed about it.
William T. Kirkpatrick, a former principal of Lurgan College and his father’s former tutor, tutored him privately after he left Malvern.
The songs and stories of what Lewis dubbed Northernness—the old Scandinavian literature preserved in the Icelandic sagas—awed him as a teenager. An inner yearning that he would later refer to as “joy” was heightened by these legends. He also developed a passion for nature, whose splendor reminded him of Northern tales, which in turn reminded him of nature’s grandeur. His works as a teenager shifted away from Boxen’s stories and he started experimenting with other artistic mediums, such opera and epic poetry, in an attempt to express his newly discovered passion for nature and Norse mythology.
He developed a love of Greek literature and mythology while studying with Kirkpatrick (“The Great Knock,” as Lewis later referred to him), who also helped him become more adept at debating and arguing. Lewis received a scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1916.
Mere Christianity
“No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, describing the culture shock he received upon first coming in England. “I was surrounded by odd English accents that sounded like demon voices. The English scenery, however, was the worse. I have since made up the argument, but at that time I had a loathing for England that took years to overcome.
C.S. Lewis had been engrossed in Greek and Norse mythology since he was a young lad, and then Irish mythology and literature. Although there is little proof that he worked hard to master it, he also showed interest in the Irish language. He became especially fond of W. B. Yeats, partly because of Yeats’s poetic appropriation of Ireland’s Celtic history. C.S. Lewis remarked in a letter to a friend, “I have found a writer who is very similar to me, and I know you would like reading W. B. Yeats. He explores our ancient Irish mythology in plays and poems with a unique beauty and energy.
Since Yeats had relocated to Oxford in 1921, C.S. Lewis had two meetings with him. 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.” Lewis was shocked to discover that his English contemporaries had little interest in Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement. Lewis wrote: “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.” Lewis was thinking of sending his work to the main Dublin publishers early in his career.
His interests shifted from pagan Celtic mysticism to Christian theology after he became a Christian (as opposed to Celtic Christian mysticism).
There were times when C.S. Lewis was a little tongue-in-cheek in his chauvinism toward the English. “Like all Irish people who meet in England, we ended by criticisms on the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race,” he wrote, recounting an experience with a fellow Irishman. Even with all of their flaws, I wouldn’t want to live or die among other people, therefore there’s no question, ami, that the Irish are the only people. Throughout his life, he frequently traveled to Northern Ireland and sought out the companionship of other Irish individuals residing in England. He referred to it as “my Irish life” and spent his honeymoon there in 1958 at the Old Inn in Crawfordsburn.
Various commentators have stated that it was Lewis’s dismay over the sectarian turmoil in his birthplace Belfast which caused him to eventually adopt such an ecumenical style of Christianity. According to a critic, Lewis “repeatedly extolled the virtues of all branches of the Christian faith, emphasising a need for unity among Christians around what the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton called ‘Mere Christianity’, the core doctrinal beliefs that all denominations share” .
According to a view by Paul Stevens of the University of Toronto, “Lewis’ mere Christianity masked many of the political prejudices of an old-fashioned Ulster Protestant, a native of middle-class Belfast, for whom British withdrawal from Northern Ireland even in the 1950s and 1960s was unthinkable.”
C.S. Lewis Conversion Story
C.S. Lewis grew up in a devout household that belonged to the Church of Ireland. Although he subsequently stated that he was both “very angry with God for not existing” and “equally angry with him for creating a world,” he became an atheist at the age of 15. As his studies broadened to encompass such subjects, he also developed an interest in the occult, which coincided with his early disengagement from Christianity as he began to see his faith as a chore and a duty. Lewis cited one of the most compelling arguments for atheism from Lucretius (De rerum natura, 5.198–9):
Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa
which he artistically paraphrased as follows:
Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.
This is not a precise translation; it is a very lyrical one. William Ellery Leonard’s more exact translation is as follows: “That in no wise the nature of all things / For us was fashioned by a power divine – / So great the faults it stands encumbered with.”
One factor that led Lewis to abandon his atheism was his fascination with the writings of Scottish author George MacDonald. When the semi-autobiographical protagonist sees MacDonald in Heaven in chapter nine of Lewis’s The Great Divorce, this is very evident:
… 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.
C.S. Lewis’s Argument for God
Arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, whom he appears to have first met on May 11, 1926, and G. K. Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man ultimately led him to return to Christianity. C.S. Lewis vehemently opposed conversion, claiming that he was adopted similar to a prodigal, “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape” when led into Christianity. He recalled his last fight in Surprised by Joy:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], 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[a] 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.
Following a lengthy debate with his close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson during a late-night stroll along Addison’s Walk, C.S. Lewis, who had converted to theism in 1929, became a Christian in 1931. He documents committing himself specifically to Christianity while traveling with his brother to the zoo. Tolkien, who had thought that he would join the Catholic Church, was slightly disappointed when he joined the Church of England.
Illness and Death
C.S. Lewis developed recurring nephritis in early June 1961, which developed into persistent low-grade sepsis. Despite missing the autumn term at Cambridge due to his illness, he returned in April of 1962 once his health started to progressively improve. Lewis’s health kept getting better, and by early 1963, his buddy George Sayer said he was completely himself.
He became ill on July 15 of that year and was sent to the hospital. He suffered a heart attack at 5:00 p.m. the following day and went into a coma, but he woke up unexpectedly at 2:00 p.m. the next day. C.S. Lewis returned to the Kilns after being released from the hospital, but he was too sick to resume his job. He consequently quit his position at Cambridge in August 1963.
In mid-November, Lewis received a diagnosis of end-stage kidney failure as his health continued to deteriorate. around the age of 64, he passed only a few minutes after collapsing in his bedroom around 5:30 p.m. on November 22. He is laid to rest at Holy Trinity Church’s churchyard inGeorge Sayer claims that C.S. Lewis reexamined his role as an apologist after losing a 1948 argument with another Christian, Elizabeth Anscombe. His subsequent writings focused on children’s novels and devotional literature. Anscombe’s memory of the debate’s conclusion and Lewis’s emotional response was very different. By citing some of Lewis’s post-1948 apologetic works, such as the second and updated version of his Miracles in 1960, in which Lewis responded to Anscombe’s criticism, Victor Reppert refutes Sayer as well. Headington, Oxford. He was buried in the same grave as his brother Warren, who passed away on April 9, 1973.
News of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which took place the same day (about 55 minutes after Lewis’s collapse), as well as the passing of English author Aldous Huxley, the creator of Brave New World, dominated media coverage of Lewis’s passing. Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley was inspired by this occurrence. According to the Episcopal Church’s church calendar, Lewis is remembered on November 22.
Apologetics
In addition to his work as a professor of English and a fiction writer, Lewis is widely considered to be one of the most significant Christian apologetics of his era. Christianity Today named Mere Christianity the finest book of the 20th century in 2000. He has been dubbed “The Apostle to the Skeptics” because of his skeptic’s perspective on religion and his conversion.
C.S. Lewis had a strong desire to use reason to support the existence of God and refute metaphysical naturalism. “How could a good God allow pain to exist in the world?” was one of the common criticisms of Christianity that were addressed in one way or another in Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. His writing, including a large portion of Mere Christianity, began as screenplays for radio speeches or lectures, and he also became a well-known lecturer and broadcaster.
George Sayer claims that Lewis reexamined his role as an apologist after losing a 1948 argument with another Christian, Elizabeth Anscombe. His subsequent writings focused on children’s novels and devotional literature. Anscombe’s memory of the debate’s conclusion and Lewis’s emotional response was very different. By citing some of Lewis’s post-1948 apologetic works, such as the second and updated version of his Miracles in 1960, in which Lewis responded to Anscombe’s criticism, Victor Reppert refutes Sayer as well.
In The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, Roger Teichman makes the noteworthy argument that the intellectual influence of Anscombe’s paper on Lewis’s philosophical self-confidence shouldn’t be overestimated: “… it seems unlikely that he felt as irretrievably crushed as some of his acquaintances have made out; the episode is probably an inflated legend, in the same category as the affair of Wittgenstein’s Poker.” Anscombe herself undoubtedly thought that Lewis’s argument, despite its flaws, was attempting to make a very significant point; she felt that this was more evident in the revised form of the argument that Lewis offered in a later edition of Miracles, even though that version also contained “much to criticize in it.”
