C. S. Lewis

by Michael E. Travers

Clive Staples Lewis, one of the twentieth century’s best known Christian authors and apologists, was born in Belfast, Ireland on November 29, 1898. “Jack,” as he came to be known, and his older brother, Warren (“Warnie”), enjoyed an ideal childhood. When Jack was nine years old, however, his mother died of cancer, even though he had prayed for his mother’s recovery. Her death was, he said, his “first religious experience”—he became an atheist.

Jack was sent to several boarding schools after his mother died, and eventually studied with W. T. Kirkpatrick (“The Great Knock”) to prepare for the entrance examinations to Oxford University. He went to Oxford in 1917, but joined the war effort that year. He was wounded in action in April 1918 and returned to his studies at Oxford, taking “firsts” in Philosophy and “the Greats” (English Literature). In 1925 he was appointed a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, a post he held until he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1954.

Through a series of events chronicled in his “spiritual autobiography,” Surprised by Joy, Lewis the atheist found himself confronted with the claims of Christianity at every turn. In 1929, he converted to theism, “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” and, in September 1931 to Christianity. From the beginning, Lewis understood the claims of Christ on his life, and he quickly became an apologist for the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

Lewis was a prodigious writer. In 1938 he published Out of the Silent Planet, the first of his science fiction trilogy; he completed the trilogy in the 1940s with Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. During World War II, he delivered the BBC Radio Broadcast Talks which were published later as Mere Christianity, along with several works of apologetics: The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, and The Great Divorce.

Best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis wrote one of these stories a year, beginning with the publication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1950. In his novels, Lewis suffuses his Christianity throughout the tales. As he wrote in one of his essays, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” In all of his imaginative writings, he wanted to prepare people to hear the gospel. In addition to this prodigious output of important Christian writings, he was also a published and acknowledged scholar of Medieval and Renaissance English literature.

Late in life Lewis married an American woman, Joy Davidman Gresham. He married her first in 1956 in a civil ceremony to allow her and her sons to remain in England, but then married her in an ecclesiastical ceremony at her hospital bedside in 1957. Joy and Jack were deeply in love, but Joy suffered from cancer. After a period of remission, she died in July 1960. Lewis wrote the agonizing A Grief Observed as he wrestled with God over her suffering and death.

C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the famous atheist, Aldous Huxley.

He once wrote, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date,” (The Four Loves). It is true of all of Lewis’s writings that they draw our attention to eternal truths and challenge us to live in their light.