C. S.

Lewis
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C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis

Born 29 November 1898
Belfast, Ireland
22 November 1963 (aged 64)
Died
Oxford, England
Occupation Novelist, scholar, broadcaster
Fantasy, science fiction, Christian
Genres
apologetics, children's literature
The Chronicles of Narnia
Mere Christianity
The Allegory of Love
Notable
The Screwtape Letters
work(s)
The Space Trilogy
Till We Have Faces
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Signature

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as
C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was an Irish-born British[1]
novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian
apologist. He is well known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The
Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both authors were leading figures in the
English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as
the "Inklings". According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptised in the
Church of Ireland at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to
the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to Christianity,
becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England".[2] His conversion had a
profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of
Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

In 1956, he married the American writer Joy Gresham, 17 years his junior, who died four
years later of cancer at the age of 45.

Lewis died three years after his wife, as the result of renal failure. His death came one
week before his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal, as he died on
22 November 1963 – the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
and the same day another famous author, Aldous Huxley, died.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions
of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have
been popularised on stage, TV, radio and cinema.

[edit] Biography
[edit] Childhood

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 29 November 1898.[3] His father was
Albert James Lewis (1863–1929), a solicitor whose father, Richard, had come to Ireland
from Wales during the mid 19th century. His mother was Florence (Flora) Augusta Lewis
née Hamilton (1862–1908), the daughter of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) priest. He had
one older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis (Warnie). At the age of four, shortly after his
dog Jacksie was killed by a car, Lewis announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first
he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was
known to friends and family for the rest of his life. When he was seven, his family moved
into "Little Lea", the family home of his childhood, in the Strandtown area of East
Belfast.

Little Lea

As a 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 to read was as easy as walking into a field and "finding a new blade of grass."[4]

Lewis was schooled by private tutors before being sent to the Wynyard School in
Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1908, just after his mother's death from cancer. Lewis' brother
had 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 a
psychiatric hospital. Lewis then 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. He was
then 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 remained until the
following June. He found the school socially competitive.[5] It was during this time that
15-year-old Lewis abandoned his childhood Christian faith and became an atheist,
becoming interested in mythology and the occult.[6] After leaving Malvern he studied
privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's old tutor and former headmaster of
Lurgan College.

As a teenager, he was wonderstruck by the songs and legends of what he called

Northernness, the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic sagas.
These legends intensified an inner longing he later called "joy". He also grew to love
nature; its beauty reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North
reminded him of the beauties of nature. His teenage writings moved away from the tales
of Boxen, and he began using different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture
his new-found 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 sound
reasoning. In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College, Oxford.[7]

[edit] "My Irish life"

Plaque on a park-bench in Bangor, County Down

Lewis experienced a certain cultural shock on first arriving in England: "No Englishman
will be able to understand my first impressions of England", Lewis wrote in Surprised by
Joy, continuing, "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."[8]

From boyhood Lewis immersed[9] himself firstly in Norse and Greek and then in Irish
mythology and literature and expressed an interest in the Irish language,[citation needed] though
there is not much evidence that he laboured 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."[10]

In 1921, Lewis met Yeats twice, since Yeats had moved to Oxford.[11] 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."[12] 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."[10] After his conversion to
Christianity, his interests gravitated towards Christian spirituality and away from pagan
Celtic mysticism.[citation needed]

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 on the invincible flippancy and dulness of
the Anglo-Saxon race. After all, there is no doubt, ami, that the Irish are the only people:
with all their faults I would not gladly live or die among another folk."[13] Throughout his
life, he sought out the company of other Irish living in England[14] and visited Northern
Ireland regularly, even spending his honeymoon there in 1958 at the Old Inn,
Crawfordsburn.[15] He called this "my Irish life."[16]

Various critics have suggested that it was Lewis's dismay over sectarian conflict in his
native Belfast that led him to eventually adopt such an ecumenical brand of Christianity.
[17]
As one critic has said, 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."[18] On the other hand, Paul Stevens of the University of Toronto
has written that "Lewis's 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."[19]

[edit] World War I

In 1917, Lewis left his studies to volunteer in the British Army. During World War I he
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 1918, Lewis was wounded by an English shell falling short of its target,[20]
and suffered from depression and homesickness during his convalescence. Upon 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.

[edit] Jane Moore

While being trained for the army Lewis shared a room with another cadet, Edward
Courtnay Francis "Paddy" Moore (1898–1918). Maureen Moore, Paddy's sister, said that
the two made a mutual pact[21] 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 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 did not visit Lewis.

Lewis lived with and cared for Mrs. Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s.
He routinely introduced her as his "mother", and referred to her as such in letters. Lewis,
whose own mother had died when he was a child and whose father was distant,
demanding and eccentric, developed a deeply affectionate friendship with Mrs. Moore.

Speculation regarding their relationship re-surfaced with the publication of A. N.

Wilson's biography of Lewis. Wilson (who had never met Lewis) attempted to make a
case for their having been lovers for a time. Wilson's biography was not the first to
address the question of Lewis's relationship with Mrs. Moore. George Sayer, who knew
Lewis for 29 years, sought to shed light on the relationship during the period of 14 years
prior to Lewis's conversion to Christianity, in his biography Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis,
in which he wrote:

Were they lovers? Owen Barfield, who knew Jack well in the 1920s, once said that he
thought the likelihood was "fifty-fifty." Although she was twenty-six years older than
Jack, she was still a handsome woman, and he was certainly infatuated with her. But it
seems very odd, if they were lovers, that he would call her "mother." We know, too, that
they did not share the same bedroom. It seems most likely that he was bound to her by
the promise he had given to Paddy and that his promise was reinforced by his love for her
as his second mother.[22]

Later Sayer changed his mind. In the introduction to the 1997 edition of his biography of
Lewis he wrote:

I have had to alter my opinion of Lewis's relationship with Mrs. Moore. In chapter eight
of this book I wrote that I was uncertain about whether they were lovers. Now after
conversations with Mrs. Moore's daughter, Maureen, and a consideration of the way in
which their bedrooms were arranged at The Kilns, I am quite certain that they were.

Lewis spoke well of Mrs. Moore throughout his life, saying to his friend George Sayer,
"She was generous and taught me to be generous, too."

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 and his brother Warnie moved, with Mrs. Moore and her daughter
Maureen, into "The Kilns", a house in the district of Headington Quarry on the outskirts
of Oxford (now part of the suburb of Risinghurst). They all contributed financially to the
purchase of the house, which passed to Maureen, then Dame Maureen Dunbar, Btss.,
when Warren died in 1973.

Mrs. 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.

[edit] Conversion to Christianity

Raised in a church-going family in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became an atheist at 15,
though he later described his young self as being paradoxically "very angry with God for
not existing".[23]

His early separation from Christianity began when he started to view his religion as a
chore and as a duty;[citation needed] around this time he also gained an interest in the occult as
his studies expanded to include such topics.[citation needed] Lewis quoted Lucretius (De rerum
natura, 5.198–9) as having one of the strongest arguments for atheism:[24]

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam

Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa
"Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see."

Lewis's interest in the works of George MacDonald was part of what turned him from
atheism. This can be seen particularly well through this passage in Lewis's 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.[25]

Influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, whom he
seems to have met for the first time on 11 May 1926, and by the book The Everlasting
Man by G. K. Chesterton, he slowly rediscovered Christianity. He fought greatly up to
the moment of his conversion noting that he was brought into Christianity like a prodigal,
"kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to
escape."[26] 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.[27]

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 Tolkien, who had hoped he would convert to Roman Catholicism.
[28]

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 Letters to Malcolm) and mortal sin (The
Screwtape Letters)[citation needed], which are generally considered to be Roman Catholic
teachings although they are also widely held in Anglicanism (particularly in high church
Anglo-Catholic circles). 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.
[citation needed]

[edit] Joy Gresham

In Lewis's later life, he corresponded with and later met Joy Davidman Gresham, an
American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism
to Christianity.[29] She was separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband, the novelist
William L. Gresham, and came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas.[30]
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.[31] 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 her
hospital bed in March 1957.[32]

Gresham's cancer soon went into a 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 Gresham's two sons after her death. While Douglas Gresham is,
like Lewis and his mother, a Christian,[33] David Gresham turned to the faith into which
his mother had been born and became Orthodox Jewish in his beliefs. His mother's
writings had featured the Jews, particularly one "shohet" (ritual slaughterer), in an
unsympathetic manner. David informed Lewis that he was going to become a ritual
slaughterer in order to present this type of Jewish religious functionary to the world in a
more favourable light.[citation needed] In a 2005 interview, Douglas Gresham acknowledged he
and his brother were not close, but he did say they are in email contact.[34] Douglas
remains involved in the affairs of the Lewis estate.

[edit] 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 15
July 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 the 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 22 November 1963 Lewis collapsed in his
bedroom at 5:30 pm and died a few minutes later, exactly one week before his 65th
birthday. He is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington, Oxford
(Friends of Holy Trinity Church). Almost 10 years later, his brother Warren Hamilton
"Warnie" Lewis, who died on 9 April 1973, was buried next to him.[35]

Media coverage of his death was almost completely 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.[36]

[edit] Career
[edit] The scholar

Magdalen College, Oxford

Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a
triple first, the highest honours in three areas of study.[37] Lewis then 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 English 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 book "A Preface to Paradise Lost" is still one of the most valuable 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.

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met on Tuesday mornings in 1939

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, Nevill Coghill,
Lord David Cecil, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warren Lewis. At
least one scholar points to December 1929 as the Inklings' beginning date.[38] Lewis's
friendship with Coghill and Tolkien grew during their time as members of the Kolbítar,
an Old Norse reading group Tolkien founded and which ended around the time of the
inception of the Inklings.[39] 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 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.[40]

[edit] The novelist

In addition to his scholarly work, Lewis wrote a number of popular novels, including his
science fiction The Space Trilogy and his fantasy fiction Narnian books, most dealing
implicitly with Christian themes such as sin, humanity's fall from grace, and redemption.

[edit] The Pilgrim's Regress

Main article: The Pilgrim's Regress

His first novel after becoming a Christian was The Pilgrim's Regress, which depicted his
experience with Christianity in the style of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. The
book was poorly received by critics at the time,[citation needed] although D. Martyn Lloyd-
Jones, one of Lewis's contemporaries at Oxford, gave him much-valued encouragement.
Asked by Lloyd-Jones when he would write another book, Lewis replied, "When I
understand the meaning of prayer." (Murray 1990)

[edit] 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 de-humanising trends in contemporary 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 main
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, depicts a new Garden of
Eden on the planet Venus, a new Adam and Eve, and a new "serpent figure" to tempt
them. The story can be seen as a hypothesis of what could have happened if the terrestrial
Eve had resisted the serpent's temptation and avoided the Fall of Man. The last novel in
the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, further develops the theme of nihilistic science
threatening traditional human values embodied in Arthurian legend (and making
reference to Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth).

Many of the ideas in the Trilogy, particularly the opposition to de-humanization in the
third volume, are presented more formally in Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, based on his
series of lectures at Durham University in 1943. Lewis stayed in Durham, where he was
overwhelmed by the cathedral. That Hideous Strength is in fact set in the environs of
'Edgestow' university, a small English university like Durham, though Lewis disclaims
any other resemblance between the two.[41]

Walter Hooper, Lewis's literary executor, discovered a fragment of another science-

fiction novel by Lewis, The Dark Tower, but it is unfinished; it is not clear whether the
book was intended as part of the same series of novels. The manuscript was eventually
published in 1977, though Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog doubts its authenticity.

[edit] The Chronicles of Narnia

The Mountains of Mourne inspired Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia. About
them, Lewis wrote "I have seen landscapes ... which, under a particular light, make me
feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge."[42]
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 books contain Christian ideas intended to be easily accessible to young readers. In
addition to Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters from Greek and Roman
mythology as well as traditional British and Irish fairy tales.

[edit] Other works

Lewis wrote a number of works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, The Great Divorce, is
a short novella in which a few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are
met by people who dwell there. 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 Alighieri, and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Another short
work, The Screwtape Letters, consists of suave 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, which he thought of as
his most mature and masterly work of fiction but which 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.

He also wrote The Four Loves, which rhetorically explains four loves including
friendship, eros, affection, and charity or caritas.

In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Lewis had begun co-
writing with J.R.R. Tolkien, but which was never completed, was discovered.[43]

[edit] 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 in 2000.
[44]
Due to Lewis's approach to religious belief as a skeptic, and his following conversion,
he has been called "The Apostle to the Skeptics."

Lewis was very 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, such as "How could a good
God allow pain to exist in the world?". 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.[45]

According to George Sayer, a loss in a 1948 debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, also a
Christian, led Lewis to reevaluate his role as an apologist, and his future works
concentrated on devotional literature and children's books.[46] Anscombe, however, had a
completely different recollection of the debate's outcome and its emotional effect on
Lewis.[46] Victor Reppert also disputes Sayer, listing some of Lewis's post-1948
apologetic publications, including the second and revised edition of his Miracles in 1960,
in which Lewis addressed Anscombe's criticism.[47] Noteworthy too is Roger Teichman's
suggestion in The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe[48] that the intellectual impact of
Anscombe's paper on Lewis's philosophical self-confidence should not be overrated: "...
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. Certainly Anscombe herself believed that Lewis' argument, though
flawed, was getting at something very important; she thought that this came out more in
the improved version of it that Lewis presented in a subsequent edition of Miracles –
though that version also had 'much to criticize in it'."
Lewis also wrote an autobiography titled 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 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)

[edit] Trilemma

Main article: Lewis's trilemma

In a much-cited passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis challenged the view that Jesus,
although a great moral teacher, was not God. He argued that Jesus made several implicit
claims to divinity, which would logically exclude this:

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)

This argument, which Lewis did not invent but developed and popularised, is sometimes
referred to as "Lewis's trilemma". It has been used by the Christian apologist Josh
McDowell in his book More Than a Carpenter (McDowell 2001). Although widely
repeated in Christian apologetic literature, it has been largely ignored by professional
theologians and biblical scholars and is regarded by some as logically unsound and an
example of false dilemma.[49]

Lewis's Christian apologetics, and this argument in particular, have been criticized.
Philosopher John Beversluis described Lewis's arguments as "textually careless and
theologically unreliable".[50] John Hick argues that New Testament scholars do not today
support the view that Jesus claimed to be God.[51] The Anglican bishop N. T. Wright
commented that the 'trilemma' argument "doesn't work as history, and it backfires
dangerously when historical critics question his reading of the Gospels."[52]

Lewis used a similar argument in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Digory
Kirke advises the young heroes that their sister's claims of a magical world must logically
be taken as either lies, madness, or truth.[47]

[edit] Universal morality

One of the main theses in Lewis's 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 people all over the earth know what this law is and when 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 cannot 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)

Lewis also had fairly progressive views on the topic of "animal morality", in particular
the suffering of animals, as is evidenced by several of his essays: most notably, On
Vivisection[53] and "On the Pains of Animals."[54][55]

[edit] Legacy

A statue of Digory Kirke (C. S. Lewis's fictional alter ego from The Magician's Nephew)
in front of the wardrobe of his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in East
Belfast, Northern Ireland

Lewis continues to attract a wide readership. In 2008, The Times ranked him eleventh on
their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[56] Readers of his fiction are often
unaware of what Lewis considered the Christian themes of his works. His Christian
apologetics are read and quoted by members of many Christian denominations, from
Catholics to Mormons (Pratt 1998).

Lewis has been the subject of several biographies, a few of which were written by some
of his close friends, such as Roger Lancelyn Green and George Sayer. In 1985 the
screenplay Shadowlands by William Nicholson, dramatizing Lewis's life and relationship
with Joy Davidman Gresham, was aired on British TV (starring Joss Ackland as Lewis
and Claire Bloom as Joy). In 1989 this was staged as a theatre play (starring Nigel
Hawthorne) and in 1993 Shadowlands became a feature film, starring Anthony Hopkins
as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy. In 2005, a one hour made for TV movie entitled C. S.
Lewis: Beyond Narnia (starring Anton Rodgers) provided a general synopsis of Lewis's
life.

Many books have been inspired by Lewis, including A Severe Mercy by his
correspondent and friend 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, an atheist and so fierce a critic of Lewis's work as to be dubbed
"the anti-Lewis",[57][58] considers him a negative influence and has accused Lewis of
featuring religious propaganda, misogyny, racism and emotional sadism (BBC News
2005) in his books. Authors of adult fantasy literature such as Tim Powers have also
testified to being influenced by Lewis's work[citation needed].

Most of Lewis’ posthumous work has been edited by his literary executor, Walter
Hooper. An independent Lewis scholar, the late Kathryn Lindskoog, argued that Hooper's
scholarship is not reliable and that he has made false statements and attributed forged
works to Lewis (Lindskoog 2001). C. S. Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham, denies the
forgery claims, saying that "The whole controversy thing was engineered for very
personal reasons... Her fanciful theories have been pretty thoroughly discredited."
(Gresham 2007).

A bronze statue of Lewis's character Digory, from The Magician's Nephew, stands in
Belfast's Holywood Arches in front of the Holywood Road Library (BBC News 2004).

Lewis was strongly opposed to the creation of live-action versions of his works. His
major concern was that the anthropomorphic animal characters "when taken out of
narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare". This was said
in the context of the 1950s, when technology would not allow the special effects required
to make a coherent, robust film version of Narnia.

Several C. S. Lewis Societies exist around the world, including one which was founded
in Oxford in 1982 to discuss papers on the life and works of Lewis and the other Inklings,
and generally appreciate all things Lewisian.[59] His name is also used by a variety of
Christian organizations, often with a concern for maintaining conservative Christian
values in education or literary studies.

The 2005 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was based on the
first installment of the Narnia series. Film adaptations have been made of two other
books he wrote: Prince Caspian (released on 16 May 2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader (released on 2 December 2010). A film adaptation of The Great Divorce is slated
for release in 2011.[60]
A number of bands and musicians—including Andrew Peterson, Thrice, Sixpence None
the Richer, and Phil Keaggy—have been influenced by Lewis's work[citation needed].

Lewis is featured as a main character in the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica

series by John A. Owen