Clive Staples Lewis, known popularly as C. S. Lewis or Jack as he preferred friends to call him, was easily among the intellectual giants of the last century. His oeuvre spanned dozens of books ranging across medieval literary criticism, fictional fantasy, and children’s literature. In an era when it was decidedly not cool to be a Christian writer and popular apologist, he was its most influential. While his spiritual journey is less known, it produced Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Weight of Glory, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, A Grief Observed, and many more as he navigated it.
Lewis was born to book-loving Irish parents in Belfast as the 19th century wound down. Their reading interests were diverse and their literary appetite was unlimited so the house became one sprawling library. Lewis’ autobiography recalls that ...
There were books in the study, books in the dining room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most empathically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.
I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.
Lost in these books, Lewis became friends with Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He read Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, The Odyssey, mythology, and Norse legends. The works of Voltaire, Milton, and Spenser became old friends, and his private tutor taught him to read Greek so he could read original texts for pleasure.
When he was seven years old, Jack’s brother, Warren who was three years older, was shipped off to an English boarding school, costing him his closest companion. Jack thus became even more reclusive and bookish – living in a world of words inhabited by armored knights and anthropomorphic animals who inspired him to write and illustrate his own books.
Jack’s mother died of cancer just three months short of his tenth birthday. The family’s Protestant faith was only nominally religious, not that a 10-year would have the faith to weather the loss of an adored parent. When his prayers for his mother’s recovery were not answered, Jack began to disbelieve the God of the Bible his mother had given him because the God of his experience was cruel, perhaps a fantasy. Jack’s slow drift toward atheism became complete within a year or so, and his spiritual emptiness was compounded by his father’s grief which left both boys estranged from their only living parent. Jack was packed off to a boarding school – rarely a good experience in early 20th century England. His once warm and satisfying home life was never to be again.
By his own admission, C. S. Lewis entered early adulthood searching. That search brought him under the influence of the writings of George MacDonald, a 19th century Scot Presbyterian minister and novelist, whose works in his own time were more popular than those of Charles Dickens. MacDonald’s fantasy entitled Phantastes forcefully challenged Jack’s atheism. After reading other MacDonald works, he confessed that they had "baptized" his imagination, preparing him for a world beyond the material one he had grown so tired of.
The influence of George MacDonald helped turn Jack away from his atheism, and in his book, The Great Divorce, the narrator, who is the embodiment of Jack, meets MacDonald in Heaven. The narrator speaks:
... 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 connection 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.
Another writer who influenced the direction of Jack’s life was the English novelist, journalist, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton. His book, The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, claimed at its outset “when we do make [the] imaginative effort to see the whole thing [Christianity] from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside.” Lewis would later admit:
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
Even as MacDonald and Chesterton were stirring Lewis's thoughts, respected friends and fellow students were challenging his atheism. Then shortly after joining the faculty at Magdalen College of Oxford, he became close friends with men whose logic he admired – only to find them seriously thoughtful Christians. Among them was J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and later the creator of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien above others was the friend who most influenced Jack’s ultimate repudiation of atheism.
Slowly Jack began to regain belief in the teachings of Christianity. And yet he described how he fought against Christianity’s appealing logic up to the moment he fully embraced it. He was brought into Christianity, he said, like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape."
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Jack described this struggle:
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.
During the last decade of a life he had lived as a bachelor, Jack met Joy Gresham who was then separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband. She was an American writer, Jewish (at a time when anti-Semitism was openly practiced), a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity as a consequence of reading The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters, two of Lewis’ books. She had come to England with her two sons to visit her spiritual mentor. While there, her husband abandoned her for another woman. She divorced him and remained in England.
Lewis found Gresham an agreeable intellectual companion and in time they became personal friends. Warren, Jack’s brother, wrote of their relationship:
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 humor and a sense of fun.
Gresham gradually fell into financial troubles and Jack underwrote the education of her two sons at a boarding school. Their common interests in the boys’ education, literature and life eventually led to love and they were married in 1956. Jack was 59 years old and his new wife was 16 years his junior. But that did not prevent a happy marriage and they had four bliss-filled years until she complained one day of a painful hip that was later diagnosed as a deadly form of bone cancer.
Her death, like the death of his mother, dealt Lewis another crisis of faith. He expressed it in his book, A Grief Observed, as he poured out grief, anger, and doubts that would persist for several years. His lament was so personal and raw that A Grief Observed was originally released under a pseudonym to prevent readers from knowing he was its author. Only after his own death was his authorship made public.
Jack penned these words as her epithet near where her ashes were scattered:
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
Between 1947 and 1954, Lewis wrote a series of seven fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, which would become his best known work. Over 100 million copies in 47 languages have been sold.
While these seven novels seem to have been written for children, they also appeal to adults. Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume for Charles Dodgson, was a logician. So his tale of Alice in Wonderland is a play on logic, which appeals to adults, just as its content appeals to children. Likewise adults see sacrifice and redemption in the characters of Narnia even as children see only their mythic qualities.
Although Lewis originally conceived what would become The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939, he did not finish writing the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, until 1949. He described its origin in an essay:
…all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day, when I was about 40, I said to myself: “Let's try to make a story about it.”
Narnia is a parallel world, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, whose portal is a wardrobe. Through it four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter Narnia where they meet various characters in the Chronicles. Only Aslan the Lion is carried through every sequel of the Chronicles and it becomes clear that he is a prototype of Christ.
Lewis continues:
At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.
I haven’t the space to recap each of the Chronicles. You should read them. But absent some knowledge of Lewis’ spiritual quest, something would be lost to an adult reader. Lewis intended that the Chronicles tell a good story, and they certainly succeed in doing that. But he also intended to use Narnia as a canvas to demonstrate moral truths about the conflict of good and evil. To that end, each of the Chronicles employs a motif which Tolkien called a eucatastrophe – a good catastrophe – in which each sequel ends happily. Good conquers evil. And each sequel ends with the children being sent back to the “real world” – until the last one.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, therefore, ends with Aslan defeating the wicked White Witch. In a world gone wrong, Aslan thaws winter and returns Christmas and spring to Narnia. The children return home tumbling out of the wardrobe.
Prince Caspian ends with the restoration of the rightful King Caspian to the throne and the expulsion and death of the usurper Miraz. All seven of the noble lords are accounted for as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ends and the ship’s crew reaches the far end of the eastern sea – the limit of Aslan’s realm.
The Silver Chair concludes with King Caspian returning to his youthful self through death and resurrection, Prince Rilian is released from his enchantment, and the enchantress is destroyed. As The Horse and His Boy concludes, Shasta and Aravis live as Crown Prince and Princess of Archenland, Narnia is freed, and the Calormenes are defeated. The Magician's Nephew ends with the healing of Digory's dying mother, and in a striking similarity to the Genesis story, Narnia is created and the evil Jadis is expelled.
The Last Battle employs the eucatastrophe motif but also this sequel is the final happy ending for all the Chronicles of Narnia. Once again the world has gone wrong and Narnia itself is destroyed. But all that is good – man and beast – is transported to Aslan’s land, a Narnia-like place yet better in every respect and clearly a symbol of Heaven.
The story and the series end with Aslan speaking to the children explaining how they got into Narnia this last time:
“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be,' said Aslan.
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
C. S. Lewis died of renal failure on November 22, 1963 – almost a half century ago this past Tuesday. Despite his fame, his passing received little note in the national press, which was occupied with another event that occurred on the same day in Dallas, Texas – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Lewis was born to book-loving Irish parents in Belfast as the 19th century wound down. Their reading interests were diverse and their literary appetite was unlimited so the house became one sprawling library. Lewis’ autobiography recalls that ...
There were books in the study, books in the dining room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most empathically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.
I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.
Lost in these books, Lewis became friends with Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He read Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, The Odyssey, mythology, and Norse legends. The works of Voltaire, Milton, and Spenser became old friends, and his private tutor taught him to read Greek so he could read original texts for pleasure.
When he was seven years old, Jack’s brother, Warren who was three years older, was shipped off to an English boarding school, costing him his closest companion. Jack thus became even more reclusive and bookish – living in a world of words inhabited by armored knights and anthropomorphic animals who inspired him to write and illustrate his own books.
Jack’s mother died of cancer just three months short of his tenth birthday. The family’s Protestant faith was only nominally religious, not that a 10-year would have the faith to weather the loss of an adored parent. When his prayers for his mother’s recovery were not answered, Jack began to disbelieve the God of the Bible his mother had given him because the God of his experience was cruel, perhaps a fantasy. Jack’s slow drift toward atheism became complete within a year or so, and his spiritual emptiness was compounded by his father’s grief which left both boys estranged from their only living parent. Jack was packed off to a boarding school – rarely a good experience in early 20th century England. His once warm and satisfying home life was never to be again.
By his own admission, C. S. Lewis entered early adulthood searching. That search brought him under the influence of the writings of George MacDonald, a 19th century Scot Presbyterian minister and novelist, whose works in his own time were more popular than those of Charles Dickens. MacDonald’s fantasy entitled Phantastes forcefully challenged Jack’s atheism. After reading other MacDonald works, he confessed that they had "baptized" his imagination, preparing him for a world beyond the material one he had grown so tired of.
The influence of George MacDonald helped turn Jack away from his atheism, and in his book, The Great Divorce, the narrator, who is the embodiment of Jack, meets MacDonald in Heaven. The narrator speaks:
... 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 connection 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.
Another writer who influenced the direction of Jack’s life was the English novelist, journalist, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton. His book, The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, claimed at its outset “when we do make [the] imaginative effort to see the whole thing [Christianity] from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside.” Lewis would later admit:
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
Even as MacDonald and Chesterton were stirring Lewis's thoughts, respected friends and fellow students were challenging his atheism. Then shortly after joining the faculty at Magdalen College of Oxford, he became close friends with men whose logic he admired – only to find them seriously thoughtful Christians. Among them was J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and later the creator of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien above others was the friend who most influenced Jack’s ultimate repudiation of atheism.
Slowly Jack began to regain belief in the teachings of Christianity. And yet he described how he fought against Christianity’s appealing logic up to the moment he fully embraced it. He was brought into Christianity, he said, like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape."
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Jack described this struggle:
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.
During the last decade of a life he had lived as a bachelor, Jack met Joy Gresham who was then separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband. She was an American writer, Jewish (at a time when anti-Semitism was openly practiced), a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity as a consequence of reading The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters, two of Lewis’ books. She had come to England with her two sons to visit her spiritual mentor. While there, her husband abandoned her for another woman. She divorced him and remained in England.
Lewis found Gresham an agreeable intellectual companion and in time they became personal friends. Warren, Jack’s brother, wrote of their relationship:
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 humor and a sense of fun.
Gresham gradually fell into financial troubles and Jack underwrote the education of her two sons at a boarding school. Their common interests in the boys’ education, literature and life eventually led to love and they were married in 1956. Jack was 59 years old and his new wife was 16 years his junior. But that did not prevent a happy marriage and they had four bliss-filled years until she complained one day of a painful hip that was later diagnosed as a deadly form of bone cancer.
Her death, like the death of his mother, dealt Lewis another crisis of faith. He expressed it in his book, A Grief Observed, as he poured out grief, anger, and doubts that would persist for several years. His lament was so personal and raw that A Grief Observed was originally released under a pseudonym to prevent readers from knowing he was its author. Only after his own death was his authorship made public.
Jack penned these words as her epithet near where her ashes were scattered:
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
Between 1947 and 1954, Lewis wrote a series of seven fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, which would become his best known work. Over 100 million copies in 47 languages have been sold.
While these seven novels seem to have been written for children, they also appeal to adults. Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume for Charles Dodgson, was a logician. So his tale of Alice in Wonderland is a play on logic, which appeals to adults, just as its content appeals to children. Likewise adults see sacrifice and redemption in the characters of Narnia even as children see only their mythic qualities.
Although Lewis originally conceived what would become The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939, he did not finish writing the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, until 1949. He described its origin in an essay:
…all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day, when I was about 40, I said to myself: “Let's try to make a story about it.”
Narnia is a parallel world, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, whose portal is a wardrobe. Through it four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter Narnia where they meet various characters in the Chronicles. Only Aslan the Lion is carried through every sequel of the Chronicles and it becomes clear that he is a prototype of Christ.
Lewis continues:
At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.
I haven’t the space to recap each of the Chronicles. You should read them. But absent some knowledge of Lewis’ spiritual quest, something would be lost to an adult reader. Lewis intended that the Chronicles tell a good story, and they certainly succeed in doing that. But he also intended to use Narnia as a canvas to demonstrate moral truths about the conflict of good and evil. To that end, each of the Chronicles employs a motif which Tolkien called a eucatastrophe – a good catastrophe – in which each sequel ends happily. Good conquers evil. And each sequel ends with the children being sent back to the “real world” – until the last one.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, therefore, ends with Aslan defeating the wicked White Witch. In a world gone wrong, Aslan thaws winter and returns Christmas and spring to Narnia. The children return home tumbling out of the wardrobe.
Prince Caspian ends with the restoration of the rightful King Caspian to the throne and the expulsion and death of the usurper Miraz. All seven of the noble lords are accounted for as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ends and the ship’s crew reaches the far end of the eastern sea – the limit of Aslan’s realm.
The Silver Chair concludes with King Caspian returning to his youthful self through death and resurrection, Prince Rilian is released from his enchantment, and the enchantress is destroyed. As The Horse and His Boy concludes, Shasta and Aravis live as Crown Prince and Princess of Archenland, Narnia is freed, and the Calormenes are defeated. The Magician's Nephew ends with the healing of Digory's dying mother, and in a striking similarity to the Genesis story, Narnia is created and the evil Jadis is expelled.
The Last Battle employs the eucatastrophe motif but also this sequel is the final happy ending for all the Chronicles of Narnia. Once again the world has gone wrong and Narnia itself is destroyed. But all that is good – man and beast – is transported to Aslan’s land, a Narnia-like place yet better in every respect and clearly a symbol of Heaven.
The story and the series end with Aslan speaking to the children explaining how they got into Narnia this last time:
“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be,' said Aslan.
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
C. S. Lewis died of renal failure on November 22, 1963 – almost a half century ago this past Tuesday. Despite his fame, his passing received little note in the national press, which was occupied with another event that occurred on the same day in Dallas, Texas – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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