“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.”
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British author, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. He is best known as the author of The Chronicleso f Narnia. Lewis was a close friend of J.R.R Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Both men served on the English faculty at the University of Oxford and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings.
Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into over 30 languages and have sold millions of copies.
C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast in Ulster, Ireland, in 1898. His father was a lawyer whose own father had come to Ireland from Wales, during the mid-19th century. Lewis’s mother was the first female mathematics graduate to study at Queen’s College Belfast.
When C.S.’s dog, Jacksie, was fatally struck by a horse-drawn carriage, the four-year-old Lewis adopted the name 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.
As a boy, Lewis was fascinated with anthropomorphic animals; he fell in love with Beatrix Potter”s stories and often wrote and illustrated his own animal tales.
Lewis was schooled by private tutors until age nine, when his mother died in 1908, from cancer. His father sent him to England to live and study in Hertfordshire. It was during this time that he abandoned the Christianity he was taught as a child and became an atheist. During this time he also developed a fascination with European mythology and the occult.1
As a teenager Lewis 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 that he would later call “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. He had a love of Greek literature and mythology. In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College, Oxford.2
Lewis entered Oxford in 1917, studying at University College. Shortly after, he joined the Officers’ Training Corps at the university as his “most promising route into the army.” Within months of entering Oxford, he was shipped by the British Army to France to fight in the First World War. .[3]
On his 19th birthday, 1917, Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France, where he experienced trench warfare for the first time. Lewis was wounded and two of his colleagues were killed by a British shell falling short of its target. He was depressed and homesick during his convalescence. Upon his recovery he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was demobilized in December, 1918, and soon restarted his studies. In a later letter, Lewis stated that his experience of the horrors of war, along with the loss of his mother and unhappiness in school, were the basis of his pessimism and atheism.
After Lewis returned to Oxford, he received a First in Honor in Greek and Latin literature, a First in Philosophy and Ancient History, and a First in English. In 1924, he became a philosophy tutor at University College and was elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, where he served for 29 years until 1954.[4]
During his army training, Lewis shared a room with another cadet, Edward “Paddy” Moore (1898–1918). Paddy’s sister, said that the two made a mutual pact that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both of their families. Paddy was killed in action in 1918, and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced Lewis to his mother, Janie King Moore, and a friendship quickly sprang up between Lewis, who was 18 when they met, and Janie, who was 45.
Lewis lived with and cared for Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s. He routinely introduced her as his mother and developed a deeply affectionate friendship with her. Lewis’s own mother had died when he was a child, while his father was distant, demanding, and eccentric. George Sayer knew Lewis for 29 years. He sought to shed light on the relationship. In his biography Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, he asked: 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. 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 and a consideration of the way in which their bedrooms were arranged at The Kilns, I am quite certain that they were.[5]
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 1930, Lewis moved into The Kilns with his brother, Mrs. Moore, and her daughter. The Kilns was a house in the district of Headington Quarry, on the outskirts of Oxford. After the outbreak of WWII, the Lewises took child refugees from London and other cities.
They all contributed financially to the purchase of the house. Mrs. Moore had 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.
He eventually returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J.R.R. Tolkien. After his conversion to theism in 1929, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931. Lewis was a committed Anglican who upheld a largely orthodox Anglican theology.
Lewis died in 1963 of kidney failure, at age 64. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honored with a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Media coverage of Lewis’s death was largely overshadowed by news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, approximately 55 minutes following Lewis’s collapse.
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
- Prince Caspian (1951)
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
- The Silver Chair (1953)
- The Horse and His Boy (1954)
- The Magician’s Nephew (1955)
- The Last Battle (1956) [1]
The Space Trilogy (Sci-Fi / Cosmic Fiction)
- Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
- Perelandra (1943)
- That Hideous Strength (1945)
- The Dark Tower (1977, published after his death) [1]
Key Theological and Philosophical Works
- The Problem of Pain (1940)
- The Screwtape Letters (1942)
- Mere Christianity (1952)
- The Great Divorce (1945)
- Miracles (1947)
- The Abolition of Man (1943)
- The Four Loves (1960) [1, 2, 3]
Standalone Fiction and Autobiography
- The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933)
- Till We Have Faces (1956)
- Surprised by Joy (1955) – Spiritual autobiography
Lewis continues to attract a wide readership. In 2008, The Times (London) ranked him eleventh on their list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” *
1 Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York: Harper Collins. 1952. 56.
2 “About C.S. Lewis.” CSLewis.com. Archived from the original on 6 April
2016. Retrieved 4 February 2016.
3 Lewis, C.S. (1955). Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life. New York
City: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 128-186.
4 Edwards, Bruce L. (2007). C.S. Lewis: An Examined Life. Greenwood
Publishing Group. 150–151, 197–199. Archived from the original on 7 March
2017. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
5 “C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Janie Moore, by James O’Fee.”
impalapublications.com. Archived from the original on 22 June 2017.
Retrieved 16 June 2019.
* “The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945.” The Times. 5 January 2008. Archived from original, April 25, 2011. Retrieved 1 February 2010.
