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One regarded him as a lively
independent thinker, but not specifically as a philosopher.(Basil Mitchell
in Walker 1990: 14)
He is
among the great men of letters in the English-speaking world, not only of
this century but ever; he is one of the most nourishing, relevant, and
effective religious thinkers of this century. (Como 1998: x)
The purpose of this brief sketch of Lewis’ life and work is to give the reader a
more rounded appreciation of these than could possibly be gained by even
the closest reading of what precedes it. While such information could be
easily found in other more expert sources, I feel obliged to say something
myself.[1] This sense of obligation springs from the obvious fact that the
reader may have read nothing else either by or about C.S. Lewis, and that
this dissertation, taken on its own, would give a rather one-sided
impression of the man.
The
principal error that one could fall into on reading this dissertation is of
thinking that C.S. Lewis was a philosopher, or was just a
philosopher. Indeed, even if he had read some of Lewis’ books, had these
been only Miracles, The Problem of Pain, or The Abolition
of Man the reader could still find himself under this impression. Lewis
was schooled in philosophy and for a short time taught philosophy at
Oxford,[2] but Lewis was not a philosopher by profession, despite his
ambitions at one time being very much in that direction. His first
permanent academic post was as a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where
he was a tutor and lecturer in English Language and Literature from 1925
until 1954. Following this, and taking a position created with him in mind,
Lewis became Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, at Cambridge
where he also held a fellowship at Magdalene College.
To avoid confusion
between the various members of his family who could be called Lewis, it
will help to point out that for some reason, from around the age of four,
C.S. Lewis liked to be referred to as “Jacksie” or “Jack” and would answer
to no other name. The name stuck, and he was ever after known as Jack to
his friends.
Clive
Staples Lewis was born in a suburb of Belfast in 1898 to Albert Lewis and
Florence (“Flora”) Hamilton. Jack seems to have inherited from them many of
the traits that made him such an able scholar. Albert shared with his son
an exceptional memory and a sharp wit, while Flora was like Jack in being
an avid reader with a great ability in logic. Unfortunately, Jack seems not
to have inherited his mother’s considerable mathematical skills. Indeed,
his lack of talent in this area nearly prevented him studying at Oxford.[3]
Jack also had an older brother, Warren, who as well as being his brother
was one of his closest friends. At an early age, Jack was fond of reading,
writing and drawing. Many of these activities were shared with his brother.
Together they created an imaginary world called Boxen, of which they wrote
many stories and drew many pictures. Warren took charge of “Indai” (=
India) and Jack, “Animal-land.” Jack later remarked that Animal-land
combined what were (at the time) his two chief literary pleasures: “dressed
animals” and “knights in armour.” I’ve never read any of the Boxen stories,
plays and histories, or seen any of the maps that Jack and Warren produced,
but the mere outlines provided in The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia
make them sound an impressive achievement for such young boys.[4] Jack enjoyed
books, and before he was fully ten years old (on 5th March 1908)
he recorded in his diary “Read Paradise Lost, reflections thereon.”[5]
It
was a few months after Jack made this entry in his diary that disaster
struck: his mother died of cancer on August 23rd. This was to be
a double blow to Jack, who effectively lost his father at the same time; he
was soon sent away to boarding school in England.
Albert’s choice of
schools left much to be desired, and Jack was deeply unhappy through his
school years. He was not, however, quite so unhappy as is suggested in his
autobiography, Surprised by Joy … and he later admitted as much. He
had a couple of inspiring teachers, continued to enjoy his books, took an
increasing interest in music (especially Wagner), engaged in many
stimulating conversions and regularly took a good walk. The last of the
boys’ schools was Malvern, and after “only one year [there], Jack was very
unhappy and physically exhausted … but it was only when he threatened to
shoot himself that Albert took his complaints seriously” (Schultz and West,
eds. 1998: 23). In September 1914, Jack was sent to complete his schooling
with Albert’s old (and retired) headmaster William T. Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick was
more than a little eccentric, as were his teaching methods. In an almost
machine like manner, he would stop a person mid-sentence and ask them to
clarify their terms, or to justify their claims. Indeed, Jack soon
discovered Kirkpatrick’s eccentricity when only shortly after stepping off
the train to meet him for the first time, in an attempt to “make
conversation” Jack remarked something to the effect that the “scenery” of
Surrey was much “wilder” than he had expected. Jack’s own description of
the event cannot be beaten.
To Kirkpatrick even the most casual remark was a “summons to
disputation.” Jack loved such arguments, and soon began to put on
“intellectual muscle.” Before long, he could hold his own in argument with
Kirkpatrick, who in the end complimented Jack by warning him against the
dangers of “excessive subtlety”. Kirkpatrick had put in place the
foundation in logic and argument that would later enable Jack to become a
master dialectician.
Under the tutelage
of Kirkpatrick and his wife, Jack was to become fluent in Greek, Latin,
French, and Italian, and competent in German. Indeed, such was his mastery
of languages that in later life he would play scrabble allowing words in
all known languages. More importantly, while at Great Bookham, Jack learned
skills and acquired (good) habits that stayed with him the rest of his
life: the habits and method of study.
Jack’s involvement
in the First World War began only shortly after sitting the exams for
entrance to Oxford, when in May 1917 he joined the Officer’s Training
Corps. He shared a room with “Paddy” Moore, who after a rocky start became
a good friend. In fulfilment of a promise to look after his family should
Paddy die in the war, Jack became a lifelong friend of the Moores. Jack
spent a few months on the front line in France, and twice found himself in
hospital. He passed much of his leave in the home of Mrs Moore, who was
separated but not divorced from her husband. The nature of Jack’s
relationship with Mrs Moore has been the subject of much speculation, the
chief question being whether they were lovers. They were certainly close
and following the war, as indeed during it, she was like a mother to him,
and he a son to her. In 1921, after two years back in Oxford, Jack had
completed his residency requirement and moved in with the Moores.
Jack never
revealed this last fact to his father who would have been outraged. Indeed,
even knowing what little he did, Albert was jealous of Jack’s friendship
with Mrs Moore. He wanted Jack to spend his holidays with him in Ireland.
But Jack desired far more privacy than Albert would allow, and regarded his
father as meddlesome, and not without reason: he often insisted on reading
Jack’s mail, with the consequence that Jack and his correspondents had to
be very careful about what they wrote. Aside from the earlier traumas of
being sent away to school, Jack was also deeply hurt when Albert failed to
visit him in hospital or when on leave. Jack’s time at university also put
strain on Albert’s already stretched financial resources, which could not
have helped matters. Despite this it is clear that Albert cared deeply for
his son and on Jack’s appointment to his Oxford fellowship Albert made a
touching entry in his diary: “I went to his room and burst into tears of
joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers had been
answered.” Although they were on somewhat better terms when Albert died in
1929, Jack always felt badly about how he had treated his father.
At
about the time that Lewis came back to Oxford following the war, his
collection of poems Spirits in Bondage was published. These had been
written from 1915 onward, many when he was just sixteen or seventeen. “The
theme of Spirits in Bondage, according to its author, is that nature
is malevolent and that any God that exists is outside the cosmic system”
(Sayer 1997: 144).
He
had come a long way from his earlier (albeit nominal) Christianity. At one
of his schools, it had been compulsory to go to church twice every Sunday.
It was then that Jack made his first concerted effort to obey his
conscience, to pray and read the Bible regularly. However, by the time he
was at Malvern these activities had evidently become a burden to him. His
first contact with other religious options coupled with the feeling that
his prayers were in vain, quickly led Jack to a firm atheistic commitment.
Once Jack began to reason about such things, he soon found that two sides
of his personality were at war with one another. On the one side was his
imagination, with a love of epic poetry and the mythological. On the other
side was his reason, which denied reality to all the things he loved. This
tension was to remain with Jack until he became a Christian in 1931.
In the meantime,
Jack was an undergraduate of University College, Oxford, where he excelled
in all his studies. By 1923, Lewis had gained a triple first in Honour Mods
(Greek and Latin texts), Greats (classical philosophy) and English Language
and Literature. Despite such academic prowess it was another year before
Jack had an academic post, and the first was only temporary … he lectured,
as mentioned earlier, in place of University College’s philosophy tutor
E.F. Carritt, who was going on leave. Having applied for all the
fellowships in philosophy and English that were offered by Oxford colleges
Jack was beginning to despair. The last such post he applied for was to
teach English at Magdalen. He did not hold out much hope of securing the
position because many more experienced men, including his old tutor, had
also applied. Lewis put his success down to the fact that he was probably
the only candidate qualified in both English and philosophy, an attractive
combination because English was at the time a relatively new subject and it
wasn’t clear how many would choose to read it. Thus, if Jack found himself
with spare time he could “help out” in philosophy. Given that he had
struggled to find work for so long, and was using much of his income (some
of which at that time still came from his father) to support the Moores it
is no surprise to find Jack writing to Albert, “I need hardly say that I
would have agreed to coach a troupe of performing blackbirds in the
quadrangle.”
According to all
reports, Jack was a gifted lecturer and an excellent tutor. Tutorials
generally had the conventional format: the student would read an essay he
had been asked to prepare, and then the two would sit and discuss it. Some
found Lewis’ argumentative style difficult, but most of his tutees seem to
have enjoyed and appreciated their weekly meetings.
Under
the influence of such friends as Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien (famous
as the author of The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, but
also professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford), Jack was beginning his journey
toward Christian belief. He had met Barfield when they were both
undergraduates, and they were ever after engaged in one long argument (the
“Great War” as they came to call it). Under the influence of Barfield
(himself a convert to Anthroposophy) Lewis came to see that since the
present is a ‘period of history’ like any other and is subject to its own
characteristic illusions; one couldn’t reject some view simply because it
was ‘outdated.’ Barfield also seems to have been largely responsible for
Lewis’ move from atheism to Idealism/Pantheism: it was he who brought Lewis
to the belief that knowledge could not be accounted for within a
naturalistic world-view.[6]
According to his
own account, there was one major factor in his next philosophical
development, his move from Pantheism to Theism. This was his inability to
give coherent expression to his belief, either in word or in deed. Whenever
he took his belief seriously, Lewis found himself referring to God with
personal pronouns, and praying; activities that were flatly inconsistent
with his belief. These may sound like weak reasons, and might lead one to
suspect that Jack would simply rather have been a theist than a pantheist.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Pantheism made a much greater
appeal to his imagination, and seemed to be less morally demanding.
Moreover, pantheism did not involve a God who could ‘interfere’.
Various
factors combined to bring about the final step to Christian belief.
Firstly, Lewis found that all, or nearly all, of his favourite authors were
Christians. One of these was G.K. Chesterton, whom Lewis enjoyed “for his
goodness.” He read Chesterton’s classic The Everlasting Man, and
found, for the first time, that a Christian outline of history could make
sense. Around the same time, in 1926, one of his colleagues, the “hardest
boiled of all the atheists [he] ever met” (Lewis 1955b: 178) made the (to
Lewis) astonishing remark that the evidence for the historicity of the
Gospels was in fact surprisingly good. If even he wasn’t safe,
thought Lewis, where was he to turn?
It
took a lengthy conversation, lasting until after 3am, with Tolkien and
another friend Hugo Dyson, before Lewis would be ready to accept
Christianity. This conversation revolved around the nature of myth, a
literary genre that fascinated Lewis. There were, he realised, mythic
themes in Christian thinking … but where he was attracted to myth in other
forms, he found the mythic element in Christianity distasteful. Until then
he had thought no myth could be true and defined a myth as “lies breathed
through silver.” Tolkien and Dyson led him to reconsider. A few days later
(October 1, 1931 [7]) he wrote to his long standing friend Arthur Greeves:
“I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in
Christ … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do
with it.”
Jack’s
conversion brought reconciliation between his reason and imagination.[8]
Under the influence of George MacDonald,[9] Lewis’ imagination had already
been, as he termed it, “baptised,” but now he could embrace the mythical,
the poetic and the epic in a way that he had previously found impossible.
That there was one central ‘myth,’ much like the others, except that it was
actually true, gave legitimacy to the meaning he had always felt to be
there in other myths and legends.[10]
Lewis,
Tolkien and Dyson were also members of a group that became known as the
Inklings.[11] The important years of this writing group were from the mid
1930s to the end of the 1940s. This was “a group of male friends, all
people of talent, who met together at least once a week to talk about
ideas, to read to each other for pleasure and criticism pieces they were
writing, and to enjoy a good evening of ‘the cut and parry of prolonged,
fierce, masculine argument.’ [The group] in fact embodied C.S. Lewis’ ideals
of life and pleasure” (Duriez 2000: 96). Since the academic climate in
which the Inklings lived and worked was largely unsympathetic to their
ideals, the group gave its members support and encouragement that was not
to be found elsewhere. Between them, this group published a huge amount of
work, and much of it had gained something from being read to the Inklings
in draft form. It was here that the majority of Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings (“the New Hobbit”) had its first airing, the same goes for
Lewis’ The Problem of Pain and, I am sure, many of his other
writings.
Through
the 1930s and ‘40s, Lewis was incredibly busy. He continued to lecture and
tutor at Magdalen, and wrote voluminously. His recognition as the author of
such classics of popular theology as The Problem of Pain and The
Screwtape Letters only served to increase his already large
correspondence. Warren, by then retired, became Jack’s secretary, looking
after his appointments and much of his mail. But Warren’s presence was no
unalloyed blessing: he had become an alcoholic. Further, Mrs Moore was
still living with him at their home, the Kilns. Due to illness, she
required much looking after, which inevitably fell to Jack. In 1949, this
overwork put Jack in hospital. He was sorely in need of a break. Lewis’
workload would have been significantly decreased had he been offered a
professorship. But this was never to happen at Oxford; perhaps partly
because of his success as a popular author, which other academics saw as
unbecoming in a scholar. It was not until 1951, when Mrs Moore died, that
Lewis was able to consider either a long holiday or a job outside of
Oxford, and it was 1954 before he took the newly created chair of Medieval
and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, where he also became a
fellow of Magdalene College. He kept his home in Oxford and still saw many
of his friends, though soon gave up commuting to attend the meetings of the
Oxford Socratic Club, a debating society devoted to open discussion of
questions relating to Christianity, of which he had been the president
since its founding in 1942.[12]
The
most important event of the next few years was surely his marriage to Joy
Davidman Gresham. She had been converted from Marxism to Christianity at
least partly through Lewis’ writings. Jack and Joy exchanged many letters,
and when she moved to England, and subsequently to Oxford, they became
close friends. She was intelligent, a match for Lewis. She was an
accomplished writer (publishing works of poetry, fiction, and theology),
and it was against her that Jack played Scrabble allowing, as I mentioned before,
words in all known languages. The
marriage was a deeply happy one. Lewis confessed to a friend, “I never
expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my
twenties.” This happiness was to be short lived. Cancer reared its ugly head
again and Joy died in 1960. They had only been married for three years and
four months.
Lewis
himself died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President John F.
Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. Of all the writings he left us, Lewis is
probably best known as the author of The Lion, The Witch and The
Wardrobe, one of seven children’s stories, all written between 1950 and
1956, which together comprise The Chronicles of Narnia. He also
wrote stories for ‘grown-ups,’ a science-fiction trilogy and a reworking of
the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Till We Have Faces. His scholarly
works include The Allegory of Love, The Personal Heresy, A
Preface to Paradise Lost, Studies in Words, An Experiment in
Criticism, The Discarded Image and his contribution to the
Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. His works of popular theology and
philosophy include Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The
Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, Miracles, Reflections
on the Psalms, The Four Loves, and Letters to Malcolm:
Chiefly on Prayer. Besides this Lewis wrote some 153 essays, many of
which are now available in various collections of his writings. He preached
many sermons. During the war he spoke on Christianity to the R.A.F. and
gave the radio talks that were become Mere Christianity. Indeed,
during World War Two his was arguably the second best known voice in
country (the best known being that of Winston Churchill). By 1947, Lewis
had become so well known as to appear on the cover of Time Magazine.
His
influence has been immense, and C.S. Lewis has often – with justification –
been called the most influential Christian apologist of the 20th
Century.[13] He was a thickly built man, with a rather ruddy complexion,
and often thought to have the look of a farmer. Shabby seems to be
the word most commonly used about his appearance. His brother commented
that Lewis’ clothes were a matter of complete indifference to him. One
writer, commenting on Lewis’ appearance even compared him with a scarecrow,
but added that to compare Lewis with a scarecrow would be unkind – to the
scarecrow! (Dundas-Grant 1979: 230). As this suggests, while Lewis was a
man of remarkable learning he was very down-to-earth, and was once referred
to by a truck-driver as “a real nice bloke.” (Morris 1979: 198) According
to Walter Hooper, Literary Advisor to the C.S. Lewis Estate, Lewis was “the
most thoroughly converted man [he] ever met”.
Last Updated: 15th
March 2003
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