C.S. Lewis

Black-and-white portrait photograph of w:C.S. Lewis smoking

C. S. Lewis — A Life Among Books

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), known to his family and friends as “Jack”, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He grew up in an exceptionally bookish household, surrounded by the extensive library of his parents. Books were not merely entertainment to the young Lewis: the worlds he discovered between their covers seemed almost as real and meaningful to him as the world outside. Together with his older brother Warren, he spent much of his childhood reading, imagining and creating stories of his own.

The death of his mother when Lewis was only nine profoundly changed his childhood. Books, imagination and intellectual curiosity increasingly became places of refuge. His fascination with mythology, medieval literature and the great questions of human existence remained with him throughout his life and eventually shaped an extraordinary career as scholar, literary critic, novelist and Christian thinker.

Scholar, Writer and Thinker

Lewis studied at Oxford and became one of the leading literary scholars of his generation. For many years he taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University in 1954. His scholarly reputation was firmly established with The Allegory of Love (1936), an influential study of medieval literature, followed by works including A Preface to Paradise Lost and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

His intellectual interests ranged far beyond academic scholarship. Lewis believed that literature allows us temporarily to escape the limitations of our own period and experience the world through other minds. This conviction explains his particular affection for old books: they provide perspectives formed in different centuries and can therefore expose assumptions in our own age that we might otherwise never recognise.

Christianity and the Search for Meaning

As a young man Lewis became an atheist, but after a long intellectual and personal journey he returned first to belief in God and subsequently to Christianity. His conversion in the early 1930s profoundly influenced the remainder of his life and writing. For Lewis, reason and imagination were not opponents; both could contribute to understanding the deeper questions of human existence.

During the Second World War he became widely known through a series of BBC radio broadcasts explaining Christian belief to a general audience. These talks eventually contributed to Mere Christianity (1952), one of his best-known works. Other influential books included The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, The Great Divorce and The Four Loves.

Narnia and the Power of Imagination

Lewis reached an entirely different audience through fiction. His science-fiction Space Trilogy — Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength — combined adventure with philosophical and theological ideas. But his greatest popular success came with the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950.

Through Narnia, Lewis demonstrated something central to his entire view of literature: imagination can sometimes communicate ideas more powerfully than argument. Children entered Narnia simply for the adventure, while older readers discovered mythology, morality, sacrifice, friendship and faith beneath the stories. More than seventy years later, the books continue to introduce new generations to Lewis’s imaginative world.

C. S. Lewis and Old Books

One reason Lewis belongs on this particular part of my website is his defence of reading books from the past. He warned that if we read only contemporary authors, we remain trapped within the assumptions and prejudices of our own age. Older writers certainly had their blind spots, but because their mistakes are often different from ours, reading them can help us recognise our own.

That idea has always appealed to me. An old book is more than an old object. It is a conversation across time. When we open a book written fifty, a hundred or a thousand years ago, someone from another world begins speaking to us again. The paper may have yellowed and the language may sometimes seem unfamiliar, but the human questions behind it often remain remarkably recognizable.

Three C. S. Lewises

Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield once suggested that there were effectively three C. S. Lewises: the distinguished Oxford and Cambridge scholar; the successful author of fantasy and science fiction; and the enormously influential Christian writer and broadcaster. Remarkably, Lewis achieved lasting recognition in all three fields, often reaching audiences who knew little about his work in the others.

Perhaps all three, however, were expressions of the same person: a man fascinated by words, ideas, imagination and the accumulated wisdom contained in books. His own writings ranged from medieval literary scholarship to children’s fantasy, autobiography, theology, poetry and correspondence, but behind them all stood the boy from Belfast who had discovered very early that an entire world could exist between two covers.

A Lasting Legacy

Lewis died in Oxford on 22 November 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the writer Aldous Huxley died. His books, however, have never disappeared. The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves and many of his scholarly works remain widely read and continually return in new editions.

And perhaps Lewis himself would have appreciated the simplest way of remembering him: read the books rather than merely reading about the man who wrote them. For someone who spent his life surrounded by literature and who understood how profoundly books can enlarge our world, there could hardly be a more appropriate legacy.

Selected Works

The Allegory of Love (1936); Out of the Silent Planet (1938); The Problem of Pain (1940); The Screwtape Letters (1942); A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942); Perelandra (1943); That Hideous Strength (1945); The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950); Mere Christianity (1952); The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956); Surprised by Joy (1955); Till We Have Faces (1956); The Four Loves (1960); An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

Source and Acknowledgement

The earlier version of this page incorporated biographical material by Bruce L. Edwards, reproduced with permission from the author. This revised version has been substantially rewritten and condensed for this website.Source: 
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