C.S. Lewis

         C.S. Lewis was born Clive Staples Lewis in Belfast, Ireland on November 29, 1898. Lewis gave himself the nickname of Jack as a young toddler and from then on became known by as Jack to most of his family, friends, colleagues, and fans. Lewis grew up in a big house with lots of rooms and lots of space even though most of that space was taken up by books, piles and piles of books, which made for a fun childhood growing up in Ireland. Jack was very close to his older brother Warren, and it was with Warren that he created his first imaginative land, Boxen. Boxen would be his first creation of a land with animals and pageantry and knights in shining armor, and he would use this imagination to go on and have an illustrious career as an author. He was raised in a Christian home by his parents, Florence and Albert Lewis. One of the most impactful times of Lewis’ life occurred when he was just ten years old when his mother Flora died of cancer. In Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Life Lewis describes his mother’s cancer by what he heard, which was everything because the doctor came right to the patients’ home back then. He heard the screams of his mom and the tears of his dad as he gave his children the news of his wife and their mothers’ death. Later this story of his mom and her battle with cancer and her ultimate death is described in The Magician’s Nephew, what would become the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia series Lewis wrote.  Not only did Lewis write about the impact of his mother’s death, but that time also caused Lewis to lose something else as well, his relationship with God. He struggled with believing in God despite his ten years of being raised within the Christian religion, but he did not understand a God who took his mother and whose father struggled to accept her death and therefore could no longer relate to his children and sent them off to boarding school.  

Lewis did not like Campbell College, the boarding school in England and missed his home in Belfast. Much to Lewis’ happiness the school closed in 1910 and he was sent back home. A year later he was sent back to school, Cherboug House  in England, only to leave there four years later to Great Bookham, Surrey where he met W.T. “The Great Knock” Kirkpatrick. Mr. Kirkpatrick was a friend of Lewis’ father and he became Lewis’ private tutor. One of the great influences on Lewis’ life he would later describe Kirkpatrick in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Life by saying “My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished.” Kirkpatrick taught Lewis about literature, specifically the classics, and he was so hard on him that he demanded that Lewis read them and understand them in their original language. So Lewis became versed in the Greek, Latin, Italian and German languages. It was said that the credit for getting Lewis into Oxford should be given to Kirkpatrick, and he continued to help him even while he was attended college there. By the time Lewis was in college he had been an atheist for quite some time now, in other words he no longer believed in God.  Lewis’ time at Oxford was briefly interrupted by his service in World War I, but he was wounded by shrapnel and sent home within a year’s time. Oxford, the town in England and also the college became very much a part of Lewis’ life from the time he enrolled in 1916 until the end of his life.

Lewis’ time at Oxford introduced him to many who would greatly influence his life and therefore his writing. Two such authors were George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. MacDonald’s book Phantastes was profoundly impactful on Lewis, challenging his way of thinking, especially when it came to his lack of belief in God. Another influence came through Mrs. Janie King Moore, she was the mother of Paddy Moore whom Lewis met while at Oxford and served with in World War I, but Paddy was killed in the line of duty. Lewis lived with Mrs. Moore and her daughter upon his return home from World War I, and that relationship then introduced him to others who would cause him to begin to think about what he valued, materialistically and intellectually, mainly Mrs. Moore’s brother. Many of his colleagues at Oxford also did not believe Lewis to be the atheist he claimed, and they would present things to Lewis to think about and ask questions that Lewis could not answer if there were no God. These authors and colleagues at Oxford helped form a group of men who shared ideas and questioned one another in ways that others had not thought about yet. This group was known as The Inklings, and it was through this group that Lewis met J.R.R. Tolkien, who would later go on to be a great author himself in writing The Hobbit series.  During all of this time in the 1920’s Lewis was writing and actually published his first work, Spirits in Bondage and then some years later Dymer, both of those were written under a pseudonym of Clive Hamilton. They were both collections of poetry, and in this time of Lewis’ life he was serving at Magdalen College where he was teaching English language and literature.  

Much of the 1920’s for Lewis was spent wrestling with the thoughts and challenges in his mind and presented to him by what he read and those that he associated most closely with. By 1931 Lewis had converted back to Christianity and the author that many of us know today began publishing his works. Lewis wrote for all generations, but no matter the audience his underlying theme of Christianity is present. His first full work in 1933 was The Pilgrim’s Regress, and this work set the tone for how Lewis wrote. He was influenced by his faith but on a level where he felt like he understood it so deeply and he wanted his reader to understand it that way as well. Lewis did not want to be direct with his reader he wanted his reader to question and challenge and research their thoughts just as he did during the time he no longer believed in God and all of his associates and friends and members of The Inklings were doing the same thing to him in order to get him to think. In 1936 he won the Hawthornden Prize for his book The Allegory of Love. His first sci-fi book came in 1938 which was called Out of the Silent Planet the first book in a trilogy that deals with sin and desire. Two of his more adult works are Mere Christianity, 1941, and The Screwtape Letters, 1942. Mere Christianity is a collection of some of the talks and speeches he would give on the radio during World War II about Christianity.   

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