Sliding into Faith
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.
C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”
Clive Staples Lewis may be one of the most quoted men in history (if not the most quoted). He was a teacher of medieval literature but is remembered for his children’s fantasies and books defending Christianity. His mind was as sharp as any of his day or since, and his many books continue to find new readers even as those familiar with his work return to his pages frequently. He is so associated with Christianity that we cannot think of the one without the other. Yet he once was an atheist.
A Houseful of Books
C. S. Lewis—his friends called him Jack—was born on the cusp of the twentieth century, November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland, to parents who loved reading. “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.”1 Reading would be a lifelong habit.
Writing would become his other passion. As a child he wrote his own stories and illustrated them. Many children do this, but only a few do so throughout their lives. Since he had an endless source of books, he spent much of his time living in their pages.
It seems an idyllic life for a bookworm, but life has a way of turning cruel, even for those with giant intellects. A few months before Lewis turned ten, his mother died of cancer. In his book Surprised by Joy, Lewis relates events of the loss. Her decline had been noticeable even to the children, and she spent much of her time in a morphine-induced delirium. Doctors performed surgery in the home, as they did in those days. Lewis relates how he was in bed ill when his father walked in, tears in his eyes, to tell him she had died.
His mother’s death made an already somewhat reclusive boy even more so. It also changed his view of God, whom he now saw as cruel—if God existed at all. He would go on to reject Christianity and any belief in God.
Oxford
Lewis began studies at Oxford University in 1917, and he would spend much of his life there, first as a student and then as an instructor. The school became home to him, a feeling he kept even when his teaching duties took him to Cambridge for nearly a decade.
It was while at Oxford that he published his first book of poetry, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, in 1919. It was written under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. He would write another volume of poetry, Dymer, also under a pseudonym.
He began his teaching career in 1924, tutoring in philosophy, and soon became a Fellow of Magdalen College, one of the colleges in the Oxford University system. He taught English and literature.
Lewis read widely and was soon drawn to the works of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton. The work of both authors challenged Lewis’ atheism and worldview. Of MacDonald’s work he said, “What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize . . . my imagination.”2
Friends also served as catalysts in Lewis’ conversion. He had been surprised that brilliant men like Nevill Coghill and J. R. R. Tolkien were practicing Christians. As time passed, he could no longer reject God.
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.3
His conversion experience was one of motion, like a man on a journey. On separate occasion, a trip to the zoo, he became a believer in Jesus as the Son of God: “I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.”4
Lewis changed in the light of his newfound personal faith, especially where it touched his writing. He moved from writing poetry and focused on Christian themes. He would continue to write academic works, but the bulk of his work fell into the Christian literature camp and it is those works that have lived after him. They still sell well.
He was a gifted writer capable of moving from academic treatments (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama), to books defending the faith (Mere Christianity, A Case for Christianity, The Problem of Pain), to science fantasy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), children’s literature (The Chronicles of Narnia), and other categories. There are few writers who can work across genres and subjects with such skill as C. S. Lewis.
His work found an eager audience and the poor teacher was soon a well-to-do professor. Lewis’ work sold well during his lifetime and still outsells many books published today. Lewis’ work is filled with both heart and logic. He is one of the most quoted authors in history. Books of compiled quotations run six hundred pages.
During World War II, Lewis made a series of radio talks about Christianity to console a rattled British public. These radio addresses became the book Mere Christianity and made Lewis a household name.
He spoke of faith in a straightforward, logical manner. Apologetics is the study and practice of defending the faith against criticism and building a case for belief. Lewis was a skilled apologist. No atheist or agnostic who has read Lewis can say he was a superstitious, uneducated man. His logic is ironclad. People might disagree with his conclusion but they could not, and cannot, say he was unclear. This is true of both his fiction and nonfiction.
An Unchanged Changed Man
Lewis, now famous, remained in the lifestyle he had lived before. He continued to teach, continued to write academic work in his field, continued to read, and continued to live a simple life. He often used much of his income to help others, including poor students who couldn’t afford school fees, underfunded seminarians, and others.
In most ways, he remained the sometimes rumpled professor.
At the age of fifty-nine his life took a dramatic turn. In 1952 Joy Davidman Gresham showed up on the writer’s doorstep. She was an American in England and had come by to meet the man who, through two of his books—The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce—had brought her to faith. A friendship was born.
Joy’s life became more difficult. Her husband abandoned her and her two adolescent sons. She moved to London and was soon in financial trouble. Lewis provided the help she needed. Friendship expanded into love and they married in 1956.
Joy, who was sixteen years younger than Lewis, was ill, something he knew when they wed. Their marriage would last only four years. Cancer once again took someone he loved. She was only forty-five. His book A Grief Observed reveals his journey through the loss and the years that followed.
Friends?
C. S. Lewis had friends who often met at the Eagle and Child, a pub near the university. The group called themselves the Inklings. The gathering included author J. R. R. Tolkien and other intellectuals. There they would review writings of their members and others. “Member” is probably not the best term, since they were a simple gathering, not a club or a literary society.
Although supportive of each other, they could be critical, and one thing they criticized Lewis about was his Christian writing. It struck them as an unseemly thing for a scholar to do, but Lewis was unmoved. He continued the course he started after his conversion and the world is better for it. It is possible that Lewis’ emphasis on Christian writing cost him a full professorship, something he only achieved when another college offered such a position.
Unheralded Passing
C. S. Lewis died in 1963 of renal failure. Few paid attention to his passing because he died the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. New readers continue to discover him; readers familiar with his work return to it. Lewis has taken his readers to other planets and to mysterious lands on the other side of the wardrobe, has caused us to view our weaknesses uniquely and powerfully as discussed by a demon intent on tripping up a believer, has examined the purpose of pain and grief, and has caused us to think about the logic of faith. He is unrivaled in the church as writer, apologist, and thinker.