I have been privileged to appear as a guest on the Counsel of Trent podcast several times over the past year. In these episodes, I have had the opportunity to speak with the host, Trent Horn, about my favorite author, C.S. Lewis.
Although Lewis left an indelible literary and theological mark on the twentieth century, many people know him only for his children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia, but know next to nothing about the man himself or his other works. In this article, I would like to introduce you more fully to the man behind the Lion, whose books have significantly shaped modern Christianity and apologetics.
1. He wasn’t English.
People often assume that C.S. Lewis was English, especially after listening to one of the few surviving recordings of his voice. They are surprised to discover that he was actually born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was, however, educated in England and lived in Oxford for most of his adult life.
2. He had several names.
He was baptized Clive Staples Lewis, but this was not what his friends called him. When Lewis was about four, a neighborhood dog named Jacksie of whom he was particularly fond died. Afterward, he refused to respond to any other name, although it was eventually shortened to “Jack.”
3. He experienced tragedy as a child.
Lewis’s mother died of cancer when he was nine. Of that experience, he wrote “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life” (Surprised by Joy, Harcourt [1966], 21).
As mentioned earlier, the young Jack was sent to a boarding school in England. He disliked England and hated most of his schooling, so much so that in his autobiography he calls one of the schools “Belsen” after the notorious World War II concentration camp. Sometime after he left, the school’s headmaster was committed to an asylum.
4. He wasn’t always a Christian.
Most people who have heard of Lewis know that he was a renowned Christian of his generation. Although he was raised in the Church of Ireland, he became an atheist as a teenager.
Lewis loved the old pagan myths, particularly those of the Norse. As he received his education in classics, he was told that paganism was false, whereas Christianity was true. This assessment seemed wrong to the young Lewis, who found much truth and beauty in the pagan myths. Ultimately, he rejected paganism and Christianity, regarding them both as nothing more than fanciful stories.
Like many who embrace atheism, Jack struggled with the problem of pain and suffering. He couldn’t reconcile a benevolent God with the suffering world he saw around him, and as a young man he often quoting the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius:
Had God designed the world, it would not be
a world so frail and faulty as we see.
5. He was a war veteran.
Lewis fought in World War I, arriving at the front line on his nineteenth birthday. After being wounded in combat a year later, he returned home.
During his army training he befriended a young man named Paddy Moore. The two agreed that if one of them died, the other would look after the deceased’s family. Unfortunately, Paddy was killed in the trenches and, true to his word, Lewis took care of Paddy’s mother and sister for the rest of his life.
6. He was exceptionally gifted.
Upon returning to Oxford University after the war, Lewis excelled in his studies, gaining multiple degrees. He got a First in Greek and Latin literature (“Moderations”), philosophy and ancient history (“Greats”), and finally another in English.
Lewis was highly intelligent, particularly when it came to language, but he struggled with mathematics. In fact, his ineptitude nearly derailed his entrance into Oxford University. Fortunately, upon his return from the war, his military service granted him a dispensation from those exams.
7. He first became a theist.
Over time, Lewis became discontented with atheism’s lack of imaginative and explanatory power. He had embraced atheism in part because of the cruel and unjust nature of the universe. However, as he would later ask: “How had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” (Mere Christianity, HarperOne [2001], 38).
Lewis explored several different philosophical outlooks before he finally accepted the inevitable. In his autobiography he writes: “You must picture me alone in [my] room, . . . night after night, feeling . . . the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. . . . [I eventually] gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised by Joy, Harcourt [1966], 228).
Lewis had come to believe in God, but he was not yet a Christian.
8. He was devoted to his friends.
Contrary to some biographical and cinematic depictions of Lewis, he was not an isolated, stoic academic. He loved good food, good beer, and good conversation. He loved his friends, and they played a hugely important role in his life.
One person who particularly impacted Lewis was J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In fact, Tolkien fans owe a great debt of gratitude to Lewis, since for many years he was Tolkien’s only audience, doing much to encourage his friend to complete and publish his masterworks. Tolkien, however, did not appreciate all of Lewis’s books, not even The Screwtape Letters, which Lewis dedicated to his friend!
Jack had many other close companions, such as Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his own brother, Warnie. All of these men were bound together by a great love of literature. As Lewis noted in his chapter on friendship in The Four Loves, friendships typically begin with the exclamation “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” (The Four Loves, HarperOne [2017], 83).
Lewis and these friends formed the Inklings, a literary discussion group where they would debate ideas and read works-in-progress to each other. For many years, they met on Tuesday mornings in their favorite Oxford pub, the Eagle and Child, affectionately known to locals as the Bird and Baby. They would also meet on Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to read their manuscripts, enjoy a drink, and smoke some tobacco.
9. He loved to smoke.
Recently, I came across a biography of Lewis that estimated he smoked sixty cigarettes a day. I may only be marginally better at mathematics than Lewis, but assuming that he was awake for fourteen hours a day and that it took him approximately five minutes to smoke each cigarette, it would seem that he spent a third of his waking life smoking!
Several years ago, I visited Lewis’s home and, although the walls in the living room had been repainted, the ceiling was left untouched to allow visitors to see how it had been thoroughly stained by nicotine.
10. His friends brought him to Christ.
After converting to theism, Lewis began to suspect that Christianity might actually be true. However, it was during a long conversation with Tolkien and Dyson that the last major obstacle was removed.
As explained earlier, Lewis saw Christianity as a myth like any of the pagan myths—he called them “lies breathed through silver” (Dedication of the poem “Mythopoeia” by J.R.R. Tolkien)—emotionally moving but false nonetheless.
Over the course of their conversation, Tolkien and Dyson helped Lewis see that Christianity was the true myth. For centuries before Christianity, man’s myths had intuited a dying and rising God. However, in Jesus of Nazareth, that myth became fact. Soon after that late-night conversation with his friends, Lewis finally became a Christian.
11. He buoyed the British spirits during World War II.
During World War II, after the success of his book The Problem of Pain, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) invited Lewis to address the nation. He used these radio broadcasts to defend the basic tenets of Christianity and they became the basis for one of Lewis’s best-known apologetics books, Mere Christianity.
12. He was a “Jack of all genres.”
Mere Christianity was just one of approximately thirty books that Lewis authored. His vast output across a diverse range of literary styles is indeed impressive. He wrote essays, apologetics, fairy tales, science fiction, autobiography, poetry, and anthology, in addition to his professional work in literary criticism.
His books earned him considerable wealth, but he gave away two-thirds of his income anonymously through the Agape Fund which was established by his solicitor and friend, Owen Barfield.
13. There is more to Narnia than you might imagine.
Probably Lewis’s best-known books are The Chronicles of Narnia, and many have received TV and movie adaptations. These books were read to me as a child, and although they seemed familiar, I didn’t grasp the Christian nature of these books until much later.
Lewis was quick to argue that Narnia wasn’t simply Christian allegory. Instead, he called it an imaginative supposal, saying, “Suppose there were a Narnian world and it, like ours, needed redemption. What kind of Incarnation and Passion might Christ be supposed to undergo there?” (Letter to Mr. Higgins, Dec. 2, 1962).
Lewis understood the power of storytelling and its ability to smuggle ideas past the “watchful dragons” of our prejudice, thus allowing us to encounter ideas afresh and with renewed potency. He had been affected in a similar way many years before when he read George MacDonald’s Phantastes, which he described as having baptized his imagination.
However, there are even more layers to The Chronicles of Narnia. About a decade ago, Dr. Michael Ward (a convert to Catholicism and the hundredth priest ordained to the Anglican Ordinariate), published his book Planet Narnia, which argues convincingly that Lewis had based The Chronicles of Narnia on the medieval conception of the cosmos. Each of the books in the series corresponds to one of the seven planets. For example, Prince Caspian is associated with the planet Mars which is, in turn, associated with warfare and trees, motifs we find throughout that book.
14. He was a pen pal to many.
Not only was Lewis a man of letters, he also was a prolific letter writer. For example, for more than half a century, he regularly corresponded with his childhood friend in Ireland, Arthur Greeves.
With Lewis’s celebrity came many more letters sent to him by adults and children alike. He took this responsibility seriously and spent several hours each day writing responses to the avalanche of fan mail.
My personal favorite is from a mother whose son was worried that he loved Aslan—the lion who is the Christ figure in the Narnian books—more than he loved Jesus himself. Lewis responded with a delightful and reassuring letter.
15. He was snubbed at Oxford but honored at Cambridge.
Despite his acclaim and popularity as a lecturer, Lewis was many times overlooked for promotion at Oxford University. The commonly accepted reason for this was that he wrote and spoke openly about his Christianity. Many felt it unbecoming of a man in his position, particularly one who was not even a professor of theology.
Fortunately, Cambridge University created a position specifically for him which, after some persistent encouragement from the University’s representatives, Lewis eventually accepted. This wasn’t the only commendation for which he was recommended. In 1951, Jack was offered a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which he declined for fear that it might politicize his evangelistic efforts.
16. Although he wasn’t Catholic, he sounded a lot like one.
Many Catholics are surprised to discover that Lewis was not a Catholic. This surprise is understandable when one looks at some of his beliefs. For example, he spoke highly of the Blessed Sacrament, he believed in purgatory and praying for the dead, and he regularly confessed to an Anglican priest.
Although he avoided talking about his difficulties with Catholicism, when pressed he cited the authority of the pope and the veneration of Our Lady as his chief concerns. However, his Catholic friend Tolkien blamed what he called Lewis’s “Ulsterior motive,” suggesting that the deep-seated anti-Catholicism which Lewis had absorbed as a boy in Ireland had never entirely left him.
Lewis himself admits to this kind of childhood indoctrination when he recounts his first meeting Tolkien: “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a papist, and at my first coming into the English faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both” (Surprised by Joy, Harcourt [1966], 216).
Despite his resistance to embracing Catholicism, Lewis is much loved by Catholics. Both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI were familiar with his work and spoke highly of it. Not only that, many people around the world credit Lewis, at least in part, with their conversion to Catholicism. This list of converts includes Peter Kreeft; Fr. Dwight Longernecker; Thomas Howard; and Lewis’s own secretary, Walter Hooper, who died in December 2020.
17. He married late in life.
Lewis lived most of his life as a bachelor. Among the writers of his many fan letters was an American poet and writer named Joy Gresham, and the two developed a firm friendship. Joy visited England and eventually moved there with her two sons. When it seemed that the British government was going to force them to leave the country, Lewis offered her a platonic civil marriage so that she and her children could legally stay in England.
Shortly after they had obtained a civil marriage certificate, Joy was diagnosed with cancer and not expected to survive for long. Faced with the possibility of losing Joy, Jack realized his deeper feelings for her. They were married at her hospital bed by an Anglican priest who also laid hands on her and prayed. To everyone’s delight, she was granted a remission of four years before the cancer returned. Heartbroken by her death, Lewis chronicled his mourning in his book A Grief Observed.
18. He is one of the most misquoted authors online.
Abraham Lincoln warned us not to believe all the quotations we read on the internet. This is particularly true when it comes to Lewis, since his name is regularly attached to words that he never wrote. William O’Flaherty’s book The Misquotable C.S. Lewis catalogues many of these inaccurate and misattributed quotations.
A few years ago, I was looking for a Lewis-themed walking tour in Oxford and found one that cost an exorbitant $335. In addition to having numerous spelling mistakes, the organizer’s website attributed this quotation to Lewis: “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
Lewis never wrote this. However, I have found that people typically do not appreciate it when you discredit their favorite misattributed quotation!
19. His death was overshadowed.
Lewis died in his bed at age sixty-four on Nov. 22, 1963. This was the same day the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, died. It was also the day on which U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which naturally dominated the news, resulting in Lewis’s passing being largely overlooked. Jack’s funeral was small and his brother, Warnie, who had always struggled with alcoholism did not attend, finding comfort instead in a bottle of whisky (Jack’s Life, Boardman & Holman Publishers [2005], 165).
20. He won many arguments . . . except one.
Lewis’s secretary, Walter Hooper, liked to say that he lost every argument with Lewis—except one. Lewis thought that no one would read his books following his death, but Hooper said he was certain their acclaim would continue.
Not only has history vindicated Hooper, he played a hand in ensuring the enduring popularity of his friend’s works. In the years following Lewis’s death, Hooper released a number of his previously unpublished works, including several volumes of letters. With each new book, Hooper demanded that the publishers re-release two of Lewis’s older works, thus keeping his books in print and ensuring Lewis’s continued legacy.
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Today, Lewis’s popularity is greater than ever. Eight years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, he was recognized at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, as one of the great British writers. His books continue to be read, and Netflix recently purchased the rights to produce new adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia.
The Episcopal Church has even honored Lewis in its liturgical calendar with the following prayer:
“O, God of searing truth and surpassing beauty, we give thee thanks for Clive Staples Lewis, whose sanctified imagination lighteth fires of faith in young and old alike; surprise us also with thy joy and draw us into that new and abundant life which is ours in Christ Jesus, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen” (Collect of the Episcopal Church).