Preface

“I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.”

— Romans 10:20, KJV

The earlier volumes of this series told of a Chinese church leader who died in a Communist labour camp, an American who prayed his way through the villages of the Punjab, a Dutch watchmaker who hid Jews behind a false wall, a Scottish mill girl who went alone up the rivers of Calabar, an African bishop who had once been sold as a slave, and an Indian widow who built a home for thousands of outcast women. This seventh volume tells the story of a man whose courage looked much less dramatic than any of theirs. He was never imprisoned for his faith. He never went to a mission field. He spent nearly all his working life in two of the most comfortable universities in the world, teaching young men to read old poems.

C. S. Lewis is, even so, a portrait of courage. It took courage of an unusual kind to be converted at all, against the grain of his own temper and of the clever company he kept. It took courage to keep, for more than thirty years, a promise made to a friend who was killed in France. It took courage to speak plainly about Christ on the radio to a nation at war, and to go on speaking when the colleagues whose good opinion he valued thought it vulgar. It took courage to marry a dying woman in a hospital ward against the advice of nearly everyone, and more courage still to write down, without disguise, what her death did to his faith. And it took a quieter, daily courage to answer by hand the letters of thousands of strangers, to go to confession every week, and to give away most of what his books earned.

What This Book Is

This book is a narrative life. It follows Lewis from his birth in Belfast in 1898 to his death in Oxford in 1963, and it tries to give the people around him their due: his father Albert, his mother Flora, his brother Warren, the friend called Paddy Moore and Paddy’s mother Janie, J. R. R. Tolkien and the other Inklings, Charles Williams, the priest who heard his confessions, and Joy Davidman, the American poet whom he married twice. It is not an account of his teaching. A companion volume in the Ochorus library, Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis, sets out what he believed and wrote about joy, the moral law, pain, prayer, love and glory. The present book touches his ideas only where they are part of the story of his life, and then only briefly. Nor does it retell his stories. Readers who want Narnia, Screwtape or the planets should go to his own books.

A Word About His Words

That is not only a matter of arrangement. Lewis’s books are still in copyright, they are still in print, and the people who hold the rights in them guard them carefully, as they are entitled to do. This book is an independent Ochorus biography. It is not published by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the C. S. Lewis estate or by any company that holds rights in his writings. It tells his life in its own words. Apart from three very short sentences, each given with its source, it does not quote him, and where it reports what he thought or felt it does so in paraphrase. His books are named so that readers can find them, and readers are warmly encouraged to buy them or borrow them from a library and to hear him for themselves. No summary can replace the clarity, the humour and the warmth of the man himself.

Why Courage?

There is a temptation, writing about Lewis, to make him more comfortable than he was. He has become a kind of patron saint for Christians who like books, and his face appears on mugs and calendars. But the man who emerges from his letters, from his brother’s diaries and from the memories of those who knew him was not comfortable. He was proud and knew it. He could be overbearing in argument and wounding in his wit. He lost his mother as a child and never really reached his father. He lived for three decades in a household many of his friends found baffling, and some of them found it unhappy. His brother was an alcoholic. His wife died little more than four years after their wedding, and cancer shadowed nearly all of those years. He knew years of exhaustion, and he faced his own death with a mixture of calm and weariness. He was, in short, a sinner who was being made a saint, and the making was slow.

That is what makes his life worth telling. It is the story of a man God pursued for a long time, who resisted for as long as he could, who gave in with very bad grace, and who then spent the rest of his life trying, with all his gifts and all his faults, to serve the One who had caught him.

How This Book Is Written

Like the earlier volumes, this book tries to be honest about its sources. Lewis told part of his own story in Surprised by Joy (1955), but that book is selective by design, and in places his memory can be shown to have slipped. His letters, published in three large volumes, and his brother’s diaries give a fuller and sometimes different picture. Biographers have weighed the evidence carefully, and on a few points they still disagree. Where they do, this book says so and gives the main views fairly. It does not invent dialogue, and it does not put thoughts into anyone’s head that the sources do not support.

Scripture in This Book

Following the companion volume on his teaching, and the Bible Lewis himself grew up with, all Scripture in this book is quoted from the Authorised (King James) Version, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme.

The verse at the head of this preface is Paul’s quotation of Isaiah: God was found by those who did not seek him. Lewis would have said that it was the truest sentence anyone could write about his life. He did not go looking for God. For years he did everything he could to avoid him. But he was found, and the finding changed not only him but millions of people who would never meet him. This book is the story of how that happened, and of what the rest of his life was like once it had.