The Legacy of C. S. Lewis

“And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”

— Daniel 12:3, KJV

Warnie’s Last Years

Warren Lewis outlived his brother by nine and a half years. They were lonely years. In time he left the Kilns, which under the terms of the original purchase passed to Maureen, and moved to a smaller house nearby in Headington, where a few loyal friends looked after him. He drank, at times heavily, and went back again and again to the nuns at Drogheda, who welcomed him as one of their own. He also did a great deal of useful work. He edited the first collection of his brother’s letters, published in 1966, with a memoir that is still one of the best portraits of Jack. He went on keeping his diary, and in it he wrote, again and again, of how much he missed his brother.

He died on 9 April 1973, and was buried in the same grave as Jack, under the same stone, in the churchyard at Headington Quarry. The two brothers who had invented Boxen in the attic of Little Lea, who had crossed the Irish Sea together in the dark in 1908, and who had shared a house for thirty years, now share a grave.

The Books

When Lewis died, many people assumed that his books would fade. Fashions in religious writing change quickly, and his had been very much the voice of a particular time: of the war years, of the BBC, of an England that was passing. Some critics confidently predicted that he would be forgotten within a generation.

The opposite happened. In the decades after his death his books sold more than they had during his life, and they have never stopped selling. Mere Christianity became one of the most influential Christian books of the century, especially in America, where it has been cited by countless people as the book that led them to faith. The Screwtape Letters and The Problem of Pain remained steadily in print. A Grief Observed, reissued under his own name, found a new readership among the bereaved. The Chronicles of Narnia have been translated into many dozens of languages, adapted for radio, stage, television and film, and read by successive generations of children around the world.

His scholarly work, too, has lasted. The Allegory of Love, his study of Spenser and of the medieval picture of the universe are still read by students of English literature. At Oxford and Cambridge, and in universities across the world, he is now studied as a writer in his own right.

The Man Behind the Books

What kind of man was he? Those who knew him describe a big, ruddy, untidy man with a booming laugh and a prodigious memory, who could quote whole pages of poetry and loved long walks, beer, plain food and good conversation. He disliked fuss, modern gadgets, newspapers and talk about himself. He could be overbearing in argument and was sometimes wounding in his wit. But he was also, by every account, generous to a fault, unfailingly kind to the weak and the troubled, faithful in his friendships, and humble about his own spiritual state.

He was not a saint in any stained-glass sense. He had real faults, and he knew them better than his admirers did. But the long story told in this book is the story of a man in whom God was steadily at work. The arrogant young atheist of the 1920s became, by the end of his life, a man who went to confession every week for twelve years, gave away most of his income, answered thousands of letters from strangers, nursed an old woman through her long decline, married a dying woman and loved her to the end, and faced his own death in peace. That transformation is perhaps the most convincing argument for Christianity that he ever offered.

Poets’ Corner

On 22 November 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial stone to C. S. Lewis was dedicated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, among the memorials to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and the other great writers of the English language. Its inscription, cut in a circle around his name like the rays of a sun, is a sentence from an address he gave to the Socratic Club in 1944, likening the Christian faith to the risen sun, by whose light everything else is seen.

It was a remarkable honour for a man who had been passed over for every professorship in his own university and whose Christian writing many of his colleagues had despised. It came half a century late. Lewis would probably have laughed.

Where He Must Be Weighed

Lewis was loved by evangelicals, and he still is. But he never called himself an evangelical, and on several points his views differed from those of most evangelical readers. He held a high view of Scripture as the Word of God, but not the doctrine of inerrancy. He believed in a purifying purgatory and prayed for the dead. He hoped that some who had never known the name of Christ might yet be saved by him. He made a weekly confession to a priest. These matters belong to his teaching, and they are weighed carefully in the companion volume, Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis. They are mentioned here only so that no reader mistakes this book’s gratitude for an endorsement of everything he believed. Lewis himself would have wanted every claim tested by Scripture, and he would have wanted his readers to follow Christ, not him.

Shining as the Stars

The verse at the head of this chapter is from the book of Daniel: those who turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever. No one can count how many people C. S. Lewis turned to righteousness. Some of them heard him on the radio in 1941. Some read Mere Christianity in a university library in 1970 or 2010. Some met Aslan as children and recognised him, years later, in the Gospels. Some found A Grief Observed on the worst night of their lives. Lewis never knew most of them. He would have said that it was not his doing, and he would have been right. But he was the instrument, and the star shines on.