From Belfast to Magdalen

I was found of them that sought me not: I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me. ROMANS 10:20

A house full of books. Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on the twenty-ninth of November, 1898, the younger son of Albert Lewis, a police-court solicitor, and Flora Hamilton Lewis, a clergyman’s daughter who had taken a university degree at a time when few women did. While still a small boy he announced that his name was Jack, and Jack he remained to family and friends for the rest of his life. His elder brother Warren, three years his senior, was his closest companion. In 1905 the family moved to a large, rambling house on the edge of the city, and the boy who would one day write of a wardrobe that opened onto another world grew up among endless passages, empty attics and shelves crammed with books that no one forbade him to read.

The first loss. In the summer of 1908 his mother died of cancer. Jack was nine. He had prayed, as a child prays, that she would be healed, and when she was not, something in his trust in God began to give way, though he did not know it yet. Within weeks he was sent across the sea to a boarding school in England whose headmaster was later declared insane. The settled happiness of his early years was over. His father, grief-stricken and awkward, never found the way to his sons’ hearts.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. PSALM 27:10

Losing faith. By his early teens, at school in Malvern, the boy had quietly given up the Christianity of his upbringing. Partly it was the influence of a kindly school matron who had drifted into spiritualism and theosophy; partly it was the anxiety of trying to pray with the right feelings and never succeeding; partly it was the sheer weight of the world’s suffering and the apparent indifference of the universe. He hated his public school, with its cult of games and its cruelty, and in 1914 his father sent him instead to be tutored privately by William Kirkpatrick, a retired headmaster in Surrey. Kirkpatrick was a convinced atheist and a ferocious logician who would not let a careless sentence pass. Lewis loved him. Under his teaching the boy learned Greek, Latin, French, Italian and German, read the classics in their own tongues, and was trained to argue with a rigour he never lost. He came out of those years a confirmed and articulate atheist.

A book bought at a station. Yet something else was happening at the same time. Ever since early childhood Lewis had known sudden, piercing moments of longing — for what, he could not say — stirred by a toy garden his brother made, by a story of Beatrix Potter’s, by the sagas of the northern gods. In 1916, waiting for a train, he bought a copy of Phantastes by George MacDonald, a Scottish minister and writer of fantasy. He did not become a Christian by reading it. But he found in it a quality of holiness, though he had no name for it then, that seemed to cleanse the longing itself, and many years later he would say that this book had begun to work on his imagination long before his reason caught up.

War. In 1917 Lewis won a place at University College, Oxford, but within weeks he was in the army. He was commissioned in the Somerset Light Infantry and reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday. In April 1918, near Arras, he was wounded by a British shell that fell short and killed the sergeant beside him. During his training he had shared quarters with a young man named Paddy Moore, and the two had promised each other that if either were killed, the survivor would care for the other’s family. Paddy was killed. Lewis kept the promise. For more than thirty years, until her death in 1951, he shared a household with Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, and supported her and her daughter. It was a strange arrangement, which his biographers have interpreted in different ways, and it cost him a great deal. He kept it to the end.

The scholar. Back at Oxford after the war, Lewis took first-class honours three times over — in classical literature, in philosophy and ancient history, and in English. In 1925 he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, where he taught English language and literature for nearly thirty years. He was a demanding tutor and a celebrated lecturer, whose lectures on medieval and Renaissance literature filled the hall. In 1926 he met a young professor of Anglo-Saxon named J. R. R. Tolkien. The two men discovered a shared love of myth and of the old northern stories, and a friendship began that would change both of their lives.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. PROVERBS 27:17

The pursuit. Through the late 1920s the atheist found his defences falling one by one. Several of his closest friends were believers, and he could not dismiss them as fools. The authors he most admired — not only MacDonald, but G. K. Chesterton, whose The Everlasting Man he read in these years, and the old poets of the Christian centuries — seemed to have a depth and sanity that the moderns lacked. A thoroughly sceptical colleague remarked one evening that the historical evidence for the Gospels was surprisingly good, and the remark lodged in Lewis like a splinter. Philosophy had already led him from materialism to a kind of idealism, and idealism kept pointing beyond itself. Looking back, he could not describe these years as a search for God on his part. It had felt far more like being hunted down.

The surrender. In 1929, alone in his rooms at Magdalen, he gave in. He knelt and admitted that God was God. It was not yet faith in Christ. It was the bare acknowledgement of a Creator, and by his own account it felt more like a defeat than a homecoming. The same year his father died. Lewis began to attend his college chapel and his parish church, not because he believed the creeds, but because he thought a theist ought to show his colours.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. PROVERBS 9:10

The long night walk. The second step came two years later. On the evening of the nineteenth of September, 1931, Lewis walked with Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, along Addison’s Walk, the path that circles the water meadow behind Magdalen, and talked until three in the morning. The subject was myth. Lewis had always loved the ancient stories of a god who dies and rises again; what he could not see was how the death of a man two thousand years ago could help him now. Tolkien and Dyson put it to him that the story of Christ was a true myth — a story with all the power of the pagan myths, but one that had actually happened, in history, in a particular place, at a particular time. A little over a week later, riding to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, Lewis set out unpersuaded and arrived believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, though he could never say at what point on the road the change had come. He took communion at his parish church in Headington Quarry on Christmas Day, 1931, and remained a communicant member of the Church of England for the rest of his life.

The writer. His first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegory of his own journey on the pattern of John Bunyan’s, appeared in 1933. His scholarly reputation was made by The Allegory of Love in 1936, and his first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, followed in 1938. Then came the war, and with it the work that made him famous. The Problem of Pain appeared in 1940. The Screwtape Letters, first published as a weekly series in an Anglican paper, came out as a book in 1942 and was an immediate success. Between 1941 and 1944 the BBC invited him to give four series of radio talks on the Christian faith, and his voice, broadcast into the kitchens and barracks of a nation at war, reached more people than any sermon. He also travelled to air force bases to speak to aircrew, many of whom would not survive the year. The talks were published in three short books and later gathered into one as Mere Christianity. In the same years he preached The Weight of Glory at the university church of St Mary the Virgin, gave the lectures that became The Abolition of Man, wrote Perelandra, That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce, and presided over a debating society at Oxford, the Socratic Club, founded to give believers and unbelievers a fair hearing.

Friends. Through all of this Lewis was sustained by friendship. For many years a circle of friends who called themselves the Inklings met in his college rooms on Thursday evenings and in a pub on Tuesday mornings to read aloud what they were writing and to argue about it. Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings to them chapter by chapter. Lewis’s brother Warren, after retiring from the army, came to live with him and became his secretary, typing replies to the flood of letters that arrived from strangers seeking help. Lewis answered nearly every one. He also quietly gave away a large part of his earnings through a charitable trust he set up for the purpose, and lived simply in a house called The Kilns, on the eastern edge of Oxford.

Freely ye have received, freely give. MATTHEW 10:8

Narnia. In 1950 he published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and over the next six years six more books followed, making up The Chronicles of Narnia. Some of his friends, Tolkien among them, did not much like them. Children did, and have done ever since. In 1955 he published Surprised by Joy, the story of his early life and conversion, and in 1956 the novel he thought his best, Till We Have Faces.

Cambridge, and Joy. In 1954 Cambridge University created a new chair of medieval and Renaissance literature and offered it to Lewis, whom Oxford had repeatedly passed over for a professorship, partly, some believed, because his popular Christian writing embarrassed his colleagues. He moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge, coming home to Oxford at weekends. In these years an American writer named Joy Davidman, a former communist and a convert from atheism who had first written to him in 1950, came to England with her two young sons. A friendship of minds grew between them. In 1956 Lewis married her in a civil ceremony, so that she could stay in the country, and he regarded it at first as a formality. That autumn she was found to have advanced cancer. In March 1957 they were married by a priest at her hospital bedside, and to the astonishment of her doctors she went into remission. For three years Lewis, who had been a bachelor for nearly sixty, knew a happy marriage. The cancer returned, and Joy died in July 1960. Out of the grief that followed he wrote A Grief Observed, and published it under a pseudonym.

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. JOHN 11:25

The end. Lewis’s own health was failing. In the summer of 1963 he had a heart attack and fell into a coma, and was given the last rites; he recovered for a time, but resigned his Cambridge chair. He died at The Kilns on the twenty-second of November, 1963, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. The news of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy on the same day. He was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, where he had worshipped for more than thirty years. His Letters to Malcolm, on prayer, appeared the following year. In 2013, fifty years after his death, a memorial to him was set in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

What kind of man. Those who knew him describe a big, ruddy, untidy man with a loud laugh, a prodigious memory and a love of long walks, beer and conversation. He disliked fuss, modern gadgets and talk about himself. He could be a bruising debater and a gentle correspondent. He was a careful, conscientious churchman who made a regular confession to a priest for most of his Christian life and who disliked hymns but went to church anyway, because he believed that a Christian must belong to the body. He was not a saint in any stained-glass sense. But he was, by every account, a man who took his own advice seriously, prayed daily, gave generously, kept his promises at great cost, and spent himself for strangers.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Lewis’s loss of faith began with an unanswered prayer in childhood. Is there an old disappointment with God that you have never brought back to Him? Bring it now.

2. He kept a promise made to a dead friend for more than thirty years. Is there a promise you have made that you have been tempted to let slip?

3. Friendship with believers wore down his resistance. Thank God for the friends who have helped your faith, and ask how you might be such a friend to someone else.

4. He answered strangers’ letters for decades. Consider one small, unglamorous service you could offer regularly for the sake of others.

5. Read Romans 10:20 again. Give thanks that God sought you before you sought Him.

A PRAYER

Lord, You were seeking me long before I knew it, in my longings and my losses, in books and friends and long conversations.

Thank You for the patience that would not let C. S. Lewis go, and that has not let me go.

Where grief has made me doubt Your goodness, meet me as You met him. Where pride has kept me from kneeling, bring me to my knees.

Make me faithful in my promises, generous with my time and gifts, and ready to give my life away for others, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.