C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second son of Albert Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis. The family lived comfortably in Little Lea, a large house on the outskirts of the city, where the abundance of books and long rainy days fostered what would become Lewis's lifelong hunger for reading. His mother's death from cancer in 1908, when Lewis was nine, shattered the security of his childhood and began his long estrangement from God. "With my mother's death," he later wrote, "all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life."

His father, devastated by grief and never particularly close to his sons, sent Lewis to a series of English boarding schools. The first, Wynyard School in Hertfordshire, was a miserable experience under a headmaster later certified insane. Lewis found refuge at Campbell College in Belfast, then Cherbourg School in Malvern, and finally Malvern College itself. The institutional Christianity of these schools, combined with his mother's death, drove him toward atheism. In 1914 he began private study with William Kirkpatrick, his father's former teacher, in Great Bookham, Surrey. Kirkpatrick was a rigorous rationalist who trained Lewis in classical languages and logical argument—preparation that would serve both his atheism and, eventually, its undoing.

Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1916, but his studies were interrupted by service in World War I. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, he was wounded in the Battle of Arras in 1918. He returned to Oxford after the war, taking first-class honors in classical moderations, philosophy and ancient history, and English language and literature. In 1925 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, where he would teach medieval and Renaissance literature for nearly thirty years.

The return to faith came slowly, reluctantly. Lewis's conversion was intellectual before it was spiritual—a recognition that his philosophical materialism could not account for the persistent human experiences of longing, moral obligation, and meaning that he found in the literature he taught. Conversations with colleagues like J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson gradually wore down his resistance to Christianity. On a bus ride to Whipsnade Zoo in 1931, he later recalled, he realized he believed. "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." The intellectual journey from atheism to Christianity would become the backbone of much of his apologetic writing.

His Writing and Its Influence

Lewis began writing seriously as an undergraduate, publishing his first book, a collection of poems titled Spirits in Bondage, in 1919 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. His academic career produced The Allegory of Love in 1936, a study of medieval literature that established his scholarly reputation. But it was World War II that transformed him into a popular Christian voice. His BBC radio talks, broadcast between 1941 and 1944, brought his clear explanations of Christian doctrine to a national audience. These talks became Mere Christianity in 1952, perhaps his most influential work of apologetics.

The Problem of Pain appeared in 1940, addressing the intellectual challenge of suffering that had first driven him from faith. The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, offered a satirical examination of temptation through the correspondence of a senior demon instructing his nephew. Both books demonstrated Lewis's gift for making theological concepts accessible without diluting them. His children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, brought Christian themes to fantasy literature with unprecedented success.

Lewis's approach to Christian writing was unapologetically intellectual, grounded in his conviction that Christianity was not merely emotionally satisfying but objectively true. He drew heavily on classical sources, medieval theology, and English literature, believing that truth transcended denominational boundaries. His apologetics assumed that reason and faith were allies, not enemies—a position that sometimes put him at odds with both fundamentalists who distrusted intellectual inquiry and liberals who reduced faith to sentiment.

In 1954 Lewis accepted the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, leaving Oxford after nearly forty years. His personal life found unexpected joy in 1956 when he married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer and former Communist who had converted to Christianity partly through reading his books. Their marriage, initially a formality to allow her to remain in Britain, became a profound love that ended tragically with her death from cancer in 1960. A Grief Observed, published pseudonymously in 1961, documented his struggle with faith in the face of devastating loss.

Lewis died on November 22, 1963—the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley—at his home in Oxford. His death received little notice amid the larger news, but his influence on Christian thought was already substantial and would only grow. His works remain in print across denominational lines, valued for their intellectual rigor and imaginative power.

Who should read Lewis: Readers who want Christianity engaged at the level of ideas without sacrificing either intellectual honesty or devotional depth. He is essential for those wrestling with doubt or seeking to understand how faith and reason might coexist. He is not for readers looking for systematic theology or detailed biblical exegesis, but for those who need to see how Christian truth might illuminate literature, philosophy, and the ordinary experiences of longing and loss that mark human life.