This is an essay I wrote for school:
When most people think of C.S.Lewis they think of him as the children’s
writer who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.
I have read some of his books and started to wonder what his life was
like, what experiences lead him to acquire the knowledge and beliefs he had
about the God he had faith in. It didn't
take much research to find out how interesting his life really was. I used to look up to him as a writer, I now
look up to him as a person too because of the noble decisions he made in his
life despite the situations he found himself in.
Clive Stapes Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Northern
Ireland. He was raised in a Christian
family of four; he had an older brother named Warren and two loving parents:
Albert James Lewis and Augusta Hamilton Lewis.
In 1905, Jack (the name he had given himself at the age of three) and
his family moved to the outskirts of Belfast and gave their newfound home the
name "Little Lea".
Three years later on his father’s birthday, August 23rd, Jack's
mother died of cancer. His frantic persistent
prayers that his mother would get better seemed to have been ignored by
God. The Bible his mother gave him
shortly before she died was buried in the bottom of a drawer. Years later in 1912, when Jack was 13, he
abandoned his Christian faith without looking back.
One morning in 1916 an average walk to check the mail brightened his entire
day as he opened up an acceptance letter from Oxford University. The next year he was a student at Oxford from
April 26 until September. Then World War
I started. Jack enlisted in the British
army and was commissioned as an officer in the 3rd Battalion, Somerset Light
Infantry by September 25th.
He reached his 19th birthday as he reached the frontlines in the Somme Valley in France. Shortly after on April 15, 1918, he was
wounded during the Battle of Arras on Mount Berenchon. By October Jack was ready to fight again; he
fought for two more months and was discharged.
Now Jack was faced with a tragedy and a responsibility. His roommate in the army and close friend
Paddy Moore was killed in battle. Later
in Lewis's life he would preach a sermon and say this about death in war:
"The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a
materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion
by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater
evil. Nor am I greatly moved by the fact
that many of the individuals we strike down are innocent. That seems, in a way, to make war not worse
but better. All men die, and most men
miserably. That two soldiers on opposite
sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment
when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant,
should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the
most terrible things in this very terrible world."
At this point in his life though, Jack had no such views. He remembered when he was eating dinner with
the Moore family; Paddy had asked him if he would take care of his mother and
sister if he died. Jack looked his
friend in the eye and promised him he would.
So in the summer of 1920, Paddy's mother and sister moved to Oxford and
rented a house there. Jack would take
care of the Moore family the rest of his life.
Five years later Lewis was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford. He now served as a tutor in
English Language and Literature. A year
later, Jack met another Fellow and rooted a friendship that would last for the
rest of his life. The Fellows name was
J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Christian. Jack
found that they both had a lot in common.
They had both served in World War I and their mothers both died when
they were around the same age. Except
when Tolkien’s mother died, it seemed that it strengthened his relationship
with God instead of weakening it.
Tolkien and Lewis had many talks about faith and God. Those talks impacted Jack and in 1929 he
became a theist. He had been having the
feeling that he was trying to fight off God, he then came to the conclusion
that if God didn't exist there would be no one to fight off. So he gave in, even if he didn't believe
Jesus was the Son of God. The same year
he claimed his belief in God, his father died on September 24th.
Two years later Jack was talking with Tollers (his nickname for Tolkien)
and his friend Hugo Dyson. They both
shared with Jack their relationships with Jesus and why they believed him to be
the Son of God. Not long after, Jack and
his brother Warren were on their way to the zoo. He explained later: "When we [Warnie and
Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus
Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Now Lewis had reclaimed his relationship with
Jesus and developed a new reverence for it.
In 1933 Lewis joined a group called the Inklings. The Inklings were a group of friends who got
together for discussions and good times.
The group consisted of Tollers, Hugo Dyson, Warren, Charles Williams,
Dr. Robert Havard, Owen Bartfield, and Neville Coghill. During many Inkling meetings Jack and Tollers
shared their writings like Tolkien's The
Hobbit and essays from C.S. Lewis's Mere
Christianity.
The Guardian published 31 "Screwtape Letters" in weekly
installments in 1941 from May 2nd to November 28th. These letters were written from the view of a
demon named Screwtape to his nephew demon Wormwood. The letters were giving Wormwood advice on
how to tempt his "patient" or person he was assigned to tempt. These letters were later published as
C.S.Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Then in 1944 Lewis did 7 radio talks on 7
Tuesdays in a row. These radio talks
were very popular because they disscussed major issues about the second World
War that was raging at the time. In one
of these radio talks he said:
"Christianity agrees . . . that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between
independent powers. It thinks it is a
civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe
occupied by the rebel. Enemy-occupied
territory--that is what this world is.
Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed; you might
say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign
of sabotage. When you go to church you
are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why
the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and
laziness and intellectual snobbery."
The radio talks were published into a book under the title Mere Christianity. Not long after, Jack published The Great Divorce--a book about a bus
ride on the outskirts of Heaven--in weekly installments in the Guardian. The
Chronicles of Narnia were published from 1950 to 1956. By the time Lewis was publishing the last
book of the series--The Last Battle--he
found that one of his good friends by the name of Joy Davidsman Gresham found
out her visa to stay in England wasn't approved. Jack married her so she would be a legal
British citizen.
One day Joy tripped over a phone cord and her leg snapped. At the hospital she found out she had bone cancer
at her thigh. On the 21st of
March, 1957, Jack stood by Joy's hospital bed saying his vows. They had another marriage ceremony to make
their previously private marriage public.
Finally it seemed that Joy was going to get better and the cancer was
dying off.
Unfortunately Joy's cancer came back not long afterwards and her health
took a turn for the worst. This didn't
stop them from going on an 11 day trip to Greece. About a month after this trip Joy died at the
age of 45. Much like Jack's mother, she
left behind two young sons. In 1961
Lewis published A Grief Observed
which was an account of his suffering after Joy's death. This is a small passage he wrote in this book
about his wife:
"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil
and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in
solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that
any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.
If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always
together, and created a scandal. That's
what I meant when I once praised her for her 'masculine virtues.' But she soon put a stop to that by asking how
I'd like to be praised for my feminine ones. . .”
Solomon calls his bride Sister.
Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular
mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?"
In 1963 one week before his 65th birthday on November 22nd,
C.S.Lewis died after suffering a heart attack and some kidney problems. His death was not very well publicized because
America was busy mourning the death of John F. Kennedy who had been
assassinated that very same day. The
grave of Clive Stapes Lewis is in the yard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington
Quarry, Oxford.
C.S.Lewis made a major impact in this world. When he was alive he provided soldiers with advice
over the radio and children with the timeless Chronicles of Narnia which are
still popular today and being made into several major motion pictures. Many people in the past, present and future
revere C.S. Lewis’s works and his story of faith despite the anguish and
suffering in his life. His remarkable
life is now a legend which continues to live on.
