Biography
Childhood
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 29 November
1898. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863 – 1929), a solicitor
whose father, Richard, had come to
Little Lea
Lewis was initially schooled by
private tutors before being sent to the Wynyard
School in Watford,
Hertfordshire,
in 1908, just before his mother's death from cancer. Lewis's
brother had already enrolled there three years previously. The school was
closed not long afterwards due to a lack of pupils — the headmaster Robert
"Oldie" Capron was soon after committed to an insane asylum. Tellingly, in Surprised By Joy, Lewis would later nickname the school "Belsen".
There is some speculation by biographer Alan Jacobs that the atmosphere at
Wynyard greatly traumatized Lewis and was responsible for the development of
"mildly sadomasochistic fantasies". (Gopnik 2005) After Wynyard
closed, Lewis attended Campbell College in the east of
In September 1913, Lewis enrolled
at Malvern College, where he would remain until the
following June. It was during this time that 15-year-old Lewis abandoned his
childhood Christian faith and became an atheist, becoming
interested in mythology and the occult.[1]
Later he would describe "Wyvern" (as he styled the school in his
autobiography) as so singularly focused on increasing one's social
status that he came to see the homosexual
relationships between older and younger pupils as "the one oasis (though
green only with weeds and moist only with fetid water) in the burning desert of
competitive ambition. […] A perversion was the only thing
left through which something spontaneous and uncalculated could creep" (Lewis 1966, p. 107). After leaving Malvern he
moved to study privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's old tutor
and former headmaster of Lurgan College.
As a young boy, Lewis had a
fascination with anthropomorphic animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and
illustrating his own animal stories. He and his brother Warnie
together created the world of Boxen, inhabited and
run by animals. Lewis loved to read, and as his father’s house was filled with
books, he felt that finding a book he had not read was as easy as "finding
a blade of grass."
As a teenager, he was
wonderstruck by the songs and legends of what he called Northernness,
the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic
sagas. These legends intensified a longing he had within, a deep desire he
would later call "joy". He also grew to love nature — the beauty of
nature reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North
reminded him of the beauties of nature. His writing in his teenage years moved
away from the tales of Boxen, and he began to use
different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his newfound
interest in Norse mythology and the natural world. Studying
with Kirkpatrick (“The Great Knock”, as Lewis afterwards called him) instilled
in him a love of Greek literature and mythology, and sharpened his
skills in debate and clear reasoning.
World War I
Having won a scholarship
to University College, Oxford in 1916,
Lewis volunteered the following year in the British
Army as World War I raged on, and was commissioned an officer
in the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at
the front line in the Somme
On 15 April 1917 Lewis was
wounded during the Battle of Arras, and suffered some
depression during his convalescence, due in part to missing his Irish home. On
his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover,
Jane Moore
While being trained for the army
Lewis shared a room and became close friends with another cadet,
"Paddy" Moore. The two had made a mutual pact that if either died
during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families. Paddy was killed
in action in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced
Lewis to his mother, Jane King Moore, and a friendship very quickly sprang up
between Lewis, who was eighteen when they met, and Jane, who was forty-five.
The friendship with Mrs. Moore was particularly important to Lewis while he was
recovering from his wounds in hospital, as his father, who had an almost
pathological reluctance to break free from the routine of his
Lewis lived with and cared for
Mrs. Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s. He routinely
introduced her as his "mother", and referred to her as such in
letters. Lewis, whose own mother had died when he was a child and whose father
was distant, demanding and eccentric, developed a deeply affectionate
friendship with Mrs. Moore. "All I can or need to say is that my earlier
hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged", he wrote
of her in his autobiography. He also said to his friend George Sayer: "She was generous and taught me to be generous,
too."
In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a
letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that
Jane and Greeves were "the two people who matter
most to me in the world."
In 1930, Lewis and Warnie moved, with Moore and her daughter Maureen, into
"The Kilns",
a house in the district of Headington Quarry on the
outskirts of
"My Irish life"
Plaque on a
park-bench in Bangor, County Down
Lewis experienced a certain cultural
shock upon first arriving in
From boyhood Lewis immersed
himself firstly in Norse and Greek
and then in Irish mythology and literature
and expressed an interest in the Irish
language, though he seems to have made little attempt to learn it. He
developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats,
in part because of Yeats’s use of
In 1921, Lewis had the
opportunity to meet Yeats on two occasions, since Yeats had moved to
Surprised to find his English
peers indifferent to Yeats and the Celtic
Revival movement, Lewis wrote: "I am often surprised to find how
utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely
Irish — if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish." Early in his career,
Lewis considered sending his work to the major Dublin publishers,
writing: "If I do ever send my stuff to a publisher, I think I shall try Maunsel, those
Lewis occasionally expressed a
somewhat tongue-in-cheek chauvinism
toward the English. Describing an encounter with a fellow
Irishman he wrote: "Like all Irish people who meet in
Due to his
Conversion to Christianity
Raised in a church-going family
in the Church of Ireland, Lewis claimed he became an atheist at the
age of 15, though he later described his young self (in Surprised
by Joy) as being "very angry with God for not existing". He
returned to his Christian beliefs at age 33.
His separation from Christianity
began when he started to view his religion as a chore and as a duty; around
this time he also gained an interest in the occult as his studies expanded to
include such topics. Lewis quoted Lucretius (De rerum natura, 5.198–9) as having one of the strongest
arguments for atheism:
Nequaquam
nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam
rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa
"Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see."
Lewis's interest in fantasy and
mythology, especially in relation to the works of George
MacDonald, was part of what turned him from atheism. In fact, MacDonald's
position as a Christian fantasy writer was very influential on Lewis. This can
be seen particularly well through this passage in Lewis's The
Great Divorce, chapter nine, when the semi-autobiographical main
character meets MacDonald in Heaven:
…I tried,
trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to
tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead
Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes
(being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of
Beatrice had been to Dante:
Here begins the new life. I started to confess how long that Life had
delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had
come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name
of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness. (Lewis 1946, pp. 66 – 67)
Influenced by arguments with his
Oxford colleague and friend J.
R. R. Tolkien, and by the book The Everlasting Man by Roman
Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton, he slowly rediscovered
Christianity. He fought greatly up to the moment of his conversion noting,
"I came into Christianity kicking and screaming." He described his
last struggle in Surprised by Joy:
You must picture
me alone in that room in Magdalen, night
after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work,
the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to
meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term
of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed:
perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all
After his conversion to theism in 1929,
Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931. Following a long
discussion and late-night walk with his close friends Tolkien
and Hugo
Dyson, he records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on
his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Church
of England — somewhat to the disappointment of Tolkien,
who had hoped he would convert to Roman Catholicism (Carpenter 2006).[2]
A committed Anglican,
Lewis upheld a largely orthodox Anglican theology, though in his apologetic
writings, he made an effort to avoid espousing any one denomination. In his
later writings, some believe he proposed ideas such as purification of venial sins
after death in purgatory (The
Great Divorce) and mortal sin (The Screwtape Letters),
which are generally considered to be Catholic teachings. Regardless, Lewis
considered himself an entirely orthodox Anglican to the end of his life,
reflecting that he had initially attended church only to receive communion
and had been repelled by the hymns and the poor quality of the sermons. He later came to
consider himself honoured by worshipping with men of
faith who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses to
all the hymns.
Joy Gresham
In Lewis's later life, he
corresponded with and later met Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background
and also a convert from atheism to Christianity.[3]
She was separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband, the novelist William
Gresham, and came to
Lewis continued to raise
Illness and death
In early June 1961, Lewis began
experiencing medical problems and was diagnosed with inflammation of
the kidneys which resulted in blood poisoning.
His illness caused him to miss the autumn term at Cambridge, though his health gradually
began improving in 1962 and he returned that April. Lewis's health continued to
improve, and according to his friend George Sayer,
Lewis was fully himself by the spring of 1963. However, on 15 July 1963 he fell
ill and was admitted to hospital. The next day at 5:00 pm, Lewis suffered a heart attack and lapsed into a coma,
unexpectedly awaking the following day at 2:00 pm. After he was discharged from
hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns though he was too ill to return to work.
As a result, he resigned from his post at
Media coverage of his death was
almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave
New World. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog
Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley (Kreeft 1982).
C. S. Lewis is commemorated on 22
November in the church
calendar of the Episcopal Church.
© Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press