The Life and Legacy of C. S. Lewis #1
"C.S. Lewis, Apostle to Skeptics"
Psalm 139.1-17
This weekend we’re launching a series on The Life and Legacy of C. S. Lewis. This message will not involve the exposition of a text or the exploration of a topic, but the introduction of an amazing man whom God continues to use to reach a lost world with the good news of his love through Jesus Christ.
I want to confess at the outset that I’m not sure if Lewis would appreciate this message for the simple reason that he is the subject of it. On a personal level, I doubt that he would want us to make such a fuss about him. Professionally- he was a literary critic- he would want us to focus on his work, not on him. In a letter written to Roy Harrington dated January 19th 1948 Lewis wrote: "Thanks for your most kind letter and for... the sermon. About ’back-ground material’: the only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say. ...I hope this doesn’t sound ungracious, it is not meant to be. In fact I am only revealing what you asked for, one of my pet ’peeves’. I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books should be ’set in their biographical context’ and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say, which is their only claim on our attention."
Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29th, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. His father Albert, a successful attorney, was emotionally unpredictable (which bred in Lewis a certain distrust or dislike of emotion), while his mother Florence was analytical and cheerful. Around age 4 Lewis announced that he wanted to be known as Jacks, later shortened to Jack, the name he went by for the rest of his life. Jack and his brother Warnie, three years his elder, grew up at Little Lea, a wonderful, sprawling home ("almost a major character in my story") bursting with books. "I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under tiles." In one of those rooms was an old wardrobe where Jack and Warnie created an imaginary world. At Little Lea Jack, an avid reader, first encountered the Arthurian legends, medieval romances, Norse mythology, and classic children’s books. Creative and imaginative, he took to writing and illustrating his own stories featuring costumed talking animals. "What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered... a physical defect which my brother and I both inherit from our father; we have only one joint in the thumb."
Three months before he turned 10, on his father’s 45th birthday, August 23rd, 1908, Jack’s mother Florence died of cancer. "With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis."
His father sent Jack off to a boarding school, Wynyard, run by a cruel, mentally ill headmaster. He begged his father to allow him to leave but to no avail. "Life at a vile boarding school is in this way good preparation for the Christian life," he would write, "that it teaches one to live by hope." When Wynyard was finally shut down, following short stays at several other schools (where he was exposed to a number of unwholesome influences including, among other things, the occult), Jack was finally sent to study with William T. Kirkpatrick, a brilliant teacher under whose instruction he thrived. When Jack first met "the Great Knock" he casually mentioned how he had imagined Surrey would be "wilder." "Stop!" shouted Kirk. "What do you mean by wildness and on what grounds had you for not expecting it?" When Lewis admitted he didn’t have any idea, Kirk told him, "Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?" This all happened in the first three and a half minutes of their acquaintance and set the tone for their subsequent relationship. And Lewis thrived under Kirk of whom he wrote, "If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. He taught Jack to think logically and under his tutoring Jack flourished.
But the cumulative effect of his mother’s death, his exposure to cruelty and the occult at boarding school, the influence of his unbelieving tutor, his reading, his not wanting to be interfered with (he found the occult fascinating because it held out the promise of control without accountability), and his deeply ingrained pessimism all led Jack to become a committed atheist. "I had definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution." He found Lucretius’ argument for atheism convincing: "Had God designed the world, it would not be/ A world so frail and faulty as we see." But, fearing his father’s disapproval, in what he called "one of the worst acts of my life" he allowed himself to be confirmed and took his first communion "in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation... Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy."
Despite his spiritual confusion, he excelled in his studies and was awarded a scholarship to attend Oxford University. His work there was interrupted by military service in the "Great War." Exempt from the draft because he was Irish, Jack enlisted and arrived in the front line trenches on his 19th birthday. To pass the time he wrote a series of pessimistic poems which were later published as Spirits in Bondage. He had earlier befriended a fellow soldier named Paddy Moore and, in a youthful moment of devotion, the two took a vow that if either died, the other would care for the dead man’s family. Paddy was killed in 1918 and so Jack, true to his word, took in Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, and was burdened with her care until her death.
During the war Jack was hospitalized for injuries he sustained. He was also, though not quite by his telling, somewhat responsible for the capture of a number of German POWs. He writes in Surprised by Joy, "How I ’took’ about sixty prisoners– that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all with their hands up– is not worth telling, save as a joke."
After the war, Jack returned to Oxford (where he was admitted despite the fact that he had not passed the math section of Responsions, his entrance exams, because of his military service). He befriended another student, Owen Barfield, who was also an atheist but who, to Jack’s shock, later changed his mind. Barfield taught Lewis the important concept of "chronological snobbery" that is "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited." This concept gave Lewis a means by which he was able both to critique modernist assumptions and to commend elements of earlier thought.
Up to now, Lewis had been an atheist. But he had come across a book called Phantastes by George MacDonald that has a profound impact on him. He reluctantly began to see that the authors he most respected and was most challenged by- Dante, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and others- were all Christians, while the writers he felt to be shallow and pretentious- Voltaire, Gibbon, Mill, Shaw, and Lawrence- were all opposed to traditional Christian faith. "All the books were turning against me," he would write. (See Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes, p. 13) He began to discover that the colleagues he most admired were also Christians. "Everyone and everything had joined the other side." Even atheists. Years before, he recalled, "the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good." Trinity term 1929, alone in his room at Magdalene College, Jack admits that God is God, and kneels and prays, in his words, "perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
That was not the end of the story. Jack believed in God but he was not yet a Christian. A sticking point for Lewis had always been the similarity between the Christian story and a number of myths about a dying and rising God he kept coming across as he studied pagan writers. That becomes the topic of discussion on a late night walk, September 19th, 1931 as Jack, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson stroll along Magdalene College’s Addison’s Walk. Tolkien suggests that you should expect to see similarities between pagan myths and Christianity. The pagan myths functioned in the pagan world as the prophets did in ancient Israel. The pagan myths pointed to the one "true myth" that one that actually happened. Lewis gets it. "I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths," he would write. "They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion... was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this." Within weeks, he was a Christian.
Academically Lewis carried on. He became an enormously popular lecturer, filling classrooms and lecture halls in a university where students were not required to, and usually did not, attend lectures. He wrote a great many academic works, including a contribution to the prestigious Oxford History of the English Language (which he humorously refered to as his OHEL book). Lewis formed the Socratic Club of Oxford (a forum for debating the truth claims of the Christian faith) and became its first president. He also helped start a small group called the Inklings who gathered ordinarily in Jack’s apartment at Magdalene or a local pub, often The Eagle and the Child (which they dubbed The Bird and the Baby). Its members, which included J. R. R. Tolkien, would debate, philosophize, joke, and read their works in progress. These included, among others, Lewis’ The Problem of Pain and Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
During the Second World War Lewis was invited to give a series of talks over BBC radio. These talks were later published as Mere Christianity. They make a logical, clear and compelling case for the Christian faith and are an excellent introduction to Lewis’s theology. Because of his BBC broadcasts and books like The Problem of Pain (1940) and The Screwtape Letters (1943, the idea for which he came up with during morning worship at his local church, Holy Trinity, Headington), Lewis became a popular public figure and was even featured on the cover of Time magazine. While the public loved his work, many of his colleagues at Oxford criticized him for writing outside his academic area. This may explain why he was never granted a full professorship at Oxford. Instead, later in his life he accepted an appointment as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Cambridge University to which he would commute by train from his home called the Kilns in Oxford.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the first of Lewis’ seven stories in The Chronicles of Narnia, was published in 1950. In it many of the strands of Lewis’ life and thought come together, including his lifelong fascination with medieval culture and values, his love of narrative and story, and his desire to share the reality of God’s love through Jesus Christ in a winsome way that appeals both to the intellect and to the imagination. With the publication of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Jack was also able to reach a new audience. While he had received hundreds of letters from adults over the years, now the children who came to know and to love Aslan and Narnia began to write to him. Amazingly, Lewis answered every letter he received, and his collected letters give even more insight into his life, faith and character.
Jack married late in life. Joy Gresham was a non-practicing Jew from the Bronx a former atheist who came to faith in large part because of Jack’s books. Their story is told in the movie Shadowlands. Following a civil ceremony in 1956 (for the ostensible purpose of establishing British citizenship), true love followed and Jack and Joy were married in an ecclesiastical ceremony in March, 1957 during her hospitalization for cancer. Following a prayer for her healing, Joy went into a miraculous remission for almost three years before her death in 1960. Lewis describes the impact of her death in his powerful book A Grief Observed.
C. S. Lewis died at his home, the Kilns on November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. He is considered to be one of the most important voices for the Christian faith in the twentieth century. One person who knew him well was asked to sum up his life in a sentence or two. He answered, "He was the most thoroughly converted man I have ever known." His books continue to be best sellers, and his life and teaching continue to inspire new generations of seekers and believers.
What kind of man was Jack Lewis? He was, as we have seen, a man of honor. He kept the promise he made to his friend Paddy Moore despite the years of inconvenience it cost him. He was a man of courage, as demonstrated not only in his service in the Great War, but more importantly in his willingness to speak boldly on behalf of Jesus Christ despite the toll it took on his professional advancement. He was a man of intellectual integrity who was willing to accept the fact that God is God and that Jesus Christ is Lord- in other words, he was willing to admit that he had been wrong- when the evidence became clear and compelling that the Christian faith is true. He was a generous man who shared not just his thoughts, but his heart, his imagination, his time and his money, giving most of his royalties and earnings to charitable causes and needy individuals. He was most of all a person whom God loved, whom God pursued in remarkable ways, whom God ultimately transformed, and whom God used to proclaim the Good News of His love through Jesus Christ to the world.
