About this class
Clive Staples Lewis or C. S Lewis was born in 1898 into a Protestant family in Belfast, Ireland. In his house there were always many books. On rainy days he would take volumes off the shelves and enter worlds created by authors like Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Nesbit, Mark Twain, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
After his only brother, Warren, was sent to boarding school in 1905, Jack, as he was called by those close to him, became somewhat of a loner.
His mother’s death from cancer in 1908 made him even more withdrawn. He not only lost a mother, but his father never fully recovered and home life was never as warm as before.
The death of Mrs. Lewis convinced young Jack that the God he found in the Bible his mother gave him was, if not cruel, then at least a vague abstraction. Between 1911 and 1912, Lewis rejected Christianity and became an outspoken atheist.
Lewis entered Oxford in 1917 as an undergraduate. Despite an interruption to fight in World War I, he always kept his home and friends at Oxford.
In 1919, Lewis published his first book, titled Spirits in Bondage, which he wrote under the pen name Clive Hamilton.
Lewis greatly enjoyed reading the Christian author George MacDonald. One volume, Phantastes, powerfully challenged his atheism. G K. Chesterton’s books worked in the same way, especially “The Eternal Man”, which raised serious questions about his materialism.
A close friend, Owen Barfield, also pounced on the logic of Lewis’s atheism. Barfield had converted from atheism to theism, and finally to Christianity, and often harassed Lewis for his materialism. So did Nevill Coghill, a brilliant fellow student and lifelong friend who, to Lewis’s astonishment, was a great Christian.
Shortly after joining the English faculty at Magdalen College, Lewis met two more Christians, Hugo Dyson and JRR Tolkien. These men became good friends with Lewis. Lewis soon recognized that most of his friends, as well as his favorite authors MacDonald, Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, and Milton, were also Christians.
In 1929, these paths met, and CS Lewis gave up, admitting that “God was God.”
Almost immediately, Lewis headed in a new direction. The new Christian devoted his talents and energy to writing prose that reflected his faith. Two years after his conversion, Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Return (1933). This small volume opened the door to 30 years of fiction, Christian apologetics, and discipleship.
Lewis’s 25 Christian books sold millions of copies, including The Devil’s Letters to His Nephew, Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Divorce, and The Abolition of Man. But though his books made him world famous, Lewis was always a scholar first. He continued to write literary and critical history, such as The Allegory of Love, considered a classic in his field, and English Literature in the 16th Century.
Lewis was frequently attacked for his Christian lifestyle. Even close Christian friends such as Owen Barfield and JRR Tolkien openly disapproved of Lewis’s evangelistic speaking and writing.
In fact, Lewis’s “Christian” books met with such disfavor that on more than one occasion he was dismissed as a professor at Oxford, with honors bestowed on men of lesser repute.
Preaching sermons, giving talks and expressing his theological views via radio throughout the UK bolstered Lewis’s reputation and increased his book sales. With these new circumstances other changes arose, among which the increase in income stands out.
After living a life of limitations, now that money was no longer an issue, Lewis refused to improve his standard of living, instead establishing a charitable trust for his royalty earnings. He supported numerous impoverished families, paid education fees for orphans and poor seminarians, and invested money in dozens of charities and church ministries.