Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Teacher of the Faith
November 29 · d. 1963
also known as C.S. Lewis, Jack Lewis, Clive Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack, was an Oxford and Cambridge scholar of English literature who returned from atheism to Christian faith in his early thirties and became the most widely read Christian apologist of the twentieth century. A layman of the Church of England, he wrote the wartime broadcast talks gathered as Mere Christianity, the seven Chronicles of Narnia, and the conversion memoir Surprised by Joy. He was born in Belfast in 1898 and died at Oxford in 1963. His feast is November 29.
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, in the north of Ireland (today the capital of Northern Ireland), and before he was old enough to argue about it he announced that he would be called Jack. Jack he stayed, to everyone who loved him, for the rest of his life. He was a bookish child in a house full of books, happiest in an attic with a story. Then, when he was nine, his mother died of cancer, and something in the boy closed like a door. The faith he had been given went cold with her. By the time he was a young man he had put God away altogether, and he was, by his own account, angry at God for not existing.
He went up to Oxford, and from Oxford to the trenches of the First World War, where he was wounded and saw friends killed. He came back, took his degrees, and settled into exactly the life he wanted: a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, teaching English literature, reading late, arguing later. He was a happy atheist. The universe was bleak but interesting, and the idea of God struck him as an intrusion he had every intention of keeping out.
But he was honest, and his honesty undid him. The writers he loved best kept turning out to be Christians, and the books that fed him kept being lit by a faith he had rejected. His closest friends were Christians too. Two of them mattered most: J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. One September night in 1931 the three of them walked and talked far into the small hours along Addison's Walk, the tree-lined path beside the river at Magdalen. They talked about myth. Lewis had always been moved by the old stories of gods who die and rise again, and he had used that very love as a weapon against belief: the gospel, he said, was one more beautiful myth, and so it could not be true. Tolkien and Dyson turned the argument inside out. What if this one myth were also fact? What if the story of a God who dies and rises was the true story, told not in words this time but in a real death and a real morning, the pattern all the others had been reaching toward? Lewis went away shaken, and days later he came to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.
The harder step had already been taken two years before. In Surprised by Joy, the memoir he wrote of his early life, he described the night the long argument finally cornered him, when he gave in and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed, "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." He had not gone looking for God; he had spent years bolting the doors. Grace had come in anyway, and found him kicking.
It mattered that this particular man came back. He had lived on the other side and remembered the country. He knew the objections from the inside, because they had been his own, and so he could speak to a doubter in the doubter's own language, without cant and without contempt. When the Second World War came and Britain stood under German bombs, the BBC asked him to give a series of radio talks explaining the Christian faith in plain words. A frightened nation listened in the dark to a donnish Oxford voice telling them, calmly and without preaching, what Christians believe and why. Those talks became the book Mere Christianity, and it has never gone out of print since. He wrote other things in those years that carried the same freight lightly: The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil coaches a junior one in the small arts of ruining a soul, taught more theology through comedy than a shelf of sermons.
And he wrote for children. He imagined a wardrobe in a spare room that opened at the back into a snow-covered wood, a country called Narnia held fast under a winter that never reached Christmas, and a great golden Lion named Aslan, dangerous and good at once, who gave his life for a traitor and rose again with the morning. The seven Chronicles of Narnia went round the world, and millions of children met in that Lion a love they would only later learn the name of. Lewis had found a way to slip past the watchful dragons of grown-up embarrassment and put the oldest story straight into a child's heart.
Late in his life the confirmed bachelor married. Joy Davidman was an American writer, sharp and warm and unafraid of him, and he came to love her past all his careful bachelor defenses. They married, and almost at once she was found to have cancer. They were given a few years, some of them good ones, and then she died. Lewis did not hide the wound or dress it up. He wrote it down, at first behind a false name, in a short and unflinching book called A Grief Observed, and its first sentence has kept company with the bereaved ever since: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." He did not pretend that faith made the loss small. He let the grief be as large as it was and held on to God through the middle of it, which is a harder and truer thing than serenity.
Lewis died quietly at his home near Oxford in 1963, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. The reluctant convert who once thought belief was a surrender became the plainest and most companionable voice of the faith in his century, and the books have not stopped working. Somewhere a reader is opening Mere Christianity for the first time, or a child is pushing past the coats at the back of a wardrobe, and the argument that once walked Jack Lewis home is still bringing others down the same road.
How we know Lewis is the reverse of the usual problem with a saint: not too little evidence but a great deal. He is one of the best documented Christians of the modern age. He wrote his own conversion in Surprised by Joy (1955), a shaped and selective memoir rather than a diary, and he left behind a vast body of letters, gathered in Walter Hooper's three-volume Collected Letters, alongside the diaries of his brother Warren ("Warnie") and the memoirs of the friends who knew him. The standard Lives rest on all of it: the authorized biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper (1974), George Sayer's Jack (1988) by a former pupil, A. N. Wilson's more skeptical study (1990), and Alister McGrath's C. S. Lewis: A Life (2013). The outward frame is secure to the year: born in Belfast on 29 November 1898; educated at University College, Oxford, his studies broken by war service and a wound in 1918; elected fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925; converted to theism about 1929 and to Christianity in 1931; and in 1954 made the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Magdalene College until near his death.
One instructive point of scholarship concerns his own account of himself. Lewis dated his surrender to theism to the Trinity Term of 1929; McGrath, working carefully through the letters, argues that Lewis misremembered and that the event more likely fell in 1930. The disagreement is small, and it is worth naming only because it shows how even a convert's own memoir is a reconstruction, told years later for the shape of the story rather than the precision of a docket. It does not touch the substance, which the letters confirm from the inside as it happened.
As a scholar Lewis was formidable, and it is easy to forget behind the fame of the religious books. The Allegory of Love (1936) reset the study of medieval love poetry; A Preface to Paradise Lost defended Milton against the taste of the age; his Oxford History of English Literature volume on the sixteenth century and the late An Experiment in Criticism are still read. As an apologist he ranged from the moral argument of the Mere Christianity broadcasts to the argument from reason in Miracles, and his single most quoted claim is that the things Jesus said about himself leave no comfortable room for the verdict of a merely wise teacher. His arguments have had able critics: the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe pressed him hard on the Miracles argument at the Oxford Socratic Club in 1948, and Lewis rewrote the chapter in response. He was not a systematic theologian and never claimed to be; he called himself a translator, putting the faith of the creeds into the language of the ordinary reader, and the reach of that translation is the surest measure of the work.
His churchmanship is harder to pin than his fame suggests. He was a plain layman of the Church of England, a "mere" Christian by deep conviction, wary of the party lines that divided Protestant from Catholic and reluctant to be claimed by either. He worshipped at his parish church, made his confession to a spiritual director, and kept a marked reticence about denominational controversy. Some readers found him too Catholic, others too Protestant, and the truth is that he wanted to stand in the hallway of the shared faith rather than in any one of its rooms. He guarded that plainness even against honour: in 1951 he declined the CBE offered by Churchill's government, reasoning that his name on the Honours List would let critics dismiss the faith as political propaganda. He would not let the gospel be made to look partisan.
This app keeps Lewis on November 29, his birthday; elsewhere he is remembered on November 22, the day of his death, a date the wider world scarcely noticed at the time because it was also the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. He is honoured across the divisions of the church he tried to speak past, read as warmly by Roman Catholics and Orthodox as by the evangelicals who took him most to heart. Mere Christianity remains the book pressed into the hands of the doubting and the newly believing more than any other of its century, and the Chronicles of Narnia have sold well past a hundred million copies and carried Aslan into film and stage and a thousand childhoods.
The places of his life have become quiet pilgrimages. The Kilns, his house in Headington Quarry on the edge of Oxford, is kept as a study centre; Holy Trinity, his parish church there, holds his grave and a Narnia-carved window. His papers and those of the other Inklings are gathered at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois, and C. S. Lewis societies meet on both sides of the Atlantic. On 22 November 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial stone to Lewis was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, setting him among the makers of English letters. It was a fitting place for a man who spent his life persuading readers that the truest things reach us first as stories.
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. Commontide may earn a small commission from purchases; the public-domain links beside them are always free.
Mere Christianity(English, 1952)
His most influential apologetic work, drawn from the wartime BBC broadcast talks; the book most often given to the doubting and the newly believing. In print from HarperOne.
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life(English, 1955)
Lewis's conversion memoir and the source of the "most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" passage; the primary window onto his return from atheism.
A Grief Observed(English, 1961)
The short, unflinching journal of his bereavement after Joy Davidman's death, first published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk; source of the "grief felt so like fear" opening.
The Chronicles of Narnia (Books 1 to 7)(English, 1950-1956)
The seven-book children's cycle, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to The Last Battle, centred on the Lion Aslan; his most widely read work and his imaginative theology at its most enduring.
Public domain: HarperCollins box set (publisher)
Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis(English, 1988 (rev. 1994))
The warm, lay-accessible believing biography to read first: written by a former pupil and close friend, drawing on Warnie Lewis's diaries and nearly three decades of acquaintance.
Public domain: Crossway (publisher)
C. S. Lewis: A Life - Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet(English, 2013)
The major recent scholarly study from inside the believing tradition, built on a full chronological reading of the works and letters; careful with the evidence, including where it redates Lewis's own account.
Primary sources. Lewis is his own best witness. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) tells the conversion in his own voice; the three-volume Collected Letters (edited by Walter Hooper) carry the life as it was lived, and A Grief Observed (1961) records the loss of his wife with unguarded honesty. The apologetic and imaginative works, from Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain to The Screwtape Letters and the Chronicles of Narnia, are the achievement itself and are listed under Works.
Principal biography. The authorized life by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974, revised 2002), remains the fullest single narrative, written by two men who knew him and had the run of his papers.
Recommended modern biography. George Sayer's Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Crossway) is the book to give first: intimate, affectionate, and reliable, written by a former pupil and long friend who draws on Warnie Lewis's diaries and twenty-nine years of acquaintance. For the reader who wants to go deeper, Alister McGrath's C. S. Lewis: A Life (Tyndale, 2013) is the major recent study, built on a chronological reading of the complete works and letters and careful about the evidence, including where it corrects Lewis's own dating.
Further reading. A. N. Wilson's C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1990) is the notable critical life, more skeptical in temper and useful as a counterweight. Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings sets Lewis among Tolkien, Charles Williams, and the circle that shaped him.
Online resources. The official cslewis.com carries the works and a reliable life; the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College (wheaton.edu/wade) holds the archival collections and scholarship on Lewis and the Inklings.
As an Amazon Associate Commontide earns from qualifying purchases.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Clive Staples Lewis special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52