Who Is C.S. Lewis?

Kevin Belmonte wrote the brief biography of C.S. Lewis below. The biography is featured on www.cslewis.org, website of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. Read and annotate the biography, and then discuss and take notes on the C.S. Lewis quotations that follow. Who is C.S. Lewis? Few authors of fantasy literature are as beloved as C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898. Time magazine has listed the first of his Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as one of the top 100 English language novels written in the twentieth century. Time had earlier confirmed Lewis’s stature as a writer of international renown when it featured him on its cover in September 1947. But then, Time was merely affirming what millions of readers then and now understood: Lewis was a writer whose gifts gave his books an enduring appeal. Unforgettable characters, places and prose that stir the imagination and heart. The world of Narnia is one to which readers return again and again. It evokes a magic all its own. At first glance Lewis was, perhaps, an unlikely person to have crafted such highly regarded works of fantasy. A brilliant academic, he was educated at Oxford University, and returned there following service in World War I to become a Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College. Later, in 1954, he was appointed to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge University. But Lewis had loved fantasy literature since his early years, and was then deeply influenced by his reading of George MacDonald’s great imaginative tale Phantastes. “I knew that I had crossed a great frontier,” he would later write. Still earlier, as a boy, he had created Boxen—an imaginary world where animals talked and had adventures. As an adult, Lewis’s scholarly studies were steeped in chivalric literature and medieval legends. Lastly, he was highly favored in that he had a decades-long friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There were other influences upon him, but these aspects of his life proved crucial catalysts for him to pen the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis and Tolkien were both members of a celebrated literary circle, The Inklings, which met at Oxford. And as Lewis’s fame grew, many people wrote to him. This opened an unexpected door of ministry, for many of his correspondents were Christians, as he was, or were interested in the truth claims of Christianity. Lewis’s correspondence also led to his meeting with the woman who would become his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, whom he married in 1956. Their love story formed the basis of the celebrated film, Shadowlands, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough. There are many more things that could be said about C.S. Lewis, but it is enough to say that the wonder does not end here. Visitors to his Oxford home, The Kilns, can sojourn and study in the same setting where he wrote his books. And most recently of all, in America, Lewis’s life and books have served as the inspiration for the creation of new college of the great books that bears his name. Lewis’s legacy endures, and will endure, so long as stories can capture the imagination of readers. Destruction…means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the ‘annihilation’ of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience…the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation? You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.” What is the argument? Do you agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between? Why? “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.” What is the argument? Do you agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between? Why? “Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.” What is the argument? Do you agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between? Why? “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” What is the argument? Do you agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between? Why? .

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