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Tom Coop Psalm 19 August 28, 2016 C.S. Lewis: Master Storyteller “I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black- haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading,” C. S. Lewis wrote to a young admirer in 1954. If the famous author had been prone to notice clothing, he might have added that his trousers were usually in dire need of pressing, his jackets threadbare and blemished by snags and food spots, and his shoes scuffed and worn at the heels. But Lewis was not bothered by fashion. He was however, meticulous about the precise use of words and the quality of evidence presented in arguments. And it is for his books and ideas that the Oxford scholar is remembered as one of the greatest Christian writers of the twentieth century.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on November 29, 1898. His father Albert, was an attorney and his mother Florence, was the daughter of a Church of Ireland priest. He also had an elder brother, Warren who was nicknamed Warnie. Indeed, Lewis had a fondness for nicknames. He and his brother, Warnie, called each other “Smallpigiebotham” and “Archpigiebotham”, inspired by their childhood nurse’s threat to smack their “piggybottoms.” 2

When he was four, his dog Jacksie was killed by a car, and he announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first, he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life. As a boy, Lewis was fascinated with anthropomorphic animals. He fell in with Beatrix Potter‘s stories and often wrote and illustrated his own animal stories. Lewis loved to read and his father’s house was filled with books. Lewis’s early childhood was relatively happy and carefree. He was close to his older brother and the two spent much time together as children. After Warren, was sent off to English boarding school in 1905, Jack became somewhat reclusive. His mother’s death from cancer three years later in 1908 made him even more withdrawn and Lewis was hurt deeply by her passing. Not only did he lose a mother, his father never fully recovered from her death and, as a result, both boys felt estranged from their father. Their home life was never warm and satisfying again. The death of his mother also convinced Jack that the he encountered in the his mother gave him was, if not cruel, at least a vague abstraction. 3

Then, by 1911 or 1912, with the additional influence of a spiritually unorthodox boarding school headmaster, Jack became an avowed atheist. He later described his young self as being paradoxically “very angry with God for not existing.” The headmaster, Robert “Oldie” Capron, seems to have been a cruel man who would flog the boys with little provocation. His neighbors believed him to be insane. Lewis stayed there for two years until the school closed down from lack of pupils, and interestingly, the headmaster was soon after committed to a psych ward. Following his graduating from high school in 1916, Lewis entered University College, Oxford, two years after the start of the First World . Wanting to do his part, soon after, he signed up and was sent to the battle front. Lewis’s time as an army officer affected him profoundly, as it did most soldiers, but one friendship changed his life. Edward Moore was a fellow Irishman with whom Lewis served. The two young men seem to have made a pact that if either of them did not come home, the other would support his family. Lewis was sent home with shrapnel wounds. Moore was killed and left behind his mother Janie and sister Maureen. True to his word, Jack lived with Janie Moore until she was moved into a nursing home, suffering from dementia, where he visited her every day until her death in 1951. 4

Always reticent about his private life, many people suspected that he and Janie Moore were lovers. In his biography, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, George Sayer wrote: “Were they lovers? Owen Barfield, who knew Jack well in the 1920s, once said that he thought the likelihood was fifty-fifty. “Although she was twenty-six years older than Jack, she was still a handsome woman, and he was certainly infatuated with her. “But it seems very odd, if they were lovers, that he would call her mother.”

In 1925, Lewis was elected to an important teaching post in English at Magdalen College, Oxford where he remained for 29 years before becoming a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1955. He was a hugely popular teacher. Lewis’s Oxford lectures on medieval literature were standing room only, with some students sitting in the windows.

Soon after joining the English faculty at Magdalen College, Lewis met two Christians, Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. Both these men became close friends of Lewis. He admired their brilliance and their logic. Before long Lewis recognized that most of his friends, like his favorite authors, George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton, were Christian. 5

Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in : “When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. “They were HVV Dyson ... and JRR Tolkien. “Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist (a Catholic), and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist (the study of literary texts and written records). “Tolkien was both.”

He eventually returned to in 1931, having been influenced by his discussions with Tolkien and by the book The Everlasting Man by Chesterton. Lewis vigorously resisted conversion, noting that he was brought into Christianity like a prodigal, “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape.”

Almost immediately, following his conversion, Lewis set out in a new direction, most demonstrably in his writing. 6

Within two years of his conversion, Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933) loosely based on his own faith journey. This little volume opened a 30-year stream of books on and discipleship. Lewis’s 25 Christian books sold over 200 million of copies, including (1942), (1950–56), (1946), and (1943), the latter Encyclopedia Britannica included in its collection of Great Books of the World.

Preaching sermons, giving talks, and expressing his theological views over the radio throughout the United Kingdom bolstered Lewis’s reputation and increased his book sales. This resulted in a marked upswing in his annual income. Lewis asked his close friend Owen Barfield, who was also an attorney to establish a charitable trust (“The Agape Fund”) with his book earnings. It’s estimated that 90 percent of Lewis’s income went to charity.

When Lewis began writing children’s books, his publisher and some of his friends tried to dissuade him; they thought it would hurt his reputation as writer of serious works. J.R.R. Tolkien in particular criticized Lewis’s first Chronicles of Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 7

He thought that there were too many elements that clashed—a Father Christmas and an evil witch, talking animals and children. Thankfully, Lewis didn’t listen to any of them. Following the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, Lewis quickly wrote 6 more Narnia books, publishing the final one, , in 1956. Throughout the series, a variety of Biblical themes are presented; one prominent character is Aslan, a lion and the ruler of Narnia, who has also been interpreted as a Jesus Christ figure. Aslan, by the way, is Lion in Turkish. Although they were not well received at first by critics and reviewers, the books gained in popularity through word of mouth. The Chronicles of Narnia books have since sold more than 100 million copies and are among the most beloved books of classic children’s literature.

Though his parents were Irish Protestants, when Lewis converted later in life, he joined the Church of England, much to the disappointment of Tolkien, who had hoped he would join the . However, it was his relationship with God that was most important to him, not his relationship to a particular church. He actually believed people should just attend whatever church was closest to them. He aimed to reach as many people as possible with his books, which meant that he was anxious to avoid points of disagreement 8 between the different Christian denominations and focus on the ideas they all agreed on: the core of Christianity. That was what Lewis did when he gave a series of radio talks during World War II, that were later published in book form as . He sent part of the text to clergymen of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations to make sure his representation of “Mere Christianity” was one that they could all agree on. He did not intend “Mere Christianity” to be an alternative to the other denominations: He says, “It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall, I shall have done what I attempted. “But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.”

Although one of his most popular, The Screwtape Letters was his least favorite to write. The book consists of a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter, advising him in his pursuit of a human soul. Lewis said he never wrote with less enjoyment. Having to “switch sides” was difficult for him.

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One of the arguments Lewis uses in his books has grown particularly famous. It is referred to as the “trilemma” or the “lord, liar or lunatic” problem, and it is a response to people who believe Jesus was a great human teacher but was not really divine. “Look at Jesus’s words as recorded in the Bible,” Lewis said: “he claimed to be the Son of God and to have the power to forgive sins. “They are not the sort of claims a good human being would make. “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. “He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the of hell. You must take your choice. “Either he was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. “But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Lewis, very unusually for the time, thought that there ought to be some provision in Christianity for resurrection or for animals – specifically, domesticated animals. 10

To Lewis, the practice of taming animals, and making them more humanlike, was an obvious parallel to God’s way of making believing Christians more Christ-like.

Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the “Inklings“, including J. R. R. Tolkien and his brother Warren, among others. They met to discuss and often criticize each other’s work. Lewis was a member till just before his death.

In January 1950, Lewis, then 51 years old, began a correspondence with an American woman, Gresham. Joy was a New York teacher of English literature, a former communist and a recent convert to Christianity: her parents had been Jewish. She had become a Christian through reading Lewis’ The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. Eventually, Gresham decided to visit England to meet the famous writer, and the two arranged to have lunch together in September 1952. The lunch was a great success, and Lewis invited Gresham to spend Christmas at his home. At this point, Lewis and Gresham were simply good friends. There was no possibility of a union between them because Gresham was already married. But the marriage was not a happy one, and the couple 11 divorced in 1953. Joy Gresham then moved to England with her two young sons, David and Douglas. Then in 1956 a crisis occurred, when the British immigration service refused to renew Gresham’s visa, which meant that she’d have to return to the United States. Rather than have that happen, Gresham and Lewis decided to marry so that Gresham could stay in Britain legally, as the wife of a British citizen. Another crisis soon pushed the relationship further. Only a few months after their “civil” marriage, Joy Gresham was diagnosed with cancer. As the disease spread throughout her body, the doctors held out little hope for her survival. It was at this point that Lewis realized just how much he loved her. In March of 1957, the two were married again, this time by an Anglican priest, in a bedside ceremony at the hospital. Although Joy’s health improved during the next year, the cancer returned in 1959. She died on July 13, 1960. Of Joy Gresham, CS Lewis said: “She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. “My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.” 12

Joy’s death was hard for Lewis to cope with and tested his Christian faith. He kept a record of his thoughts and feelings throughout the grieving process, and published it, using a pseudonym, as . So many people recommended the book to Lewis, however, to help in his own grief that at last he was forced to admit he wrote it. “No one ever told me grief felt so like fear,” reads the opening sentence of A Grief Observed. “I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” It is an honest account from a mourning widower: Lewis did not flinch from recording the times when his faith was tested. By the end of the book he had made his peace with God. After her death, Lewis’s own health deteriorated, and in the summer of 1963 he resigned his post at Cambridge. Lewis’s condition continued to decline, and in mid-November he was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure. On November 22nd, exactly one week before his 65th birthday, Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm and died a few minutes later. Media coverage of his death was almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day (approximately 55 13 minutes following Lewis’s collapse), as did the death of English writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis joined some of Britain’s greatest writers recognized at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The floor stone inscription is a quotation from an address by Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”

Lewis’s relevance today can be summarized in his own words from the preface to his best known theological work, Mere Christianity: “Ever since I became a Christian, I have thought that perhaps the best, perhaps the only service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the .” His success in doing so during the 1940s earned him the label, “the Apostle to the skeptics.”

The appeal of C.S. Lewis continues to be the way in which he combines reason and imagination. He argued that "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important." C.S. “Jack” Lewis was a remarkable man, with a remarkable mind, and a remarkable faith. 14

We are blessed that he left us so much to reflect on. Amen!