C.S. Lewis: A Life Inspired

by Christopher Gordon

As an adult Lewis explained this seeming contradiction, saying that, “He [God] was, in my mental picture…merely a magician,” and not a very talented one at that. A faith as “irreligious” as his was at that time didn’t count.

In addition to this insistence on skillful discourse and sound argument, Kirk demanded a high standard of self-guided reading, of constant challenge, comparison, and evaluation of the great classics of literature, always read in their original languages.

Kirk would brook no degradation of the majesty of such wonderful works, and made Lewis learn the languages in which they had been written.

It is interesting to note that several of Kirk’s quirks would later serve to refine Lewis’ much-later adoption of Christian faith, though they were intended to reinforce his own philoso...

Lewis mentions, “I hear you” as the closest thing to praise ever uttered by Kirk, who became a father figure of sorts when Lewis’ relationship with his own was disintegrating.

Arguments between them, he said, only served to drive anyone interested in that house far away. In the Body of Christ, an ear had no business saying the eye was perceiving things wrongly. Differences were, as we shall see later, an essential part of God’s diversity, a theme Lewis illustrated at the end of the Narnia series.

But back to his teenage years, and Lewis’ adopted belief in the same atheist rationalism as his tutor: “Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer.” A hearty education indeed! “Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me,” Lewis explains, and that was the proof-loving, evidence-demanding view of the universe and everything in it.

With the intellectual bar set high during those years studying under Kirk, Lewis rose to the challenge, vowing to never again allow himself to take a “child’s head” view of anything. And all future inquiries...

Old Knock’s “brains and all” approach

The Christ story, he decided, was every bit as beautiful, heroic, and false as the Norse myths, just another good story along the lines of that tragic —if moving— scene involving Balder the Beautiful, another God-story invented by the ancients and following the same pagan themes of death and rebirth, themes with obvious origins in the seasonality of agriculture.

Lewis thus professed his beliefs publicly and dishonestly, an act he abhorred later in life as one of the worst things he ever did.

In Phantastes, reality didn’t have to be based on reason. There was a quality, “the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live,” that Lewis loved.

What we might nowadays call “right” and “left” brain were still separate, each side “pure,” not to be mixed. But an internal battle kept nagging at his thoughts: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”

Thus an appreciation for beauty, at least of the natural world, remained. Lewis held Kirk in highest esteem, indebted to the man for the rest of his career, as the man who “excited and satisfied” that rational half of his mind. “My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished.”

His response to a friend who asked “Were you much frightened in France?” could have stemmed from soldier’s stoicism, a lingering insistence on rationalism, or outright honesty— or even a mix of all three—but whatever was behind it, Lewis answered with, “All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray.”

Owen Barfield,

Arthur Greaves,

Barfield had embraced a way of thinking called anthroposophy, the philosophy of spiritual science put forth by Rudolph Steiner a few decades before,

But Barfield gets credit for dealing Lewis’ love of pure logic two wounding blows: one to “chronological snobbery,” the other to the view that the universe can be explained by the five senses alone.

Firstly, Barfield helped Lewis to see that just because one’s generation and its accompanying body of literature were steeped in a popular idea or philosophy, that didn’t mean that the philosophies of the past were wrong. He forced Lewis to acknowledge the necessity of examining why they came and went: Had the older schools of thought been proved wrong, or could truth be found in something that had gone out

of style? Just because a thing or idea had become passé didn’t mean it ought to...

Barfield’s second blow forced the issue of the meaning of “mind.” If Lewis were determined to keep clinging to realism, then he had to accept that “thought” itself, as a product of cumulative and inherited input from the five senses, was a relatively new phenomenon in the universe, since it came with the advent of humans. Lewis would also thus need to embrace the Theory of Behaviorism, which insisted that there is no such thing as “mind” at all, only behavior, since behavior, not mind, could be measured and studied. The concept of “mind” had no proof,...

Lewis still wasn’t ready to admit that there was anything particularly theistic about this larger mind of the universe at all. It could exist, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was synonymous with God. “I suspect there was some willful blindness,” Lewis later writes about this period of his spiritual journey. “I wanted Nature to be something…indifferent.”

Lewis was only willing to accept that, indeed, reason alone was not enough to either understand or to use as a tool to contemplate either logic or ethics or the complex nature of the universe. There had to be something larger, something absolute, a mind that established that basic human notion of right and wrong that lurked at the back of every discussion of morality. Our own mind, the very tool we use to examine mind, was a product of the mind itself; this revelation presented a sticky wicket which could not be bypassed.

“And there I made a new friend. The very first words he spoke marked him out from the ten or twelve others who were present; a man after my own heart…” Note that Lewis uses the word heart, not mind. And their minds certainly differed; Neville Coghill, a brilliant student, was Christian. “I soon had the shock,” Lewis reveals, “of discovering that he—clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class-was a Christian and thorough-going supernaturalist.” Shock, indeed. How could someone so informed choose to accept something so implausible as that mythology of Jesus Christ? Naturally, the two friends vigorously debated their views.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning; just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.”

“All the books were beginning to turn against me,” Lewis wrote of this discomfort. “Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader.” Not yet taking what would seem the obvious next step of giving this faith of those who he respected a thorough and immediate investigation, Lewis did begin to allow himself to be labeled a theist, as one who believed that the great absolute mind behind all the universe might indeed be a God of sorts. He still was not at all keen at allowing that God to step in any closer than arm’s length and “interfere.”

Just as Lewis was taking those first steps along the path of contemplation of the existence of a Heavenly Father, his earthly one died. The event, combined with the erosion of those naturalist beliefs he’d held onto for years, pushed Lewis to do what he had never done outside a sense of duty: In the spring term of 1929, Lewis finally “gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed…”

Though their relationship never reverted to the cozy companionship the two had enjoyed early on—in those days when they sat and conjured up imaginary worlds— the grown Lewis men would always remain united by their shared, strained relationship with their biological father, and managed to piece together a functional, if at times harmonious only in outward appearance, dynamic that supported one another through adulthood.

The Inklings held weekly meetings in a pub called The Eagle and Child, referred to affectionately by the group’s members as the “Bird and Baby.” These weekly, if not more frequent gatherings, would last for sixteen years, and it was through interactions and debates held in the fellowship of this group— all writers, all male, all of whom shared an enthusiasm for fantasy literature and narrative— that faith finally left the page for Lewis and became a living, animated thing.

Lewis’ perceptions of Christianity were greatly influenced by two Inklings members, his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

Tolkien and Dyson convinced Lewis that, rather then discrediting the experience of Jesus Christ, the ancient tales actually proved its veracity, because the old tales showed that the pagans thousands of years before had seen a glimpse of its truth, of the reality that was to come with the Savior’s arrival.

Unlike the pagan tales of dying and reincarnating gods, this one had ties to time and geographical space, connections to the physical world. And that made all the difference.

for the first time, reason and imagination were able to co-exist peacefully in Lewis’ mind.

“When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” A reconciliation of mind— of art and science, in a way— had taken place.

On a bus ride, a sense of self-awareness arrived in Lewis’ mind as a sort of strange gift: “I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster.”

Perhaps he had clung to every other philosophy for so long, his grasp was reluctant to let go, and let every aspect of himself melt into the mind to which he was acquiescing his own. “Remember, I had always wanted, above all things…to call my soul my own.”

new habit of getting up early on Sundays to attend church. This sort of discord Lewis also touched upon in his writings, with the claim that any household in which one member suddenly “gets” religion will see a similar upheaval.

Agitated and unsure as to how exactly being a Christian was supposed to influence his desire to write, he thought up an idea while sketching an outdoor landscape— during a visit to his father in Ireland, interestingly—and penned a prosy retelling of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, within the span of only two weeks, a work which Lewis titled The Pilgrim’s Regress: An allegorical apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism.

The book, though never very popular, did serve as a starting point, as a self-created map of sorts. In Pilgrim’s Regress, the main character John travels through similar ideological stops as Lewis himself had made along the way. In a sense, the book was a necessary map; Lewis needed to fine tune a visualization of the path he’d taken in his own mind, before he could share it with anyone else.

Tolkien, who had not at this time published anything, but had become quite engrossed with the idea of myth-making. Tolkien wrote and presented Lewis with a poem called Mythopoeia (a term coined for the creation of myth), dedicating it from “myth-lover” to “myth-hater.”

Ultimately, Tolkien’s legacy to Lewis, though their friendship would receive a later rift over this very issue, would be getting him to see that fiction was a vehicle through which issues of morality could be explored—though not specifically those themes of Christianity itself. Those, Tolkien believed, should be reserved only for ordained priesthood, not attempted by laypeople. Lewis, however, saw worlds of possibility opening, offering ways to bring people to a consideration of Christianity—if only obliquely, through allegory— with imagination as the carrier.

The first truly successful book Lewis wrote did not come from his own imagination; it was, funny enough, an analysis of poetry, a scholarly book titled The Allegory of Love which examined the ways allegory had been used in love poetry from ancient Rome through the European Renaissance. The book was, and still is, considered an incredible intellectual achievement, which altered medieval studies of English literature in particular. Ten years this work had been in the making; its success, plus the vocal support of Tolkien whose book The Hobbit had been a hit around this same time, gave Lewis a stronger platform with publishers for his first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, in 1938.

Out of the Silent Planet was written for people who, like Lewis had been in earlier days, were not religious, saw nothing but manmade mythology in the Bible, and had never attended church or had decided against ever doing so again. Openness to spirituality, not biblical creed, is promoted.

The novel was meant to serve as a precursor to the contemplation of good and evil, and particularly of consequences: Earth, or Thulcandra as it is called in the story, had clamped its ears closed to its own planetary spirit-song until it became, essentially, deaf.

Along with never wearing a watch and leaving his Oxford lecture attendees hanging with provocative, unanswerable questions, Lewis was known for doing two things at once, often penning two vastly differing bodies of work at the same time, alternating between them as a sort of refreshment for his mind.

The year 1940 saw the publication of The Problem of Pain, which argued for the existence of God in the midst of turmoil and suffering.

Lewis—who didn’t drive—

Titled The Screwtape Letters,

Wormwood,”