This week we will take a quick look at the life of C.S. Lewis. He was a gift to the church who was born on November 29, 1898 and died November 22, 1963.
The service known as the Christian Quotation of the Day (www.cqod.com) circulated the following quote on the anniversary of his death this year.
Quotation:
The word religion is extremely rare in the New Testament and the writings of mystics. The reason is simple. Those attitudes and practices to which we give the collective name of religion are themselves concerned with religion hardly at all. To be religious is to have one’s attention fixed on God and on one’s neighbor in relation to God. Therefore, almost by definition, a religious man, or a man when he is being religious, is not thinking about religion; he hasn’t the time. Religion is what we (or he himself at a later moment) call his activity from outside.
... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "Lilies that Fester," from
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays, p. 32 [1960]
Lewis was an introspective man and he was concerned about purity in motives. If you can’t attend this Sunday please note that my notes are included as the first comment attached to this post.
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Notes on C.S. Lewis
Introduction
Name Clive Staples Lewis (called Jack)
Born November 29, 1898 in Belfast Ireland
Died November 22, 1963 in England (day of JFK assassination)
Most of the information in this discussion comes from:
Surprised by Joy – C.S. Lewis’ autobiography
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis – Alan Jacob
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Why discuss him?
An Oxford professor saved late in life by God’s Grace
Probably most famous conversion of the 1900s
Prolific and influential writer and debater (Mere Christianity)
His children’s books (The Chronicles of Narnia, 7 books) still popular
Movie, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” starting Dec 9th
Early Life
Lewis quotes (Chap 1 of SBJ) Milton, “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.”
Lewis had two wonderful parents, Mother – a cool critical mathematician and his father with great sentimentality, passion, and rhetoric.
Lewis had “issues” with his dad. I think that it is at least likely that his dad suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) if Lewis’ descriptions of their interactions are accurate. Fortunately for his father he was a politician and they seem to be almost universally afflicted with ADD.
When a young boy (<10) Lewis attended a protestant church in Ireland.
C.S. while very young announced to his parents that his name would now be Jacksie. Hence, Jack Lewis.
Began writing as a child. Constructed a world called Boxen with talking animals that was interwoven with his older brothers concepts of India. They made maps and wrote detailed descriptions. I wonder if TV costs us more than we can imagine.
This animal land, in Lewis opinion, had nothing in common with his later children’s books except the talking animals. There was no “wonder” in his animal land.
Lewis was cognizant of a longing for something throughout his life. He felt he was pursing it from time to time in various forms of literature and experience. He calls this unsatisfied longing that isn’t unpleasant “Joy”. I think that as long as he felt he was making progress towards the unknown object of desire it was joyful. He uses “Joy” in this way throughout his autobiography. A calling and life passion might be another way of saying it.
His mother died when he was 10 – really a disaster for family life
He was sent to boarding school with a certifiable loon. The teacher was fairly fond of Lewis so it wasn’t as horrible for him as some others but Lewis left in a couple of years after the school closed down due to lack of students and the instructor died a couple years later in an asylum. It was bad.
He continued in boy’s schools throughout his education. In fact, since he went on faculty at Oxford he really lived his life in the company of men. I think this colored his relationships with women and only late in life after his salvation did he find some balance. He became an atheist while a teen and it was not a casual experience. He was a thinking atheist.
Adult Life
Academic success preceded his conversion but continued after his conversion.
He taught philosophy at Oxford as a substitute in 1924 when he was 26 years old.
He was elected to Magdalen College at Oxford in 1925 where he taught English Language and Literature for 29 years until he left for Magdalene College of Cambridge in 1954.
He was chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge until he resigned just before his death in 1963 just short of 65 years old. He was a brilliant scholar.
Conversion
If you attended the course I taught on Francis Schaeffer’s book “The God Who is There” then you heard about Schaeffer’s observations of the tensions required of modern man between a concept of reality and finding meaning. In Lewis we have an introspective man who describes his experience of the problem in excruciating detail.
In his mothers death he prayed as he said (SBJ p. 21) “I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle (praying for his mother’s healing), to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as an magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I supposed He would simply - well, go away.”
In a sense then it wasn’t even a religious experience in seeking God. Lewis argues this point and I think I related to God in much the same way and I accept the point. God is simply a resource to be accessed and if it doesn’t work then you simply did something wrong. Alan Jacob has a hard time believing this was really the case for Lewis after his mother’s death. From this point, Lewis went gradually to atheism and, by God’s Grace I moved to a relationship with the God who is there.
Lewis actually got to a point of extreme introspection in prayer. He tried to pray properly in the sense that he thought that if he prayed and kept his attitudes just right during his praying that then the prayer would “work”. I think I know the pressure he put himself under as a young boy. He couldn’t make it “work” so he began to look for relief and he was exposed to both spiritism and atheism.
Eventually he embraced atheism. He had an otherwise excellent tutor who both hardened his atheism and greatly strengthened his ability to explain and defend a point.
Lewis didn’t believe in God and yet he was angry with Him for the condition of the world.
Lewis served in WW I. God would place individuals in his life that would speak and explain things about God. One of these was an individual that was probably killed by the shell that wounded Lewis during the war.
Lewis came back from WW I a very smart man but still an atheist.
He suffered, as most thinking unsaved modern men should, the pressure of living as if there were nothing but molecules and physics but knowing that he was real. That he existed as a person with a real will. The two things are not compatible. They are mutually exclusive when considered in depth. Lewis suffered for years looking for some way to be “real” without having a God to which he would be obligated.
Lewis needed God to not exist so he could live the way he wanted to.
“The one principle of hell is – “I am my own” – George MacDonald
SBJ p. 66 “And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief.”
He found that his passion for life had left him as well.
SBJ p. 77 “Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.”
SBJ p. 115 “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world”
It sounds funny but it is a common condition. For someone so much involved with classical literature and mythology to think that all those virtues are simply meaningless was particularly painful. It meant that really all that he studied and loved was just useless noise.
SBJ p. 170 “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless”
Certain books began to influence him and they had Christian authors. One in particular was a book of fantasy by George MacDonald (not widely read today). He said in hindsight the thing about it was Holiness.
SBJ p. 191 “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere – “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
SBJ p. 211 “And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.”
1929 – Lewis became a theist on a bus ride
SBJ p. 224 “I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.” Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back – drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.”
This was only Lewis’ comments as he moved to a belief that there is a God. He still didn’t know the God of the Bible. He moved to a position of trying to obey God still with no thought of heaven. He bent the knee to the Creator of the Universe but he still didn’t know Jesus.
He said he felt as a mouse searching for a cat. He lived in dread of the coming God between 1929 and 1931. In 1931 he came to saving faith in the work of Christ while on a motorcycle on his way to the zoo after extensively discussing Christianity with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.
SBJ p. 237 “It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson were instrumental in his salvation. Tolkien was a close friend. They had a group at Oxford called the “Inklings” to discuss writing and pretty much anything as long as you had a tough hide with pipes and pints of ale. Tolkien was the author of the “Lord of the Rings”
I’d like to move to a brief discussion of one particular work since it is about to be released as a movie. If you are able to find a child to take to this movie grab them and take them. You’ll enjoy and learn from the movie as well.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
One thing about Lewis that drove Tolkien a little crazy was his syncretism. It may have its roots in his salvation with a Roman Catholic and an Anglican being used by God. It comes out in TLWW as a odd combination of talking animals, Greek Mythological characters, and of course a giant talking lion.
The story starts with 4 children sent away from London to live with an elderly professor in the country. They find that they can go through a “wardrobe” into another country.
The new country they find is called Narnia.
The country is covered by Snow and in the power of a ruler called the “White Witch”
She makes it always winter but never Christmas
She manipulates one of the children to betray the others, become a traitor, and then uses his sin to claim him as hers.
The story is an allegory;
Edmund really serves as everyman.
The White Queen, the Angel of Light, as the Enemy of Your Soul
Aslan, the Great Lion, as Christ
The story provides a tremendous image of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. It is a picture that a child can understand.
There is also a tremendous picture of those held captive by the Enemy being given life again by the Savior.
There is a picture of the courage we are called to show after salvation in the service of our Lord.
I hope the movie is up to the book.
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