Cs lewis biography

You may unsubscribe from these email communications at any time. If you have any questions, please review our privacy policy or email us at [email protected]. About C. September Enrolls as boarding student at Campbell College, Belfast, Ireland; leaves in December due to respiratory problems. April Meets Arthur Greeves, who becomes a lifelong friend.

September 19, Is privately tutored by W. December Receives a scholarship to University College, Oxford. June 8, Enlists in British Army. April 15, Wounded in Battle of Arras. December, Discharged from British Army. Lewis was full of happiness during the years of their marriage, though Gresham died of cancer in Lewis grieved deeply for his wife and shared his thoughts in the book A Grief Observedusing a pen name.

InLewis resigned from his Cambridge position after experiencing heart trouble. He died on November 22,in Headington, Oxford. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Prince Harry. Charli XCX. Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales. Elton John. Ralph Fiennes. Daniel Day-Lewis. Maggie Smith. He became a renowned apologist for the Christian faith through publications like The Screwtape Letters and others.

The book has been published in 47 languages. The story starts with the book entitled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobein which four kids flee life in England through the back of the wardrobe into the world of Narnia. The series is quite heavy with references to ancient Roman and Greek mythology. Lewis might be well-known for this fantasy series, but he also gained a lot of fame through writing other fictional stories.

The Space Trilogy steps away from his usual themes of magic and myths, and instead focuses more on what life might be like in other planets. Lewis began having health issues in He contracted blood poisoning from his kidneys being inflamed. His health began to improve and friends said he was back to himself in the early part of But in July of the same year, he had a heart attack and went into a coma.

He returned home, but later died on November 22, I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal. From boyhood, Lewis had immersed himself in Norse and Greek mythology, and later in Irish mythology and literature. He also expressed an interest in the Irish language[ 17 ] [ 18 ] though there is not much evidence that he laboured to learn it.

He developed a particular fondness for W. Yeatsin part because of Yeats's use of Ireland's Celtic heritage in poetry. In a letter to a friend, Lewis wrote, "I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, W. He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology.

InLewis met Yeats twice, since Yeats had moved to Oxford. After his conversion to Christianityhis interests gravitated towards Christian theology and away from pagan Celtic mysticism as opposed to Celtic Christian mysticism. Lewis occasionally expressed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek chauvinism towards the English. Describing an encounter with a fellow Irishman, he wrote: "Like all Irish people who meet in England, we ended by criticisms on the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race.

After all, there is no doubt, amithat the Irish are the only people: with all their faults, I would not gladly live or die among another folk. In he spent his honeymoon there at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn[ 26 ] which he called "my Irish life". Various critics have suggested that it was Lewis's dismay over the sectarian conflict in his native Belfast which led him to eventually adopt such an ecumenical brand of Christianity.

Chesterton called 'Mere Christianity', the core doctrinal beliefs that all denominations share". Paul Stevens of the University of Toronto wrote an opinion that "Lewis' mere Christianity masked many of the political prejudices of an old-fashioned Ulster Protestanta native of middle-class Belfast for whom British withdrawal from Northern Ireland even in the s and s was unthinkable.

Lewis entered Oxford in the summer term, studying at University Collegeand shortly after, he joined the Officers' Training Corps at the university as his "most promising route into the army". On his 19th birthday 29 NovemberLewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France, where he experienced trench warfare for the first time.

He was demobilized in December and soon restarted his studies. In he became a Philosophy tutor at University College and, inwas elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen Collegewhere he served for 29 years until Maureen Moore, Paddy's sister, said that the two made a mutual pact [ 37 ] that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both of their families.

Paddy was killed in action in and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced Lewis to his mother, Janie King Moore, and a friendship quickly sprang up between Lewis, who was 18 when they met, and Janie, who was The friendship with Moore was particularly important to Lewis while he was recovering from his wounds in hospital, as his father did not visit him.

Lewis lived with and cared for Moore until she was hospitalized in the late s. He routinely introduced her as his mother, referred to her as such in letters, and developed a deeply affectionate friendship with her. Lewis's own mother had died when he was a child, while his father was distant, demanding, and eccentric. Speculation regarding their relationship resurfaced with the publication of A.

Wilson 's biography of Lewis. Wilson who never met Lewis attempted to make a case for their having been lovers for a time. Wilson's biography was not the first to address the question of Lewis's relationship with Moore. George Sayer knew Lewis for 29 years, and he had sought to shed light on the relationship during the period of 14 years before Lewis's conversion to Christianity.

In his biography Jack: A Life of C. Lewishe wrote:. Were they lovers? Owen Barfield, who knew Jack well in the s, 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".

We know, too, that they did not share the same bedroom. It seems most likely that he was bound to her by the promise he had given to Paddy and that his promise was reinforced by his love for her as his second mother. Later Sayer changed his mind. In the introduction to the edition of his biography of Lewis he wrote:. I have had to alter my opinion of Lewis's relationship with Mrs.

In chapter eight of this book I wrote that I was uncertain about whether they were lovers. Now after conversations with Mrs. Moore's daughter, Maureen, and a consideration of the way in which their bedrooms were arranged at The Kilns, I am quite certain that they were. However, the romantic nature of the relationship is doubted by other writers; for example, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski write in The Fellowship that.

When—or whether—Lewis commenced an affair with Mrs. Moore remains unclear. Lewis spoke well of Mrs. Moore throughout his life, saying to his friend George Sayer, "She was generous and taught me to be generous, too. Moore, and her daughter Maureen. The Kilns was a house in the district of Headington Quarry on the outskirts of Oxford, now part of the suburb of Risinghurst.

They all contributed financially to the purchase of the house, which eventually passed to Maureen, who by then was Dame Maureen Dunbarwhen Warren died in Moore had dementia in her later years and was eventually moved into a nursing homewhere she died in Lewis visited her every day in this home until her death. Lewis was raised in a religious family that attended the Church of Ireland.

He became an atheist at age 15, though he later described his young self as being paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing" and "equally angry with him for creating a world". Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa. This is a highly poetic, rather than a literal translation. Lewis's interest in the works of the Scottish writer George MacDonald was part of what turned him from atheism.

This can be seen particularly well through this passage in Lewis's The Great Divorcechapter nine, when the semi-autobiographical main character meets MacDonald in Heaven :. I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes being then about sixteen years old had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante : Here begins the new life.

I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness. He eventually returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J.

Tolkienwhom he seems to have met for the first time on 11 Mayas well as the book The Everlasting Man by G. 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". You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.

That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of [ a ] I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. After his conversion to theism inLewis converted to Christianity infollowing a long discussion during a late-night walk along Addison's Walk with close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

He records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Church of England — somewhat to the disappointment of Tolkien, who had hoped that he would join the Catholic Church. Lewis was a committed Anglican who upheld a largely orthodox Anglican theologythough in his apologetic writings, he made an effort to avoid espousing any one denomination.

In his later writings, some believe that he proposed ideas such as purification of venial sins after death in purgatory The Great Divorce and Letters to Malcolm and mortal sin The Screwtape Letterswhich are generally considered to be Roman Catholic teachings, although they are also widely held in Anglicanism particularly in high church Anglo-Catholic circles.

Regardless, Lewis considered himself an entirely orthodox Anglican to the end of his life, reflecting that he had initially attended church only to receive communion and had been repelled by the hymns and the poor quality of the sermons. He later came to consider himself honoured by worshipping with men of faith who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses to all the hymns.

He rejected the recruiting office's suggestion of writing columns for the Ministry of Information in the press, as he did not want to "write lies" [ 51 ] to deceive the enemy. He later served in the local Home Guard in Oxford. From toLewis spoke on religious programmes broadcast by the BBC from London while the city was under periodic air raids. The youthful Alistair Cooke was less impressed, and in described "the alarming vogue of Mr.

Lewis" as an example of how wartime tends to "spawn so many quack religions and Messiahs". FromLewis was occupied at his cs lewis biography holiday weekends visiting R. It was also during the same wartime period that Lewis was invited to become first President of the Oxford Socratic Club in January[ 56 ] a position that he enthusiastically held until he resigned on appointment to Cambridge University in InLewis accepted the newly founded chair in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridgewhere he finished his career.

He maintained a strong attachment to the city of Oxfordkeeping a home there and returning on weekends until his death in 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. In later life, Lewis corresponded with Joy Davidman Greshaman American writer of Jewish backgrounda former Communistand a convert from atheism to Christianity. She was separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband, novelist William L. Greshamand came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas. Joy was the only woman whom he had met Since she was divorced, this was not straightforward in the Church of England at the time, but a friend, the Rev.

Peter Bide, performed the ceremony at her bed in the Churchill Hospital on 21 March Gresham's cancer soon went into remissionand the cs lewis biography lived together as a family with Warren Lewis untilwhen her cancer recurred. She died on 13 July Earlier that year, the couple took a brief holiday in Greece and the Aegean ; Lewis was fond of walking but not of travel, and this marked his only crossing of the English Channel after Lewis's book A Grief Observed describes his experience of bereavement in such a raw and personal fashion that he originally released it under the pseudonym N.

Clerk to keep readers from associating the book with him. Ironically, many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief. After Lewis's death, his authorship was made public by Faberwith the permission of the executors. Lewis had adopted Gresham's two sons and continued to raise them after her death. Douglas Gresham is a Christian like Lewis and his mother, [ 67 ] while David Gresham turned to his mother's ancestral faith, becoming Orthodox Jewish in his beliefs.

His mother's writings had featured the Jews in an unsympathetic manner, particularly on shechita ritual slaughter. David informed Lewis that he was going to become a shoheta ritual slaughterer, to present this type of Jewish religious functionary to the world in a more favourable light. In a interview, Douglas Gresham acknowledged that he and his brother were not close, although they had corresponded via email.

David died on 25 December In early JuneLewis began experiencing nephritiswhich resulted in blood poisoning. His illness caused him to miss the autumn term at Cambridge, though his health gradually began improving in and he returned that April. His health continued to improve and, according to his cs lewis biography George SayerLewis was fully himself by early On 15 July that year, Lewis fell ill and was admitted to the hospital; he had a heart attack at pm the next day and lapsed into a coma, but unexpectedly woke the following day at pm.

After he was discharged from the hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns, though he was too ill to return to work. As a result, he resigned from his post at Cambridge in August Lewis's condition continued to decline, and he was diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure in mid-November. He collapsed in his bedroom at pm on 22 November, at age 64, and died a few minutes later.

Media coverage of Lewis's death was almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of John F. Kennedywhich occurred on the same day approximately 55 minutes following Lewis's collapseas did the death of English writer Aldous Huxleyauthor of Brave New World. Kennedy, C. Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford Universitywhere he won a triple first, the highest honours in three areas of study.

His The Allegory of Love helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives such as the Roman de la Rose. His last academic workThe Discarded Image : An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literatureis a summary of the medieval world view, a reference to the "discarded image" of the cosmos. Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the " Inklings ", including J.

Glyer points to December as the Inklings' beginning date. The religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-establishment Tynan retained a lifelong admiration for him. Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy :. 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 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 Papistand at my first coming into the English Faculty explicitly never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both. In addition to his scholarly work, Lewis wrote several popular novels, including the science fiction Space Trilogy for adults and the Narnia fantasies for children.

Most deal implicitly with Christian themes such as sin, humanity's fall from graceand redemption. His first novel after becoming a Christian was The Pilgrim's Regresswhich depicted his journey to Christianity in the allegorical style of John Bunyan 's The Pilgrim's Progress. The book was poorly received by critics at the time, [ 23 ] although David Martyn Lloyd-Jonesone of Lewis's contemporaries at Oxford, gave him much-valued encouragement.

Asked by Lloyd-Jones when he would write another book, Lewis replied, "When I understand the meaning of prayer. The Space Trilogy also called the Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy dealt with what Lewis saw as the dehumanizing trends in contemporary science fiction. The first book, Out of the Silent Planetwas apparently written following a conversation with his friend J.

Tolkien about these trends. Lewis agreed to write a "space travel" story and Tolkien a "time travel" one, but Tolkien never completed " The Lost Road ", linking his Middle-earth to the modern world. Lewis's main character Elwin Ransom is based in part on Tolkien, a fact to which Tolkien alludes in his letters. The second novel, Perelandradepicts a new Garden of Eden on the planet Venus, a new Adam and Eveand a new "serpent figure" to tempt Eve.

The story can be seen as an account of what might have happened if the terrestrial Adam had defeated the serpent and avoided the Fall of Manwith Ransom intervening in the novel to "ransom" the new Adam and Eve from the deceptions of the enemy. The third novel, That Hideous Strengthdevelops the theme of nihilistic science threatening traditional human values, embodied in Arthurian legend.

Many ideas in the trilogy, particularly opposition to dehumanization as portrayed in the third book, are presented more formally in The Abolition of Manbased on a series of lectures by Lewis at Durham University in Lewis stayed in Durham, where he says he was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the cathedral. That Hideous Strength is in fact set in the environs of "Edgestow" university, a small English university like Durham, though Lewis disclaims any other resemblance between the two.

Walter HooperLewis's literary executor, discovered a fragment of another science-fiction novel apparently written by Lewis called The Dark Tower. Ransom appears in the story but it is not clear whether the book was intended as part of the same series of novels. The manuscript was eventually published inthough Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog doubts its authenticity.

The Chronicles of Narniaconsidered a classic of children's literature, is a series of seven fantasy novels. Written between and and illustrated by Pauline Baynesthe series is Lewis's most popular work, having sold over million copies in 41 languages Kelly Guthmann It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage and cinema.

The books contain Christian ideas intended to be easily accessible to young readers. In addition to Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters from Greek and Roman mythologyas well as traditional British and Irish fairy tales. Lewis wrote several works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, The Great Divorceis a short novella in which a few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are met by people who dwell there.

The proposition is that they can stay if they choose, in which case they can call the place where they had come from " Purgatory ", instead of "Hell", but many find it not to their taste.

Cs lewis biography

This work deliberately echoes two other more famous works with a similar theme: the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieriand Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Another short work, The Screwtape Letterswhich he dedicated to J. Tolkien, consists of letters of advice from senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood on the best ways to tempt a particular human and secure his damnation.

It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the unusual perspective of Psyche's sister. It is deeply concerned with religious ideas, but the setting is entirely paganand the connections with specific Christian beliefs are left implicit. Before Lewis's conversion to Christianity, he published two books: Spirits in Bondagea collection of poems, and Dymera single narrative poem.

Both were published under the pen name Clive Hamilton. He also wrote The Four Loveswhich rhetorically explains four categories of love: friendshiperosaffectionand charity. Ina partial draft was discovered of Language and Human Naturewhich Lewis had begun co-writing with J. Tolkien, but which was never completed. In an original poem was discovered in a collection of documents in Special Collections at the University of Leeds.

Lewis is also regarded by many as one of the most influential Christian apologists of his time, in addition to his career as an English professor and an author of fiction. Mere Christianity was voted best book of the 20th century by Christianity Today in Lewis was very interested in presenting an argument from reason against metaphysical naturalism and for the existence of God.

Mere ChristianityThe Problem of Painand Miracles were all concerned, to one cs lewis biography or another, with refuting popular objections to Christianity, such as the question, "How could a good God allow pain to exist in the world? According to George Sayer, losing a debate with Elizabeth Anscombealso a Christian, led Lewis to re-evaluate his role as an apologist, and his future works concentrated on devotional literature and children's books.

Certainly, Anscombe herself believed that Lewis's argument, though flawed, was getting at something very important; she thought that this came out more in the improved version of it that Lewis presented in a subsequent edition of Miracles — though that version also had 'much to criticize in it'. Lewis wrote an autobiography titled Surprised by Joywhich places special emphasis on his own conversion.