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A statue of Lewis, getting ready to go to Narnia.

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Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), usually known asC. S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends), was anIrish-bornBritishwriter, scholar of Englishmedieval andrenaissanceliterature, andChristian apologist. He was a fellow of University of Oxford from 1925 to 1954, the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at University of Cambridge from 1954 until his death.

Lewis spent his younger life as anatheist, but converted toAnglicanism in his late twenties under the influence of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien (though Tolkien was a devoutRoman Catholic). Lewis was also friends with Alec Vidler, until Lewis found out that Vidler had aligned himself with theLabour Party.^[2] Lewis' daftness is not entirely meritless, as he had drivenAyn Rand to a total meltdown for having read his work.^[3]

Andby God, hehatescars.^[4][5]

Religious beliefs[edit]

Christianity[edit]

Lewis was a member of the Anglo-Catholic tendency^[6]within the Anglican church. His best-known work of apologetics,Mere Christianity (1952), attempts to isolate the core of Christianity independent of particulardenominations.

In this work (the chapterThe Perfect Penitent), Lewis hints that he does not believe in the standard Western Christian understanding of Jesus' death as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin, a notion also eschewed in his Christian allegorical fiction. Lewis seems to opt for the ancient notion that Jesus' death is a ransom paid to the devil rather than a sacrifice to God.^{[note 1]}Something sensible at last.

In his autobiographySurprised by Joy (1955), Lewis states that obtaining life after death is a rather crass motive for becoming Christian and actually spoils what is good in Christianity. (No wait, that ideadoes make sense.)

Like many Anglo-Catholics, Lewis acceptedtheistic evolution, and, like many Anglo-Catholics, believed in apurgatory. Although Article XXII of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles^[7]rejects "the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory", Lewis construed this to mean Catholic beliefsabout purgatory, rather than beliefin purgatoryper se.

Taoism!?[edit]

Though strangely, Lewis is also very keen on theTaoist concept of "Tao".Which to Lewis means that “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”^[8] ... despite Taoism (i.e.Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of the belief) stating that Tao cannot be characterized; "what one may name as Tao is notthe actual Tao."^{[9][note 2]}

Lewis' interpretation of Tao, disparagingly referred to as "Taovangelism", is believed to be an interpretation of Taoism through a veryCalvinist reading.

Fiction and other written works[edit]

Lewis is better known for his fiction writing than his academic work. His best-known work consists of the "Chronicles of Narnia", a series offantasies in which English schoolchildren are transported to amagical land, where they are involved in various heroic (and otherwise) roles. The Narnia books have a great deal of Christian allegory and assumptions, although many readers don't immediately perceive this. Particularly strongly Christian areThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe;The Magician's Nephew; andThe Last Battle. In the last, Christian allegory is wielded like a sledgehammer, presumably just to make sureeveryone knew what he was getting at. For good measure he threw in a helping of Plato's theory of forms, having the characters (after death?) go to "the real England"—whatever that is.

Lewis was also a known Christian apologist. InMiracles andMere Christianity, Lewis employs a streamlined simplified version ofKantian arguments that the simple fact that we have minds (Miracles) and morality (Mere Christianity) points to the existence of a God. In the latter, he employs hisoriginal trilemma argument that since Jesus claimed to be God, he must be Lord, liar, or lunatic. This argument ignores (among other thing) the possibility that this story about Jesus may be fabrication by another author, which one might expect awriter of fantasy to be aware of. Lewis is today highly popular withconservative Christians but professional theologians cite him less often.

Lewis has been criticized forracism because of his portrayal of Calormen, a country suspiciously similar to theOttoman Empire, which is almost entirelyevil. The people of Calormen, while not particularly like the real Ottomans, were very much like theEuropeanstereotypes ofMuslims at the time.

In his bookMere Christianity, Lewis argued thatwitch hunts were not wrong, only mistaken since witches do not exist—if they did, he says, the crime of witchcraft, working for the Devil to destroy people, would be deserving of death, if any crime ever deserved death.^[10]

In addition to the Narnia books, his writings include:

Christian apologetics:

• Mere Christianity, the aforementioned apologetic for what Lewis considered basic Christianity, independent of denominations.

Literary criticism:

• The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature: actually an excellent introduction to medieval ideas about the physical world.
• An Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition: a study of medieval romantic poetry.
• A Preface to Paradise Lost: A study of Milton's epic poem.

Philology:

• Studies in Words: An actually well researched scholarly work on how words have changed their meanings through history. This suggests his more controversial work is a case ofultracrepidarianism.

Value and natural law:

• The Abolition of Man: A very philosophical work that some consider to be Lewis' most important (non-Narnia) book. In it, he argues thateducation, both in the home and in school, must be based both on "morallaws andobjectivevalues". In it, Lewis raises the question ofmoral relativism, and directly opposes the claim that there is such a thing as "absolute moral value" in this world. Among other things, he defends "the power of man over nature" as something worthy of value, but criticizesthe use of it to deny values, the value of science itself being among them. He defendsscience as something worthy,but criticizes using it to discredit values ​​- the value of science itself being among them - or defining it tothe exclusion of other moral values.^[8] You can deduceits merits from the fact that in 1999,National Review had ranked it as the 7th best non-fiction book of 20th Century.^[11]

Autobiography:

• Surprised by Joy - An autobiography.

Fiction:

• The Screwtape Letters, a series of letters between an apprentice demon, Wormwood (yes, that was a reference inCalvin & Hobbes), and his mentor.
• Till We Have Faces, a celebrated retelling of the Cupid and Psychemyth from Apuleius intertwined with manyexistential and evenUniversalist themes. Lewis called it the best of his novels.
• The Space Trilogy, somewhat obscure at the moment, but began a magnificent spat of letters with none other thanArthur C. Clarke. It was born from a dare with J.R.R. Tolkien; the two disliked what they perceived as the current dehumanizing trends inscience fiction and dared each other to write a sci-fi book their own way, though Tolkien's book went unfinished.
• The Great Divorce, a dream-vision novel about a trip from hell to heaven.

Critics of apologetics[edit]

A thorough analysis of Lewis' Christian apologetics is found in John Beverslius' bookC.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. In the foreword, Beverslius states that Lewis is either often treated as an almost-divineoracle or with complete contempt, and neither treatment is deserved. He regards Lewis as having a sensitive and intelligent mind that is simply wrong about Christianity, and as such his arguments should be respectfully dismantled.

A chapter analyzing Lewis' apologetic arguments appears in S.T. Joshi's bookGod's Defenders: What They Believe and Why they are Wrong.^[12]

Secular critics of Lewis' fiction[edit]

Author Philip Pullman is an outspoken critic of Lewis and the underlying values in his Narnian chronicles. Pullman has several times noted that his own fantasy trilogyHis Dark Materials is written in part to serve as ahumanist alternative to the Narnia series.

Salon.com editor Laura Miller wrote a book defending the literary value of the Narnia books for non-believing readers entitledThe Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Guide to Narnia. Portions of the book are autobiographical in which Miller discusses her childhood love of Narnia, her subsequent disenchantment when she discovered the Christian subtext of the books, and her later discovery of how to appreciate the books outside of the framework of Lewis' Christianity.

A more negative assessment of Lewis' fiction is in David Holbrook's psychoanalytic study of Lewis entitledThe Skeleton in the Wardrobe in which he sees signs of Lewis' fear of women and sexuality reflected in the Narnia series. However, Holbrook speaks quite highly of Lewis' novelsThe Magician's Nephew (the 2nd to last of the Narnia series, though it's a prequel) andTill We Have Faces.

A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis is the only full-length one not written by a Christian. Wilson actually lost his Christian faith while researching his bio of Lewis and the resulting book is heavily psychoanalytic. However, Wilson returned to Christianity 20 years later.

Lewis wars among conservative Christians over evolution[edit]

TheBioLogos institute (a think tank promoting the compatibility of evolution and Christianity) frequently cites C.S. Lewis with approval in its literature. However, theDiscovery Institute (which promotesintelligent design) also houses aLewis Institute, and one Discovery Institute member,John G. West, has edited a book^[13] and given several lectures contesting the view that Lewis was comfortable with evolution, in spite of very clear statements to this effect inMere Christianity. (In fact, Lewis was indeed comfortable with evolution when he wroteMere Christianity in the early 1940s, but was later convinced to gofull-creationist when a colleague used the old "evolution is random therefore it can't produce the human eye" fallacy on him.)^{[citation needed]}

West's book further ropes Lewis into the battle against that conservative Christian chestnut "scientism", the belief that all truth can be obtained scientifically. AstrophysicistSean Carroll has observed that religious opponents of modern science often use the term "scientism" over-flexibly to mean a wide range of things, depending on the polemical needs of the moment.^{[citation needed]}

See also[edit]

• Lewis Trilemma

External links[edit]

• The C.S. Lewis Institute
• Hnakra Wars, the wargame based on C.S. Lewis'sOut of the Silent Planet

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

• Dyer, Justin Buckley; Watson, Micah J. (2016).C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 9781107108240.

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