A Character Sketch on C.S.Lewis

Two weeks ago I did a character sketch on C.S.Lewis. It was so interesting to read about him. I hope you enjoy! At the bottom of the post, there is a link to see what Douglas Wilson says to the question " Is C.S.Lewis a Calvinist?"

Monochrome head-and-left-shoulder photo portrait of 50-year-old Lewis




Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 to Albert and Flora Lewis in Belfast Ireland.

Albert Lewis was a solicitor whose father, Richard, had come to Ireland from Wales in the mid-19th century.

Flora was the daughter of an Anglican priest.

He had only one brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis.

When he was four, his dog, Jacksie was killed by a car. Lewis told everyone to call him Jacksie, but later accepted Jack, a name he was known to his friends and family for the rest of his life.

When he was seven, his family moved to Little Lea, the family home of his childhood. He said
 " The new house is almost a major character in my story. I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books."

As a boy, Lewis had a fascination with talking animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and illustrating his own animal stories.

After Lewis's grandfather's death in April 1908, his father became moody and withdrawn, so much so that Lewis found it hard to have a conversation with him. To make matters worse, his mother was battling stomach cancer and was getting weaker every day. This situation made his father even more moody, until Lewis hated being in the same room with him.

On Albert Lewis's 45'th birthday, Flora died. Lewis was only nine years old. His father would sob uncontrollably sometimes and at other times telling the boys to leave the room because he didn't want to see them. Things only got worse when Lewis's uncle died  ten days after Flora.
Three weeks after his mother's death, Lewis and his brother were sent off to Wynyard House School in England.

 When he arrived, he compared the flimsy wooden fences to the sturdy stone walls of Ireland, the imposing red brick farmhouses to the picturesque white cottages of home. Even the shape of the haystacks annoyed him--- the stacks were taller and more pointed than Irish haystacks.


Wynyard School was abusive and dismal, and the boys were not really taught anything. The teacher, the Reverend Capron, nicknamed "Oldie", was abusive, both verbally and physically. Each day, the teacher seemed to make up new rules and new punishments to go with them.
Two weeks after arriving there, Lewis wrote a pleading letter home to his father. It said:

  " My Dear Pappy,
Mr. Capron said something I am not likely to forget ---- ' Curse the boy' ( behind Warnie's back)  because  Warnie did not bring his jam to tea, no one ever heard that rule before. Please, may we not leave on Saturday? We simply CANNOT wait in this hole until the end of term....
Your loving son Jack

Albert Lewis never answered, so they had to stay until the end of the term.

In 1909 when Lewis turned eleven years old, he began to find refuge in Christianity. His experience in that school was so bad that he began to look forward to the Sunday visit to St John's Church. He prayed morning and night and read his bible every day. This practice helped him to bear his times at school a little more easily.

That same year the school closed, allowing him to return to Ireland, only to return to England to attend Malvern College. There he became an atheist, telling himself that Christianity was a myth, and he no longer believed in God.

On April 28, 1917, Lewis entered Oxford. At that time, World War I was underway, and all the young men in Oxford were drafted into the army. In just a manner of  weeks he was drafted.

On November 29, 1917, he arrived at the battle front in France's Somme Valley. While he was there, he would write poems in a little notebook about his experiences.

 On April 15, 1918, Lewis was in the trenches at Mount Bernenchon.
He was wounded in that battle by Allied artillery fire that was firing in between the British lines and hit in three places ----- the back of his left hand, chest and left thigh.

On November 11, 1918 Lewis was almost ready to go back to France to fight, but to everyone's delight and relief, Germany surrendered.

He resumed his studies at Oxford in 1931. While he was there, he believed in a higher being which he was content to call "God", but he still had doubts.

On September 19, Lewis went out for a walk with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Tolkien, who was a Roman Catholic, pointed out to Lewis that his failure to grasp the central
care of the Christian message was mostly a failure of imagination on Lewis's part. He also pointed out that Lewis had no difficulty in grasping and drawing meaning from the ancient myths of Greek and Norse, but when it came to the Christianity, he wanted to put on the cap of a rationalist and wrestle with the logic of the story rather than accept it and draw truth and meaning from it. Nine days later, September 28 he became a Christian. He was thirty three years old. Three months later, his brother also became a Christian.

His first book as a Christian was " The Pilgrims Regress". It was very similar to the Pilgrims Progress but it was more like his own conversion.

 When WWII came around, Lewis was sure that they weren't going to draft him again because he still had shrapnel in his body from the previous war. But they did send his brother again to France. Lewis did feel obliged to open his doors to the displaced children ( Displaced Children were children from London that were ordered to go away because there was a possibility of a German attack on London.)

Lewis signed as a member of the Oxford City Home Guard Battalion.

On February 1941 Lewis had a stack of thirty-one letters from Screwtape on his desktop---- each one addressing a different tactic of the devil. At first he decided to send them individually to the local newspaper the " Guardian". They became an instant success. By the fourth letter was published, Lewis was asked by a publisher named Geoffrey Bles, for the rights to the letters and publishing them in book form.  

Later, he received a letter from Dr. James Welch, the director of the religious broadcasting at the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC). Dr. Welch had read some of Lewis's works, and wanted to know if he had anything that he would like to prepare to read on the radio. At first, Lewis laughed it off. He hated the radio, much preferring reading a book or listening to a record on the gramophone. But, he soon realized that as a result of the merciless German bombing that the morale of the people was so low that many people who would not normally do so  were thinking of manners of life and death. He wrote back to Dr. Welch and offered to give a fifteen-minute talk each Wednesday night during the month of August 1941.  The talks, titled " Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe" and broadcast live from the BBC studios in London, were a huge success. Lewis was overwhelmed from the amount of letters from his listeners that he received. Some of them wanted spiritual guidance, and others wanted to share their spiritual beliefs. Dr. Welch suggested that Lewis take another fifteen-minutes on the air to read and answer some of the listeners questions. The hope was that the amount of letters would decrease.


 Predictably, the opposite occurred. The more personally interested that Lewis appeared to be in the opinions and questions of his listeners, the more people wrote to him.

The war finally ended on May 8, 1945. After the war, Lewis had even more time to write his books. Some of the books are:

- Mere Christianity 

-The Great Divorce: A Dream

-Miracles: A preliminary study

-Rise of Christianity 

- Chronicles of Narnia.

He married Joy Davidman, a Christian Jewish/American woman who was divorced with two boys, David and Douglas. They later found out that she had cancer (breast cancer). She died July 13, 1960. Lewis was heartbroken. He poured out his heart in a manuscript. After he wrote it, he wondered how was he going to publish it. He thought it was very embarrassing to have such a personal book, and he cringed at the personal "fan mail" such a book might generate. In the end, he chose a different name and sworn his publisher to secrecy, naming it " A Grief Observed"
 
On Friday November 22, 1963, He died of kidney failure. He was sixty-five years old. He died the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

His step-son, Douglas Gresham, was influenced greatly by his step-father, and to the grace of God, is a Christian and still alive.


Was C.S.Lewis a Calvinist ? 



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