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?"
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
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withdrawn, so much so that Lewis found it hard to have a conversation with him.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.
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 ?
Was C.S.Lewis a Calvinist ?
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