Born on 29 November, 1898 In Belfast, Ireland

At age of 4, when his dog Jacksie was fatally struck by a horse-drawn carriage, he adopted the name Jacksie. He later accepted the name Jack. And his friends and family would call that for the rest of his life.

Pass Christianity to Lewis

Mother

Lewis' Mother

Flora, the daughter of an Anglicasn priest. Born in 1898.

• Read stories from the bible to him, prayed with Lewis daily, introduced the teaching of Christ
• Attended a Protestant church in Belfast
• Member of the CHurch of Ireland

Brother: Hamiltonn Warren (3 years older)

Father: Albert

Died of prostate cancer on 22 November 1963

• same time Kenndy was assasinated and passing of Aldous Husky
• death was almost like a secret
• Died at the Kilns

Failed the driving test 17 times

Bad at math and numbers

An intellectual but led by his heart

In a world of male academics but life is marked with the death of 3 women he loved

Tried to reenter military service, offering to instruct cadets; but was not accepted.

From 1941 to 1943, he spoke on religious programmes broadcast by the BBC from London while the city was under periodic air raids.

The house was featured in the Narnia book

The youthful Alistair Cooke was less impressed, and in 1944 described "the alarming vogue of Mr. C.S. Lewis" as an example of how wartime tends to "spawn so many quack religions and Messiahs".[55] The broadcasts were anthologized in Mere Christianity.

Lewises took child evacuees and from london and other cities into the Kilns

Paid for by Lewis' father's inheritance

The Kilns (AKA C.S. Lewis House)

What I admire about C.S. Lewis is that he lives out what he believes.

• For him Christianity is not just a set of facts but something that changed how he lives

Objections According to Feuberbach, Freud, and Marx. Thse higher aspirations including spirtual ones are invented as a kind of wish-fulfillment, projection, or opiates (of the nation) because people can not face a grim, meaningless universe

But wishing that GOd doesn't exists can also be projection/wish-fulfillment/opiate. Due to our hatred of our earth father, or even just the world. Or that we don't want a good and just God to exist because we are sinners.

He’s a hedonist at heart…. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are pleasures forever more…. He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. There are things for humans to do all day long…sleeping, walking, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, and working. Everything has to be twisted before it is of any use to us. – Screwtape Letters

There is a cross shaped hole that only Christ can fill

We need to be transformed. Only when we place God first in our heart, can we enjoy these secondary blessing in their proper place

Our hearts are restless unless it rest in you – Agustine, The Confessions

Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman wrote:

"The war, the whole of life, everything tended to seem pointless. We needed, many of us, a key to the meaning of the universe. Lewis provided just that.

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. – C.S. Lewis

“One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” – C.S. Lewis, Christian Apologetic

• the radio talks became Mere Christianity
• uses stories, and analogies
• make him very popular

His voice was well known second to Winston Churchill

Influenced John Piper to Christian Hedonism

What is the chief end of man?

How people respond to this other-worldly desire

1. Chasing the hedonistic treadmill. Always seeking, but never satisfied
2. Stoicism, they don't believe that they will be satisfied so they don't expect much, and won't be disappointed.
3. The Christian way, realized that their ultimate desire won't be satisfied in this world, but in the word to come. The things here are only a shadow of the things to come.

1. Every innate desire human have have a real object that satisfies that desire
2. There exists a desire that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world
3. Therefore, something exists outside of this world which can satisfy this desire.

He made Narnia as an imaginative world, used to grasp the reality that is bigger than itself.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” – C.S. Lewis

And when Lucy and Edmund had to return to this world, they feared being separated from Aslan, and Lucy said, “We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

“Are – are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

We live in a world like Narnia, always winter but never Christmas

He made his fictional work to reflect reality. To him these are not fiction but something that reflects what reality is like

Lewis' though on "we are not dealing with mortals"

No one is oridinary

• Speak about friendship and the Christian Life
• Speaks about books, fantasy, narratives, beauty, and realism

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next."
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Lewis calls this desire "Sehnsucht" or Joy. A yearning that was once experience but now no more, yet we want more. To simply want it in itself is a pleasure.

Best Known Defender of the Argument from Desire

These wonders and experience of awe are like signs pointing to God.

Before I became a Christian, I would shake my fist at God,” how can there be a God with all this pain and suffering in the world, and then he realized, “wait a minute–I’m an atheist. For an atheist, there is no problem of pain. There is only a problem of pain for a Christian. – C.S. Lewis

See your own sotry in the grand story of Christ

We're all part of a bigger story

“In the Trinity Term of 1929 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.”

– C.S. Lewis

Finally, after years of thinking, reading, arguing, debating, reflecting, engaging in discussions with friends, and reading literature, Lewis gave in to the intellectual idea that God exists.

Christianity for him was a completed, coherent of explanation of why the world is actually in part scientifically intelligible, and why immaterial information exists because ultimately responsible for our universe is an immaterial, Creator God, and He is also responsible for the creation of the human mind in his image.

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legistlator.”

Natural science came about because men believed that the universe follows rules because there's a law giver

John 1: In the beginning was the Word, and everything was made through Him and without Him nothing came to be that came to be

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“A damned soul is nearly nothing; it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.” – C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Affirms Hell is real and final in Problem of Pain

[[Refuting Universalism Slanders Of C.S. Lewis, Part 1]]

Though there is one character in Narnia who is "saved" even though he worshiped other gods.

Many other still faced "eternal death".

[[Refuting Universalism Slanders Of C.S. Lewis, Part 2]]

- so many myth of a young man god dying, how to distinguish between that and Jesus?
- Jesus is the one myth that is true

He zoomed into the one definitive question

A walk with J.R.R Toiken, and Hugo Dyson

On the way to the Zoo

by the time they arrived, he believed that Jesus is God

If everything that exists is interlocked into a chain that is mindless, how do irrational, impersonal forces give rise to minds and thinking, and reasoning and moral principles? Naturalism itself is self-refuting. – C.S. Lewis

To do science we need a "brain" to think. But if the brain is just a much of chemical and random processes then how can we trust it?

Another world-class philosopher is Alvin Plantinga, and he sums up the position: “If Dawkins is right, that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce – including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism.”

Argument from conscience/love

“Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.” – Thomas Nagle (atheist)

He now have to explore, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Right now, Lewis, has tried finding answers in Atheism, Philosophies, Pantheism, Agnosticism, and concluded that Monotheism made the most sense of the world

J.R.R. Tolkein

Hugo Dyson

Own Barfield

George MacDonald

Did Jesus exist, and if so, was He who He said He was, and did He really arise from the dead?

The Christian Myth is real, it had really happened and Christ is really who He said He was.

Later became a tutor and a lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” – C.S. Lewis

He describes a trip in the sidecar of a motorcycle on the way to the Whipsnade Zoo. When he left for the zoo he did not believe that Christ was the Son of God; when he arrived at the zoo, he did believe that Christ was the Son of God, yet nothing extraordinary had happened along the way.

• Evangelism is ofeten done in the context of friendship

  • Important to have friends who don't think like we do. Non Christians
  • His friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien started off rocky. Lewis recounts his first meeting with Tolkien like this "No harm in him; only needs a smack or so"

• Evangelism done in the power of the Holy Spirit

  • Addison's Walk
  • “interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining.

• we are heirs to a treasure trove of evangelistic tools courtesy of Lewis himself

  • Narnia
  • Space Trilogy
  • The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed
  • Mere Christianity

“Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy.”

– C.S. Lewish, [[The Screwtape Letters|Screwtape Letters]]

• Fantasy → imagination

Made good friends. Realized most of the people he is gravitated towards are Christians. And made Lewis to consider Christianity

Lewis was approaching this quest as an intellect, but realized that there's more to the human person than just the mind

Lewis believed that truth would reconcile the rational, intellectual external side of his life with the deep yearning that he felt from the internal imaginative side of his being

[[Universalism]]: Those who believe ALL will be saved if you hold to the idea that all will eventually go to Heaven, you are a Universalist.

Restarted his study in 1919

He wrote some poetry books

Got Triple First in Classics, Philosophy, and English (Top of his class in each subject)

Was very smart

Became atheist at age 15

paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing" and "equally angry with him for creating a world with suffering"

“I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality must come sometime, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when.” – C.S. Lewis, Problem of Pain

• If it would be beneficial for someone to have more than one chances at choosing God (even after death), then God would have make it so.

1. Emeth character from The Last Battle the final Narnia story
2. His praise of George MacDonald, who was a proponent of universal salvation
3. Lewis' comment made related to salvation in Mere Christianity and other writings

• George MacDonald
  • Lewis looked up and respected MacDonald
• Emeth from the last battle
  • believed a false god, Tush, but his services was accepted as done to Aslan and that he too will go to the heaven equivalent of Narnia
• Mere Christianity
  • New People or New Men
    • why some non-christian are nicer than Christians
    • Lewis wrote that he thought some “who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ” could still be “so strongly attracted by Him that they are His” more than they realize.

He published under the psudonoym Clive Hamilton, Spirits in Bondage and Dymer both poetry books

Loved OxFord, when he was working in Cambridge he would visit on the Weekends just to see friends and familiar places

Entered Oxford in 1917 to Study at University College

Under Kirkpatrick Lewis was able to attend Oxford

Paddy Moore, firend of C.S. Lewish during WW1 who had been killed in war (24 March, 1918)

Lewis was 20 when he started taking care of Janei moore (Minto)

Taking care of Janie Moore

Poor, supporting 2 with the support of his father's money for one

Lewis and (Him?) made a pact that one would take care of the other's family if they died

His Atheism Grew stronger

Demobilized in Dec 1918 and soon restarted his studies

In Nov 29, 1917 Lewis arrived at the front line in Somme Vallye in France and experienced trench warfare

Lewis states that his experience of the horrors of war, along with the loss of his mother, and unhappiness in school were the basis of his pessimism and atheism

Wounded in 1918, and invalided out

C.S. Lewis the Lay Theologian

• Don't go to C.S. Lewis to get your theology straight

He's very unsure about and even indifferent to the details of atonement

Lewis says that “Christ was killed for us” and “His death has washed out our sins” but “any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary”

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. – John 14:6

• Was also hated in Oxford for writing theology books
  • What's an Oxford Don doing writing popular theology (a form of prostitution), a professor in literature should teach literature not theology
  • Got passed over promotion and awards twice for the Chairs in English Literature
  • In post-war Oxford, Christianity was hated

Oxford Community didn't like him converting to Christianity

Denied promotions and suffered personal insult for his beliefs

• You either write about your own subject or you write detective stories

he chose to express his faith in the vernacular rather than in the language of the scholar. Although he did so in order that he might make the faith accessible to all - view by many in the university as a thing not proper to his profession

"In the eyes of some," says Blamires, "he was using a donnish knowledge to mesmerize the innocent masses with dialectical conjuring tricks."

His close friend didn't like his "evangelistic" Christian writings

• Bothered and embarreded him (Owel Barfield)

He "felt it was the duty of every Christian," observed Owen Barfield, "to go out into the world and try to save souls." In an essay on "Christianity and Culture" Lewis stated plainly that "The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying him, the salvation of the human soul, is the real business of life," and in another place admitted that most of his books were "evangelistic." Speaking of the fundamental difference between the Christian's and the unbeliever's approach to literature, and by extension to any of the great works of human culture, Lewis said without qualification, that "the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world."

Inclusivism

• Anonymous Christians: people may be saved through Christ without putting explicit faith in Chris

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. (178)

Lewish 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".

hat which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929[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. Suprised by Joy

Realized that his Atheism didn't address his desire for something more

Looked into Idealism. That the world is more than just matter. That the world we perceive through our senses is just a curtain where the Absolute is hiding.

Hegal and Henri Bergson

Materialism felt like a stiff armor to him

J.R.R. Toliken

Met on 11 May 1926

Friends

• a reading from on of the group's works in progress
• Tolkien would read a draft of The Lord of the Rings
• Lewis a draft of The Great Divorce

Categorically Anglican.

George MacDonald's Phantastes was part of what turned him from Atheism

Conversion to theism in 1929

Conversion to Christianity in 1931

ollowing a long discussion during a late-night walk along Addison's Walk with his 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

The EVerlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

Explored Pantheistic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism

The "Absolute" is immanent, within, and around everything. Perhaps reality was spiritual and matter was an illusion

No way to link goodness and truth

Doesn't explain how the spiritual and the physical world resemble reality. To totally abandon the physical and say that it is an illusion is too far

Idealism's definition of the "Absolute" is too vague

“The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you.” – C.S. Lewis, Miracles

Lewis and His Father's relationship weren't the greatest. He considered it his greates sin.

The Spirit does now work without the revelation of Christ in view. The Spirit's work is to glorify Christ, and to put the spotlight on Christ.

This is undermined in an inclusivism view, were explicit faith in Christ is not required.

Okay, what about What about people born with mental issues, or children who've died in infancy

Romans 10:12 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Janie Moore (46) was mother of Paddy Moore

Can't tell his father because his father wouldn't support him

• He was meant to be living in the colleage
  • hiding his relationship with Moore from his father
  • that his father was not just financing 2 student, but 3
  • presenting Moore as his land lady, when things got more complex, he would present her as mother

Lewis was supported by his father.

• Upon employment as an Oxford don or professor, Lewis was finally able to support himself. Although the salary of a don was measure

• Also was providing for Mrs. "Jane" Moore,

• Chronological Snobbery: "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited."
  • Owen Barfield: "Why did it go out of date?", "Was it ever refuted (by whom, where, and how conclusively)?"
  • Our own age is a mere period that has its own characteristic illusions, which can be corrected by reading old books.

A closure to his childhood

Lewis stpend Albert's last 6 weeks with his father before he died.

Baptized Imagination

George McDonald's Phantastes

Lewis quoted Lucretius (De rerum natura, 5.198–9) as having one of the strongest arguments for atheism:[44]

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa

which he translated poetically as follows:

Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.

• Strong atheist
  1. Believed that science has made belief in God untenable
  2. Suffering during childhood with dead of mother and war

It also happened as Lewis became more facinated with the occults.

“Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it. You must be able to communicate your faith so a child can understand. – C.S. Lewis

Can you explain it to a 5 year old?

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. – from_ Mere Christianity_

Christian Inclusivism: while Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, explicit faith in Christ may not be necessary for everyone to be saved. It suggests that God may work through other religions to draw people to Christ, even if they don't have a full understanding of Christian doctrine

• What he beleived about in this topic, is not what he goes around emphasizing. And he had other many more things to say that are useful to Christians. So it's not warranted that we should turn away from him writing.

Instead, all that can be said is that Lewis either believes, or hopes a position called Inclusivism is possible. Williams explains this belief “holds that not all men are saved, that those who are saved are saved by the death of Christ, but that it is possible for some who have never heard the name of Jesus to be saved by that death through ‘implicit faith’ by following the light that they had.”

Lewis' position isn't full on Universalism. Since in his story in the Last battle not all who worship false gods get to go to "heaven". But that he hope(?) that even those who did not know the name of Jesus, but did their best to follow him with the limited knowledge they have get to go to heaven.

I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a v. imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him.

• C.S. Lewis, 1952 letter

Janie Moore

If Christianity should happen to be true, then it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don't should be equally well equipped for leading a good life. Knowledge of the facts must make a different to one's actions. – C.S. Lewis

It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of impostors; but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need . . . Another thing that annoys me is when people say “Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it.” My reply is “But if I’d kept it I should probably have drunk it.” – Lewis

He gave most of his royalties from his books to charities.

Realized he had to pay taxes on them.

Wasn't great with numbers

The Kiln

“For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear—fear of insecurity.”

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusement, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our giving does not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say it is too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our commitment to giving excludes them.

Lewis didn't just give money, but also his time and talent.

Lewis had a gift to make people feel important and what they said was of value.

He writes in Mere Christianity, “Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.’”

He writes in The Screwtape Letters, “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”

At the end of Lewis’s life, his total estate was worth only £37,772

When in 1939 Lewis became aware that most of the reviewers of his book Out of the Silent Planet failed to recognize its Christian theology, the idea struck him that the Gospel could be "smuggled into people's minds" by means of fiction.

Story about how my non-christian coworkers know of Narnia → can can seg way into some gospel discussion

Before Lewis conversion to letter writing, he actually hated writing letters.

But after his conversion, he believed that if Jesus is really who He said He is, then his whole life has to change.

Lewis committed to use all means of communication at his disposal to point others toward the truth that made sense of history, art, philosophy, culture, religion, and all of life.

“If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.”

• C.S. Lewis, to one of the child that wrote letters to him

His childhood

• loss of mother
• bad experience in boarding school
• estrangement from father

He didn't want the same thing that happened to him to happen to other children. He made sure to reply to children (Matthew 18:6)

Lewis also struggled with generousity. However, Lewis, in surrendering his life to Christ, consistently sought to overcome this insecurity by trusting God and giving generously, the antidote to fear, worry, and materialism.

I thought I saw how stories, fairy stories, could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in my childhood. Could one not thus steal past these watchful dragons? I thought I could. – C.S. Lewis

Really good at conveying truth

• C.S. Lewis writing Narnia, as a way to smuggle theology into people
• C.S. Lewis as a translator, that makes theology easy for laymans to understand

“We must translate every bit of our theology into the vernacular, and this theology must be taught, not because it helps marriages or families or cultures or any other pragmatic purpose, but because it’s true. It is objectively, unchangeably true.”

Is it a sin to love Aslan, the lion of Narnia, more than Jesus? – A young girl write wrote, to C.S. Lewis

He not only answered letters from reasonable, sincere people, but he also responded to those who seemed whiny, lonely, and miserable (1 Peter 3:15) (Lewis ability to write at their level)

How would our work world change if we viewed each of our interaction with people as coming from someone made in the image of God? How would our interaction with peopl in the service industry change? Imagine what could happen if even once a week we would sit down and write a letter of encouragement to a fiend of family member?

If this idea that no one is ordinary is true. How would you use your all to make Christ known? How would you see every single person that waked into this church? How would that change your behavior?

Lewis believed that each individual human being deserved to be treated with love and respect because each was created in the image of God.

All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations [heaven or hell]. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.

• C.S Lewis, a sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford

Sounds like, our church's mission statement

His radio broadcast brought in so much letters that he had to terminate the radio broadcast talks

Brenton Dickieson estimated that we have approximately 3,274 handwritten surviving letters of Lewis

After his literary fame, he spent 2 hours every morning writing correspondence

• 3 Volume set The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, collected and edited by Lewis's literary executor, Walter Hooper

• Individual collections by his brothger Warren Lewis

• Letters to Children

• Letters to an American Lady 

• _They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves

• The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis

• Letters of C.S. Lewis

Got a position in Cambridge to teach

Where Lewish wrote all of his Narinia books and other calssics

THe professor from Narnia is based off of Lewis in the Kiln.

_Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country . . . He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper . . . and three servants. – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

After German invaded Poland, took up children that were forced to evacuate the big cities

In Headington Quarry, just outside of Oxofrd

Lewis used most of his energy to saving souls

Lewis never learned to type. The clack of the keys distracted him

Inspired the book The Screwtape Letters → then later Letters to Malcolm

Noting some of the different sorts of correspondents, Lewis states, “An anonymous postcard tells me that I ought to be flogged at the cart’s tail for professing to believe in the Virgin Birth … An unknown American writes to ask me whether Elijah’s fiery chariot was really a Flying Saucer. I encounter Theosophists, British Israelites, Spiritualists, Pantheists.”

Opposition

• Married late
• Married an american who was at once Jewish, divorced, and personally rather abrasive

David Greham → returned to mother's ancestral faith

Douglas Gresham → stayed a Christian

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. W. 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 Faber, with the permission of the executors.[67]

There's no ordinary people

Lewis wrote in Suprised by Joy that a perfect day "would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock." (before his conversion?)

After complaining of a painful hip, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and the relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. 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 1957.

At first a civil marriage, to renew Joy's visa. But it later became romantic

• "Grief felt so like fear" - A Grief Observed

Joy Davidman Gerham, an American writer of Jewish background, a former member of the Communist Party USA and a convert from atheism to Christianity.

• Married in 1956
• 16 years younger than Lewis

Had cancer, scatica

Jack had experience this grief before of losing a close women

Decided to marry more officially → cancer went into remission for 3 years

died on 13 July 1960

“It’s funny having at 59 the sort of happiness most men have in their twenties... “ ‘Thou has kept the good wine till now’. – C.S. Lewis

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. – C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Lewis writes elsewhere that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

1. Wish Fulfillment (sets self as the hero and center of the universe)
2. Invention
   • Enables us to see the world as it is
3. Perceiving the world beyond us
   • [[Sehnsucht]]

Antagnism grew toward Christian faith due to his experience at a "Christian" boarding school

Dad sent them back to be taught by Kirkpatrick

Head master was actually found to be a literal mad man

Bully from school mate and abuse from head master

Terrible Experience for Him

"With his uncanny flair for making the wrong decision, my father had given us helpless children into the hands of a madman." In fact, the headmaster whom they called "Oldie" was later declared insane and the school closed.

the home was never warm and satisfying again

"With my mother's death all settled happiness . . . disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis." – C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy

Lewis's brother Warren wrote: "For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met ... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun."

His atheism solidified

"My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished." – C.S. Lewis

Started right at the train station when where they met. Asked on why he believe the city is the way it sis

Private Tutor, William Kirkpatrick, also taught Albert and Warnie

Taught Lewis how to think critically, to speak, write. Reading the Classics in their original language.

Taught Lewis Rationalism, Naturalism, and [[Materialism]]

Socratic Method: taught to give logical reason for every statement e made and to defend his position

Greatly influenced Lewis. Rationalism. Only things that can be proven with logic and reason should be believed

At age 16

At their first meeting at the train station, young Jack (as he chose to call himself) made a comment to Kirk about not expecting the "wildness" of the scenery of Surrey. "Stop," said Kirk. "What do you mean by wildness and what grounds do you have for not expecting it?" As he attempted an answer, it became increasingly clear that he had no distinct idea about the word "wildness" and that "insofar as I had any idea at all, 'wildness' was a singularly inept word." "Do you not see, concluded the Great Knock, that your remark was meaningless?" Thinking that the subject had been dropped, Jack proceeded to sulk. Never was he more mistaken. Kirk proceeded to inquire about the basis of Jack's expectations about the flora and geology of Surrey. It had never occurred to Jack that his thoughts needed to be based on anything. Kirk concluded, "Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?"

Became Reclusive → kept reading

Father became estranged and sent both of them to Boarding school in England (well intentioned but a mistake)

Passed away due to cancer 3 months before Lewis' 10th birthday in 1908

Young Lewis loved to read. He was drawn towards anthoropomorphc animals. And he made his own story too (Boxen age of twelve)

Couldn't console and comfort Lewis and his brother

Lewis house was filled with books. Lewis wrote that finding something to read was easy as going into the field and "finding a new blade of grass"

Fascinated with "dressed animals" and "knghts in armor"

The death of Mrs.Lewis convinced young jack that the God he encountered at church and in the bible his mother gave him was, if not cruel, at least a vague abstraction. - 4 or 5 years later by 1911, or 1912 (during his boarding school exprience?) Lewis forsake Christianity and became a vowed atheist

Into the Hand of a mad man

lonly and isolated

Later described as worse than life in the trenches

Return to Christianity

Timeline

C.S. Lewis and Univseralism

• Atheism

Case Study* of C.S. Lewis Ideas

• Early Life

After Conversion

29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963

Belfast, Ireland

60+ books and essayts best remembered for stories he wrote for children (Narnia)