C.S. Lewis

Before

Clive Staples Lewis was nine years old when his mother died of cancer, and the boy's small, frightened prayers for her healing went unanswered. With her death the warm, secure world of his childhood collapsed, and he was packed off to a succession of cold, often cruel English boarding schools that he remembered ever afterward with loathing. By his teens he had quietly concluded there was no God at all. The First World War, where he was wounded at the front and watched friends blown apart, only hardened the verdict; the universe, he decided, was a meaningless accident, and human beings a brief flicker in the dark. He rose quickly to become a tutor and fellow at Oxford — brilliant, widely read, and armored in a tidy materialism that left no room for the supernatural. Christianity he dismissed as one more primitive myth, no different from the dead religions of Greece and Rome. And yet his atheism was strangely restless. He was, in his own famous phrase, 'very angry with God for not existing' — and angrier still at him for having made a world so brimming with pain. His unbelief was confident on the surface, but underneath it had no peace.

The Turning Point

Two forces slowly broke down his defenses. The first was a recurring, almost unbearable longing he named 'Joy' — sudden, piercing stabs of desire, set off by a line of poetry, a memory, or the Norse myths he loved, for something no experience in this world could ever satisfy. For years he chased the feeling itself and always lost it; only later did he understand that the longing was not the point but a signpost, pointing past the world to the One who had made him for himself. The second force was honest argument. At Oxford he kept noticing an inconvenient pattern: the writers who nourished him most deeply — George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson — were Christians, while the tidy materialists left him cold. His friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson pressed him in long night-time conversations along Addison's Walk: the gospel, they argued, was not one more dying-and-rising myth to be explained away, but the true myth — the very thing all the old stories had been dreaming toward, this time stepping out of legend and into history as hard fact. One by one his objections fell, against his own will. In 1929, kneeling alone at night in his rooms at Magdalen College, he 'gave in, and admitted that God was God' — by his account 'perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.' But that was only belief in God, not yet faith in Christ. The final step came two years later, on an utterly ordinary morning, riding to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle. There was no struggle and no tears; he simply discovered that something had quietly settled. As he later described it, with characteristic precision: 'When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.'

After

The reluctant convert spent the rest of his life helping others believe. During the Second World War his BBC radio talks steadied a frightened nation and became Mere Christianity, still one of the most influential works of Christian apologetics ever written. He wrote The Problem of Pain and, after his wife's death, the raw and honest A Grief Observed, out of his own suffering; he skewered the human heart with mischievous brilliance in The Screwtape Letters; and — almost as an afterthought — he wrote seven children's stories about a land called Narnia and a great Lion named Aslan, through whom countless children first met, without quite realizing it, the figure of Christ. He died quietly on November 22, 1963 — the same day as President Kennedy, so that his passing went almost unnoticed in the news. Yet more than half a century later his books still sell in the millions and lead readers, exactly as they once led him, out of doubt and toward Jesus.

In Their Words

“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