C.S. Lewis For Beginners

By Louis Markos and Joe Lee

C.S. Lewis For Beginners is a thorough examination of C. S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, throughout his career as an author and as a professor at Oxford University.

A Christian apologist defends Christianity as a consistent and coherent worldview that squares with human reason, history, and desire. It offers answers to every facet of our lives on earth as well as answers to our questions about what happens after we die.

What makes C.S. Lewis unique as an apologist is the way he balanced so perfectly reason and imagination, logic and intuition, and head and heart. In addition to writing such non-fiction apologetics books as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles, he wrote eleven novels: the seven Chronicles of Narnia, a trilogy of science-fiction adventures, and a haunting retelling of an old myth set in the ancient world. All eleven tell wonderful, captivating stories that stand on their own as fiction but that also support and bring to life the kinds of apologetical arguments he makes in his non-fiction. He also wrote two utterly unique works of fiction, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, that offer a fresh, highly original take on sin and temptation, angels and devils, and heaven and hell.

And that’s not all. Lewis the apologist and novelist had a day job. He was a celebrated English professor at Oxford, and then Cambridge, University who wrote works of literary criticism that are still famous today. C.S. Lewis For Beginners takes the reader through the wardrobe of his complete catalog of writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: For Beginners
• Release date: Jun 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781939994813

Louis Markos

Louis Markos (PhD, University of Michigan) is professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His many books include From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith, The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes, Apologetics for the 21st Century, Atheism on Trial, From Aristotle to Christ, and On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis.

Book preview

Introduction

C. S. LEWIS WAS THE GREATEST Christian apologist of the twentieth century.

But what is an apologist?

It is not someone who says, I am sorry for the bad popes or for the Crusades or for the Spanish Inquisition.

It is someone who presents a logical, rational defense of the Christian faith.

When Socrates was put on trial in 399 BC by the Athenian democracy for (supposedly) teaching foreign gods, corrupting the youth, and making the weaker argument the stronger, he gave a defense of his life and mission. Defense in Greek is "apologia," and that is why we call the famous speech he gave The Apology. It was a great speech, but it didn't end well. Socrates was declared guilty and sentenced to drink a lethal dose of hemlock. Apologies, it seems, don't always convince their audience!

Like Socrates, the Christian apologist mounts a defense of what he believes and practices. His apology will typically include a logical, reason-based (as opposed to emotional, feeling-based) defense of such key Christian beliefs as the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and the historical accuracy and authority of the Bible.

It also includes offering answers to some of the strongest arguments against Christianity:

If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why is there suffering in the world?

If God is all-good, why is there evil in the world?

How can there be only one way to God?

How can a modern person believe in miracles that violate the laws of nature?

Doesn't Darwinian evolution explain everything we see around us?

More generally, the Christian apologist defends Christianity as a consistent and coherent worldview that squares with human reason, history, and desire. It offers answers to every facet of our lives on Earth as well as to our questions about what happens after we die.

Here are some apologists from the past: Paul, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Cardinal Newman, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers. Here are some twentieth-century American apologists: Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, Alvin Platinga, Peter Kreeft, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Norman Geisler, Michael Behe, Gary Habermaas, William Dembski, Lee Strobel, Chuck Colson, and Nancy Pearcey.

What makes Lewis unique as an apologist is the way he balanced so perfectly reason and imagination, logic and intuition, head and heart. In addition to writing such non-fiction apologetics books as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles, he wrote eleven novels: the seven Chronicles of Narnia, a trilogy of science-fiction adventures, and a haunting retelling of an old myth set in the ancient world. All eleven tell wonderful, captivating stories that stand on their own as fiction but that also support and bring to life the kinds of apologetical arguments he makes in his non-fiction. He also wrote two utterly unique works of fiction, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, which offer a fresh, highly original take on sin and temptation, angels and devils, heaven and hell.

And that's not all. Lewis the apologist and novelist had a day job. He was a celebrated English professor at both Oxford and Cambridge who wrote works of literary criticism that are still famous today. Though these are not works of apologetics, they open up for modern readers the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, the strong faith of Dante, Milton, and Bunyan, and the power of poetry and allegory to uncover a two-way traffic between heaven and Earth.

At this point, some of you may be saying to yourself: I'm not a Christian, so why should I bother reading a Christian apologist like C. S. Lewis? The answer is that Lewis was not a narrowly Christian writer who spoke in a condemning or preachy manner, but a profoundly human writer who spoke to people where they are.

First, though he was Anglican, he devoted himself to defending what he called mere Christianity: the central doctrines that all Christians, whatever their denomination, have traditionally accepted. Lewis took his focus off of the many issues that still divide Catholics and Orthodox, Baptists and Lutherans, Presbyterians and Pentecostals:

The proper meaning of the Lord's Supper and the proper way to perform it.

Whether people should be baptized as infants or adults and whether they should be dunked or sprinkled.

What exact role the Virgin Mary and the saints should play in the life of the believer and the congregation.

Whether the spiritual gift of tongues still exists and how it should be exercised.

How to understand the role of the pope and of church hierarchy in general.

When Christ will return and how Revelation should be properly interpreted.

Second, he always avoided technical, theological jargon. He spoke in layman terms, using sharp, clear metaphors. He never patronizes or condescends, but treats his readers, whatever their background or educational level, as serious thinkers who are interested in the big questions of life.

Third, his ethical and psychological insights are so strong that even readers who do not believe in God will be entertained, instructed, and convicted by his deep exploration of human behavior and the human psyche. Just as non-Catholic (and non-Christian) readers have long thrilled to Dante's journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, so readers of Lewis, whatever their faith, have enjoyed journeying with him to the magical land of Narnia and seeing our own world through his unique perspective.

Fourth, Lewis's works are not only informed by the Bible but by the entire Western tradition: Homer and Virgil, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, Augustine and Aquinas, Dante and Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Austen and Dickens. It is all there in Lewis, and it is all accessible and waiting to be dialogued and wrestled with. Lewis carried the entire tradition in his bones, and he allows us to experience it through him.

Fifth, living as we do in an age that tends to be dismissive of everything that came before us, Lewis had the humility to learn from the past: not just the Renaissance, but the Middle Ages and classical Greece and Rome as well. Lewis helps his modern readers to identify and break down what he called chronological snobbery, our deeply held but never challenged belief that the past was ignorant, dark, and superstitious.

Sixth, Lewis allows us to take a second look at things we think we know: certainly Christianity and the Middle Ages, but also poetry, history, democracy, prayer, sin, pain, friendship, love, miracles, outer space, myth, nature, beauty, faith, morality, the sexes, and so much more. He was what used to be called a man of letters, a public intellectual who meditated on the issues of his day and tried to put them in a wider, human context.

Seventh, his imagination was so strong that he never needed to be original in the modern sense of the word. Everything Lewis wrote was grounded in the wisdom of the past while being invigorated by the concerns of today and the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs of people living in a modern, scientific, technological age. That is what gives Lewis's books their at-once contemporary and permanent appeal.

If those seven points don't convince you, then I will leave you with this challenge. Read something three times in Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas, and you will find you have forgotten most of it by next week; read it once in Lewis, and it will stay with you forever.

In the chapters that follow, I will first take a close look at the milestones in Lewis's life that helped him mature into the Christian, the professor, and the writer he became and then devote one chapter each to his most accessible books. In chapter three, I shall group together four of his academic-scholarly works that, though brilliant, are a bit technical for the average reader: The Allegory of Love (1936), The Personal Heresy (1939), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), and Studies in Words (1960). I shall, however, devote full chapters to three of his academic works that have proven to be accessible and challenging for a non-academic audience: A Preface to Paradise Lost, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image.

Although I shall not devote a chapter to his poetry, his letters, or his many collections of essays, I shall discuss his poems and letters in chapter one, and highlight some of his best essays when they overlap with the books discussed in chapters two through twenty-eight.

Now, throw open the wardrobes of your mind and your heart and be prepared to be enchanted, transported, and transformed.

ONE

Biography

CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS, KNOWN TO his friends as Jack, was born in 1898, while Queen Victoria was still sitting on the throne of England. He was not English, as most people think, but Irish. He grew up in Belfast in the time of troubles between Protestants and Catholics that led to Irish independence in 1922. However, though Southern Ireland was set free from British rule, Northern Ireland, where Belfast is located, remained a part of the UK. Lewis grew up in a Protestant family, but his work is free of anti-Catholic bias.

Although nearly all the major British writers before the late nineteenth century were English—the Scottish poet Robert Burns and novelist Sir Walter Scott were exceptions—after 1880, much of the creativity of the British Isles turned green. Here are six great Irish writers whose lives overlapped, if briefly, with that of Lewis: Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

Magic and wonder and a sense of the sacred and the supernatural are strong in Ireland, and much of it seeped into the heart and soul of the man who would create the land of Narnia with its talking animals, walking trees, and living streams.

By temperament, Lewis was a logical, rational thinker. In that, he favored his mother Flora who was one of the first women in her peer group to earn an advanced degree in mathematics. His father, Albert, a solicitor of Welsh descent, was far more passionate and emotionally volatile, something that made the young Lewis distrust emotions as embarrassing and perhaps even dangerous.

Still, Lewis's creative and intuitive side was kept open by a number of things. First, he had an Irish nurse named Lizzie Endicott who filled his young imagination, and that of his elder brother Warren (or Warnie, born in 1895), with fantastical tales. The fact that he lived not far from the ruins of an old castle helped give flesh and bones to those stories.

Second, when he was still quite young, his family left the city to live in a big drafty house that they called Little Lea. As Lewis himself explained in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: I am a 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 (chapter 1).

Third, in one of those upstairs rooms, there stood an old wardrobe. Lewis and Warnie sat together in that wardrobe and created a make-believe land they called Boxen. When Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he transformed that wardrobe into a doorway into Narnia and placed it in a big drafty house like Little Lea.

Fourth, and most importantly, Lewis experienced, throughout his early childhood, a series of intense spiritual moments during which he felt an overwhelming desire for something beyond our natural world. Those yearnings would be triggered, not by a supernatural vision of God or a visitation of angels, but by ordinary, everyday events. In Surprised by Joy, he lists three such moments, moments he came to refer to as joy:

When Lewis was sick with a toothache, Warnie took twigs and moss and arranged them inside a biscuit tin to form a toy garden. When Lewis saw it, he was transported to cool, green places—an experience that forever shaped his view of Eden and of heaven.

While reading Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter, he felt troubled by what he called the Idea of Autumn.

Glancing randomly at a book on a table, he read these poetic lines about the Norse god Balder: I heard a voice that cried / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead. Though he knew nothing of Norse mythology at the time, the words swept him away to cold, distant northern places.

Lewis had a truly idyllic childhood, but it was all smashed to bits when the happy nine-year-old boy lost his beloved mother to cancer. To make matters worse, his father reacted by enrolling his grieving son in a series of mostly terrible boarding schools in England.

Though Warnie, who would go on to join the military, had already been attending a boarding school and didn't seem to mind them too much, Lewis hated and despised them. At the first of these horrible schools, the headmaster beat the children mercilessly; he was later certified as insane and died shortly after in an asylum.

For six long years (1908–1914), Lewis endured one bad school after another. During these years he abandoned the Christian faith of his childhood, but he threw himself into reading and studying, and he learned to value friendship as one of the bright spots in