QuotesSelf
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.
- C. S. Lewis
remark №001 / 232by C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis - Belfast 1898, Oxford then Cambridge, dead the same afternoon as Kennedy. Fifteen books that still sell, eight rhetorical moves used over and over, the Inklings in the pub, Narnia, the conversion, the marriage, the grief.
tags: Lewis, Inklings, Tolkien, Oxford, Narnia, Christianity, apologetics, 20th century, Magdalen, The Eagle and Child
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I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.
FELLOW OF MAGDALEN · PROFESSOR OF MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS · “Jack” · 1898 - 1963
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”- The Weight of Glory, 1941
Belfast, 1898. Oxford, 1925-1954. Cambridge, 1954-1963. He was a medievalist by training, a literary critic by hobby, and the most-read Christian writer of the twentieth century by accident. Half his life was spent learning to read; the other half spent writing such books as people who do not normally read books would actually read.
C. S. Lewis was, by training, a medievalist; by hobby, a literary critic; by accident, the most-read Christian writer of his century. The repeated moves of his prose, with the cleanest example of each.
Lewis’s most-quoted argument, from Mere Christianity (1952). A man who said the things Jesus said about himself - that he is the Son of God, that he can forgive sins, that he existed before Abraham - cannot be merely "a great moral teacher." Either he was telling the truth, or he was deluded, or he was a deliberate fraud. Lewis presses readers not on the conclusion (which he leaves to them) but on the unavailable middle option. The trilemma is logically debatable but rhetorically devastating - it has converted, by Lewis’s own count, more people than any single move he made.
"You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."
For sixteen years a group of Oxford writers met every Tuesday morning at the Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’, and every Thursday evening at Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, to read their work in progress aloud and savage one another. The Lord of the Rings, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and most of Mere Christianity were workshopped at that pub.
WORKS The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters; Surprised by Joy; Till We Have Faces.
Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford 1925-1954; Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge 1954-1963. Held the Inklings together from 1933 to 1949. Read most of Narnia aloud to them as he wrote it. Married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; she died in 1960. He died on 22 November 1963 - the same day as JFK and Aldous Huxley.
Click any spine. Filter by category. Lewis published thirty-six books in his lifetime - here are the fifteen still most-read.
The BBC wartime radio talks, edited together. The book that made him a household name in America.
Originally four series of BBC Home Service broadcasts, recorded between August 1941 and April 1944, in fifteen-minute slots that Lewis would speak live without a script. Collected, revised, and published as Mere Christianity in 1952. Sales: by his death in 1963, just under a million; by 2025, well over fifty million. The book launched the trilemma argument (Lord, Liar, Lunatic) into the mainstream. It is the most-read explicitly Christian book of the twentieth century after the Bible.
When the children were evacuated from London to Lewis’s home at The Kilns in 1939, one of them - a girl of about nine, name unrecorded - asked, on her first day, if there was anything behind the old wardrobe in the spare bedroom. Lewis spent the next ten years working out the answer. Click the doors.
“Lucy looked into the inside of the wardrobe and saw rows of coats hanging up - mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe.”
Lewis wrote them in one order and they happen in another. Toggle below. One hundred million copies sold; by some counts the second-most-read piece of children’s fiction in English (after Alice).
THE MOMENTAslan walks willingly to the Stone Table; the witch shaves his mane and kills him; the table cracks at dawn and he is back.
The first published, written 1949, published 25 October 1950. Begun from a single mental image of a faun under a streetlamp in a snowy wood that had been in Lewis’s mind since he was sixteen. Tolkien hated it; Lewis sent it out anyway. The book has now been translated into 47 languages and read by approximately a third of the children alive in the English-speaking world.
Click the slab. The Table is whole; the Table is cracked. Two laws were written; the second one trumped the first.
The Stone Table is the oldest law in Narnia. It was carved before time itself dawned, by the Emperor across the Sea: every traitor belongs to the Witch, and every treason is paid for in blood. Edmund has betrayed his siblings to her. The Table will not change for him.
Aslan offers his own life in Edmund’s place. The Witch accepts the trade. He is bound, mocked, killed.
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), chs. 14–15
Lewis’s least-read major work, and one of his favourites: three novels of theological science fiction (1938, 1943, 1945). Click a world.
MALACANDRA · Mars
1938 · Bodley Head
Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking tour, is kidnapped by Weston and Devine and taken in their ship to Malacandra. There he finds three rational species - the hrossa, the séroni, and the pfifltriggi - living together in a pre-fall harmony under the angelic Oyarsa of the planet. He learns Old Solar (the language of the unfallen worlds) and is sent home with a message: Earth is the silent planet, the one whose Oyarsa has gone mad.
Lewis described his life as a long, reluctant homecoming. The conversion to theism (1929) and to Christianity (1931) are the centre. Click any stop.
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. 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." (Surprised by Joy.) He is now a theist. Not yet a Christian.
He answered around twelve thousand letters in his life, most of them by hand, most of them to strangers. His brother Warnie eventually became his secretary because the volume was unmanageable.
The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford
14 October 1944
On Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, then in slow draft. Lewis read every chapter aloud at the Inklings in the Eagle and Child.
Yours, Jack.
- Collected Letters, vol. II
The full text of Lewis’s two most-cited single addresses - The Inner Ring (1944) and The Weight of Glory (1941) - is its own page on this site.
Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
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.
Read both, full text → The Inner Ring & The Weight of Glory
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI