C. S. Lewis: life, ideas and books

Life

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, served in the British Army in the First World War and was wounded in 1918. He studied at Oxford, where he won first-class honours in three fields, and was a fellow of Magdalen College from 1925 to 1954. He was a member of the Inklings, an Oxford literary circle that included J. R. R. Tolkien.

His BBC radio talks on Christianity during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1943, brought him a wide audience. In 1954 he took up the new chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. He married Joy Davidman in 1956, and she died in 1960. He died in Oxford in 1963.

Ideas

Lewis, who had been an atheist, came to Christianity and wrote that reason and the shared moral law among cultures point to God. He argued for what he called "mere Christianity", the core beliefs shared across the Christian denominations. He described the Narnia books as stories that suppose what Christ might do in another world rather than as strict allegory.

In The Abolition of Man (1943) he defended objective values, often called the natural law, against the view that morality is merely a matter of conditioning.

Major works

• The Screwtape Letters (1942).
• The Abolition of Man (1943).
• Mere Christianity (1952).
• The Chronicles of Narnia (seven books, 1950-56).
• The Space Trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet (1938).
• Surprised by Joy (1955), an autobiography.

Why conservatives read him

Lewis is widely read by religious conservatives for his clear defence of Christian belief and objective moral truth. The Abolition of Man is often cited in arguments about education and the limits of technocratic reform. He did not write as a partisan, and his readers draw on him for moral and cultural reflection more than political programs.