© Narnia - narni

During 1870-74 the family lived in Rome where Thomas Hamilton was Chaplain of Holy Trinity Church. There survives from this period the earliest document in Flora's hand. It is an account of a miracle she witnessed in one of the Catholic churches of Rome when she was 12 years old, and which WHL thought evidence of an eminent degree of her 'matter of factness.' Describing the body of a young female saint in a glass case beneath the altar, Flora said, 'the beautiful waxen figure with its flowers and candles had a great fastenation [sic] for me, so I went back by myself to look at it again...I was gazing fixedly at her when she slowly lifted her eyelids and looked at me; I was terribly frightened and felt myself getting cold - I had hardly time to look at or admire her large blue eyes when she again closed them.' Later, her mother 'laughed and said it was nonsense,' thus causing Flora to conclude that 'it was all done by cords' (LP I: 312).

The maternal grandfather of Jack Lewis was the Rev. Thomas Hamilton an Anglican chaplain in Rome (for a few years) and Jack's mother spent some of her childhood in Italy.

Riding in the upper story of the family omnibus of C. S. Lewis’s chromosomes was a paternal great grandfather, Joseph, a Methodist minister, and a maternal great grandfather, Rev. Hugh Hamilton, who had been Bishop of Ossuary in Ireland. Lewis’s maternal grandfather, Rev. Thomas Hamilton, was an Anglican chaplain in Rome and rector of St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Dundela. With all this religious genetic baggage, it is surprising that C. S. Lewis’s own father and mother were rather nominal Anglicans.

Lewis’s mother, who died of cancer when he was only eight years old, had graduated from Queen’s College in Belfast, Ireland with first-class honors in logic and second-class honors in mathematics. Lewis described his father, Albert, as "almost without rival the best raconteur [or storyteller] I have ever heard…" However, as with Fyodr Dostoevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson and their fathers, Jack’s (C. S. Lewis’s lifelong nickname) relationship with his father was always strained. Albert was a Belfast court police lawyer .http://www.faithalone.org/journal/2000i/townsend2000e.htm

LEWIS, Florence Augusta 'Flora' (1862-1908), the mother of W.H.Lewis* and CSL, was one of two daughters and two sons born to the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton and Mary Warren Hamilton. At the time of her birth on 18 May 1862 in Queenstown, County Cork, her father was a Chaplain with the Royal Navy. During 1870-74 the family lived in Rome where Thomas Hamilton was Chaplain of Holy Trinity Church. There survives from this period the earliest document in Flora's hand. It is an account of a miracle she witnessed in one of the Catholic churches of Rome when she was 12 years old, and which WHL thought evidence of an eminent degree of her 'matter of factness.' Describing the body of a young female saint in a glass case beneath the altar, Flora said, 'the beautiful waxen figure with its flowers and candles had a great fastenation [sic] for me, so I went back by myself to look at it again...I was gazing fixedly at her when she slowly lifted her eyelids and looked at me; I was terribly frightened and felt myself getting cold - I had hardly time to look at or admire her large blue eyes when she again closed them.' Later, her mother 'laughed and said it was nonsense,' thus causing Flora to conclude that 'it was all done by cords' (LP I: 312).

From Rome the Hamiltons moved to Belfast where Flora's father was Rector of St Mark's, Dundela, 1874-1900. Flora attended 'Ladies Classes' at the Methodist College Belfast, in the sessions 1881-82, 1883-84 and 1884-85 at the same time that she was going to Queen's University, Belfast (then the Royal University of Ireland). She performed brilliantly at Queen's. She took a first degree in 1880, and in her second examinations in 1881 she passed with First Class Honours in Geometry and Algebra. In 1885 she passed the second university examination with First Class Honours in Logic and Second Class Honours in Mathematics, and took a BA in 1886.

Flora would have known Albert Lewis's* family since the Hamiltons arrived in Belfast, but it was not until almost a decade had passed that they suddenly seemed to need one another's opinion on a good many things. 'Where was the best place to stay in Dublin?' asked Albert. 'Will you come in to tea after church? We want to get some information from you,' said Flora. Albert obviously thought it best to save really serious matters until after he had qualified as a solicitor in 1885. However, when he proposed to her in 1886 she had already turned down his brother, William, and he seems to have understood this as increasing his own chance. However, in her reply of 21 Sept. 1886 Flora said 'I always thought you knew that I had nothing but friendship to give you' (LP II: 152). In this she was not being conventional: she really did like Albert's friendship, and, indeed, seemed to value all friendships highly.

CSL has described his mother as 'a voracious reader of good novels' (SBJ I), and this love of literature which she and Albert shared certainly made Albert a more interesting suitor than his brother. A particular opportunity came to hand in 1889 when Flora had a story, 'The Princess Rosetta', published in The Household Journal of London. Albert said at once that he hoped that 'to the collegiate honours' Strandtown had already gained through Flora, 'will be added the higher distinction of producing a great novelist.' Flora presented him with the manuscript of the 'Princess Rosetta', and Albert assured her that not even the Bodleian Library or the British Museum could persuade him to part with it. It is a pity that it was not given to one of these libraries for no copies of The Household Journal containing Flora's story, nor any of the other stories she wrote, can be traced. Flora and Albert were to exchange many letters after this, but only Flora's have survived.

In comparing the Lewises and the Hamiltons, CSL said his father's people were 'sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical,' while the Hamiltons were 'cooler,' their minds 'critical and ironic' (SBJ I). The thirty letters Flora wrote to Albert before they were married and the forty-eight she wrote afterwards (preserved in LP) provide evidence of this. They supply as well a clue as to where Lewis got his own clarity of thought. 'I am not quite sure that I would like it if you only talk to me on "sensible subjects",' Flora wrote to Albert on 5 July 1893. 'Why should it bore me to hear about your love for me? You know it does not. I like you to love me, and if your love bored me, your society would, still more, so there would be no use in your talking to me on any subject at all...Gussie [her brother] is right about our not being a demonstrative family. I don't think we are, but do you know I really think it is better than being too demonstrative; men soon get tired of that sort of thing' (LP II: 251-52). Up until they became engaged in June 1893 Flora, a well-brought up lady, addressed Albert as 'Dear Mr Lewis'. Now, writing to him on 26 June 1893 she calls him 'My dear Allie', and asks:

I wonder do I love you? I am not quite sure. I know that at least I am very fond of you, and that I should never think of loving anyone else. I said 'yes' the other day, partly because I knew that if I said 'no,' we should have had to have given up seeing each other all together...The thing that makes me most doubtful about the whole thing is the fear lest you be disappointed in me. You see you really care too much about me to know what I am like. I am afraid you think I am far better and far nicer than I really am, and that when you find out that I am just about the same as other people, you will not be satisfied with me...

In spite of all this, I think and hope that we shall be happier together than apart, and even if I don't succeed in making you perfectly happy in the future as your wife, I should at least have made you unhappy in the present by refusing, so let us hope that I have done what is best for you. (LP II:248-49).

They were married in St Mark's on 29 Aug. 1894, and following a honeymoon in North Wales, they moved into the Dundela Villas,‡ Dundela, Belfast. They were immensely devoted to one another. Warren Hamilton Lewis* was born in 1895 and named after the two sides of Flora's family; Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898. Warren has said in his 'Memoir' how much his father 'loathed' holidays away from home. The responsibility of taking the boys on holidays thus fell on Flora, and 'Warnie' and 'Jack' were never to forget what a large stock of their happiness came from these holidays. No matter how short the distance to home, Flora wrote almost daily to Albert. In the holiday to Castlerock in 1901 she learned that he was fussing over life insurance. 'I wish I could make you feel more satisfied about things of this sort,' she wrote, 'but I am afraid it is your nature to take a gloomy view of life' (LP II: 316).

In 1905 the family moved into 'Little Lea'‡ on the outskirts of Belfast, which Albert had specially built for Flora. Warnie went to Wynyard School‡ in England soon afterwards, while Jack's education began at home, with Flora teaching him French and Latin, and Annie Harper, his governess, teaching him everything else. Flora's last holiday with the boys was in Berneval in the summer of 1907. In the little diary Jack wrote the following Christmas - 'My life During the Exmas Holadys of 1907' - we glimpse the contentment of the happy Lewis family. He said his father was 'very sensible' and 'nice when not in a temper' while his mother is 'like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry.' As Christmas draws near we learn how Warnie comes home from school, of the various Lewis and Hamilton relations who drop in, how 'Mamy stoned raisins for the Xmas pudding', of how Jack and Warnie take to 'rushing about the house' and of the play which Jack is writing to perform for the family on Christmas Day. The document ends with the words 'The old year out and the new year in' (LP III: 88-92).

Not far into the new year Flora fell ill. On 7 Feb. 1908 she was operated on at home. The doctor found cancer. Flora rallied for a while, but by June 1908 the trouble had returned, the nurses were back, and Flora was confined to bed. There her faithful husband attended her with touching devotion, rarely leaving her bedside. She died on 23 Aug. 1908, deeply lamented by Albert, Warnie and Jack. There is a good deal about her in LP, SBJ and in Warren's 'Memoir'. Photos in L, IHW, TI, TJB.

NARNIA? Which Narnia? 299 BC - 2007 AD? Or 1950 October 16 - 2007 September 29?

The first Narnia is a town halfway between Rome and Assisi, which was given the Latin name of NARNIA by the Romans in 299 BC. In Latin today this name is still unchanged. And Narnia, not the Italian 'Narni', is even the form still used in English - as in C.S. Lewis: A Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, 2002, pp. 306-7.

It is a town which is certainly quite alive. This year it could be celebrating its 2306 ANNIVERSARY (299+2007).

The second Narnia is a country in the Imaginal World (which at times can be more powerful and influential than what we call the Real World). A country, which publicly and officially opened its doors to all of us on 1950 OCTOBER 16 - the day Geoffrey Bless in London published A Story for Children by C.S. Lewis. The country of Narnia described there is also quite alive. Today it still continues to be discovered by children and adults and even continues to grow and expand in their hearts over the whole world.

We all could be celebrating its 57th BIRTHDAY in two weeks.

Narnia entered the life of C.S. Lewis when he was about sixteen years old. He found this name in 1914 in his new Atlas of Ancient History; liked it and underlined it. He wrote the very first sentences of a story about Narnia in the fall of 1939 when he offered his home for some young girls from London. But he was also thinking about yet another girl - who was only four years old at that time. About Lucy Barfield, adopted daughter of one of his best friends and his own god-daughter. Whom he truly loved and who, in May 1949, received from him an unusual and a very special gift... A year and a half before us all!

Did Narnia exist, does it currently exist, or will it exist sometime in the future? My answer to all these three questions in both first cases is - YES !

What do I think? Read the entire thread and was was moved to share some thoughts; however incomplete. (I am still thinking about "Narnia 1900-1949 according to 'The English Calendar'"? And "Narnia of the Year 1 - Year 2555 of 'The Narnian Time'?")

The City of Narnia began in 299 BC and now is 2306 years old.

The Story of Prince Caspian, published 1951 October 16, will very soon be 56 years old. (Happy Birthday!).

But when Prince Caspian blows The Great Horn it is summer of the year 2303 since Narnia began. And in three more years - 2306 and 2307- he will be on the "Dawn Treader"

Which is also the precise present time since the beginning of the Umbrian City of Narnia!!

The maternal grandfather of Jack Lewis was the Rev. Thomas Hamilton an Anglican chaplain in Rome (for a few years) and Jack's mother spent some of her childhood in Italy.

http://www.faithalone.org/journal/2000i/townsend2000e.htm

Lewis’s maternal grandfather, Rev. Thomas Hamilton, was an Anglican chaplain in Rome

and rector of St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Dundela. With all this religious genetic baggage, it is surprising that C. S. Lewis’s own father and mother were rather nominal Anglicans.

After Jack’s mother died, he increasingly bonded with his brother, Warnie. As an adult, Warnie became a noted British major, was a member of the Inklings group, wrote seven books on seventeenth-century France, and, sadly, was subject to alcoholic binges.

Both Lewis and his wife-to-be were precocious learners. Jack "knew both Greek and Latin by the age of six." By ten years old he had read Milton’s Paradise Lost. Similarly, Joy Davidman had "read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History at age eight and promptly announced her atheism." Though Lewis’s childhood home was not especially happy or religious, he was taken to St. John’s Anglican Church twice each Sunday where, he reported, "I here heard the doctrines of Christianity…taught by men who obviously believed them

Il nonno materno di Lewis era il Rev. Thomas Hamilton un cappellano Anglicano a Roma e la madre di Lewis passò qualche anno della sua giovinezza in Italia.

http://www.emeraldhouse.com/prodinfo.asp?PID=shiverofwonder&currpage

Flora was born at Queenstown in County Cork in 1862 and as a young girl lived in Rome with her parents. She proved to be of a much cooler temperament than her father, who was a chaplain in the Royal Navy during the whole of the Crimean War and a chaplain of the Anglican Holy Trinity Church in Rome from 1870 to 1874. The Hamiltons were the descendants of a titled Scottish family that was allowed to take land in County Down in the reign of James

******************************************************************

Quindi Flora fu a Roma con suo padre dal 1870 al 1874

da 8 a 12 anni.

*********************************************************************

Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis (d. 23-Aug-1908 cancer)

Flora was born at Queenstown in County Cork in 1862

Thomas Robert Hamilton, who was born on 28 June 1826, took a first in Theology at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1848, and was made deacon in the same year. He was much afflicted with his throat and in 1850 set out with his family on a grand tour of Europe. Two years later he took another trip for his health, this time to India. He was ordained priest in 1853. The following year, Thomas was appointed chaplain in the Royal Navy and served with the Baltic squadron of the fleet throughout the Crimean War. In 1859 he married Mary Warren (1826-1916), the daughter of Sir John Borlasse Warren (1800-1863), by whom he had four children: Lilian (1860-1934), Florence Augusta (1862-1908), Hugh (1864-1900) and Augustus (1866-1945).

From 1870 until 1874, Thomas was chaplain of Holy Trinity Church, Rome, after which he returned to Ireland and took up the incumbency of St. Mark, Dundela. So Lewis' mother lived in Italy for 5 years.

Lewis knew the history of Italian culture quite deeply. His position as a Fellow at Oxford and later as a Professor at Cambridge gave him the opportunity to study classical literature and Latin poets such as Livy, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder.

http://www.anglicani.it/architettura.htm

Anglicani in Italia

http://www.stpaulsrome.it/english/orvieto/nav.html

ad Orvieto

ed a Roma

Sunday Services

Convento di S. Paolo

Via Postierla 20

05018 Orvieto

10.30 am

Vicar: The Rev. Susan Skillen+

+39 0763 341462

The C S LEWIS TRAIL begins in ST MARK'S, DUNDELA, BELFAST, [Church of Ireland, ie the Episcopal Church] which has rich associations with the Lewis family.

The Reverend Thomas Hamilton Foto di Famiglia

http://dnausers.d-n-a.net/cslewis/brochure2.html

http://dundela.down.anglican.org/lewis.html

St Mark's first Rector was REV THOMAS HAMILTON. He was the grandfather of C S Lewis and lived in the Old Rectory within the church grounds. C S Lewis presented St Mark's with this portrait of his grandfather.

On 29th January 1899, Rev Thomas Hamilton baptised his grandson CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS at the font to the west end of the church.

Baptism Entry

[Courtesy of the Church of Ireland Representative Church Body. photograph - Mr R McClure]

ALBERT LEWIS, father of C S, was a loyal member of St Mark's. He served as Churchwarden and as the first Sunday School Superintendent. Jointly with his brothers and sisters, Albert gave the church the silver vessels still used for Holy Communion.

Albert Lewis was a successful solicitor in Belfast. C S Lewis, however, did not enjoy a harmonious relationship with his father.

C S Lewis with his fatherAlbert died in 1929. By then C S had become a don at Oxford, and Warren was a career Army officer. In 1932, C S and Warren presented a stained glass window to St Mark's in memory of their parents. The LEWIS WINDOW may be seen in the south aisle.

C S Lewis with his father

[Photo courtesy of the Marion E. Wade Centre]

[not to be reproduced without written permission]

The Lewis Window

[Photo courtesy of Mr R McClure]

Michael Healy, a noted Dublin artist in stained glass, portrayed three Saints - Luke, James and Mark. The English translation of the Latin text reads:

To the greater glory of God and dedicated to the memory of Albert James Lewis, who died on the 25th September 1929, aged 67, and also of his wife, Flora Augusta Hamilton, who died on the 23rd August 1908, aged 47.

he Latin inscription below the window is translated:

The two brothers, Warnie and Jack (as he had always been called, since the age of four years old) were very pleased with the window when they made a special journey to Belfast to see it completed. It was created by the Irish artist, Michael Healy (1873-1941), a member of the Tower of Glass, a well-known group of stained-glass window artists of the time.

The memorial window on the south side nearest the side chapel, is to the Rev Thomas Hamilton, first Rector of St Mark's (1826-1905). He was C S Lewis's grandfather and baptized him. Thomas Hamilton lived in what is now the old rectory situated on the south side of the church. His daughter, Flora, Lewis's mother, died when the boy Jack was only 9 years old and this grievous loss stayed with the grown man all his life.

The lectern with its open Bible - the eagle is the symbol of St John the Gospel writer and represents the word of God being carried on eagle's wings across the world. The Lectern was presented to the church by cousins of C S Lewis. The family sat in one of the front pews close to the pulpit, so the boy Jack would have been right under the eye of his grandfather, while he was preaching the sermon.

His wife, Mary Warren Heard, was a cousin and a dear friend of Flora Hamilton. So the Lewis boys were often invited to the Ewart's house, Glenmachan. C S Lewis in his autobiography, "Surprised by Joy" has much to say about the family. It was Cousin Mary, he records, who 'took upon herself the heroic work of civilising my brother and me'.

In this church and among these families young Jack Lewis grew up. After his mother's death, he was sent away to boarding school in England and his life was totally changed. Although as a young man he and his father grew apart, yet he never lost his fond memories of his childhood in Strandtown.

A leaflet was produced as a guide for visitors interested in C S Lewis.

http://dundela.down.anglican.org/cslewisguide.html

Clive Staples Lewis, the notable Christian writer, was baptized in the font (1) at the west end of the church on January 29th 1899 by his grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Hamilton, Rector of St Mark's.

We shall celebrate the centenary of his baptism in January 1999. If you wish to look for the objects associated with C.S. Lewis in this church, follow the path shown by arrows in the plan and the words in italics in this leaflet.

The pilgrimage of life begins with Baptism at the font. When you stand here in the baptistry, remember that this man was called, almost against his will, to serve God by writing and speaking about 'mere Christianity', in philosophical books and science fiction, in childrens' stories and on the radio. Many thousands have heard and are hearing his message, for his books still sell in great numbers all over the world.

Look towards the Communion table at the east end of the church. See how the architect, William Butterfield, has designed it so that the table, from which worshippers receive the bread and wine of Communion, is the most important object in the church, standing higher (and therefore more important) than the pulpit from where the preacher preaches, or the lectern from which the Bible is read.

William Butterfield (1814-1900) was an Englishman who designed a large number of churches in England and abroad, according to the ideas of the Tractarian Movement This was a religious revival which aimed to renew the faith of the Anglican Church by providing symbolic decoration in each church building to express ideas of worship. Butterfield used powerful, vigorous arches, pillars and walls in his buildings, decorated with multi-coloured stripes and patterns of stone and brickwork.

Follow the arrows which lead you along the nave (2) between the pews to a point halfway up the church. Look to your right.

C. S. Lewis and his brother, Warren, known as ‘Warnie' presented this window (3) to the church in 1935 in memory of their father and mother. Three Saints are shown: two Gospel writers, St Mark and St Luke, on either side of St James. We may wonder why St James, the son of Zebedee, is the central figure. Perhaps because his shrine at Compostela in Spain was a mediaeval place of pilgrimage - the pilgrim's bag and staff and the pilgrim's badge, the scallop shell, shown in the window hint at this. But perhaps simply because Albert Lewis's second name was James. The Saint holds a silver chalice, similar to one which Albert and his family presented to the church in 1908 in memory of their father, Richard Lewis, engineer and shipbuilder, who lived at Ty Isa, near the Holywood Arches.

The Latin inscription below the window is translated:

Walk down the aisle (the narrow side passage) to see the memorial window (4) to the Rev Thomas Hamilton, first Rector of St Mark's (1826-1905). He was C.S. Lewis's grandfather and baptized him. His daughter, Flora, Lewis's mother, died when the boy Jack was only 9 years old and this grievous loss stayed with the grown man all his life.

Now look at the lectern (5) with its open Bible - the eagle is the symbol of St John the Gospel writer and represents the Word of God being carried on eagle's wings across the world. The Lectern was presented to the church by cousins of C.S. Lewis. The Lewis family sat in one of the front pews close to the pulpit, so the boy Jack would have been right under the eye of his grandfather, while he was preaching the sermon.

Stand and look up towards the Communion table. Notice how the tiles on the floor of the chancel are more highly decorated than the floor you are standing on. Then walk up between the choir stalls to the sanctuary (6). Do not go past the railings. Again the tiles are even more highly decorative, symbolising the near approach to the Communion table. Above it the letters I H S are perhaps a shortened form of the Greek name of Jesus.

The east window (7) is a memorial to Isabella, Lady Ewart, the wife of Sir William, a wealthy linen magnate, who was one of the founders of St Mark's church. The nave, aisles and tower were built in 1878 and the chancel and transepts were added in 1891 at the expense of the Ewart family, as a memorial to Sir William. On the south wall of the sanctuary is the tablet which records his life and Christian service. His son, Sir William Quartus Ewart, is remembered in the window of the side chapel in the south transept.

His wife, Mary Warren Heard, was a cousin and dear friend of Flora Hamilton. So the Lewis boys were often invited to the Ewart's house, Glenmachan. C.S. Lewis in his autobiography, "Surprised by Joy" has much to say about the family. It was Cousin Mary, he records, who 'took upon herself the heroic work of civilising my brother and me'.

http://dundela.down.anglican.org/doorhandle.html

A journey from St. Mark's, Dundela, Belfast to the world of the imagination that is Narnia.

People often ask the question : What inspired C.S. Lewis when he came to write about the wonderful world of Narnia ?

Here at St. Mark's we think that we might just have a little piece of the answer to that particular puzzle.

It is generally accepted by his biographers that when Lewis came to write his stories his mind turned back the years to his own childhood for inspiration. So, we picture him as a young boy, around seven years of age, going to visit with his grandfather, Thomas Hamilton, first Rector of this parish. A formidable clergyman in the Victorian tradition; long silvery beard, furrowed brow and piercing eyes. You can see photos of him elsewhere on this site.

The young Lewis goes visiting to the home of his grandfather, the building known to us as "The Old Rectory", that still stands in the grounds of the church. As he stands at the door of this imposing church house, waiting to be let in, there at eye level to this young boy is the door pull. There in front of him looks out the head of a lion. The lion of St. Mark ? Or a lion from some far of place...

Is this the image that inspired Aslan?

Tradition would always consider the lion the symbol of St. Mark. For Lewis it became something more in the allegory of Narnia.

For Lewis, when he quarried his childhood memories and discovered Narnia, was he journeying back to that first family of faith of which he was a part, the congregation at St. Mark's Church? After all, St. Mark's was the place of C.S. Lewis' baptism, the beginning of his life of faith.

Were his first reminiscences of the church characterised in childhood memories of his grandfathers doorstep, of the Lion looking him in the eye as he stood at the door and knocked...

A little piece of the puzzle that is the question, "What inspired Lewis?". Does it fit for you ?

A chance to trace Lewis link

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/feature/A-chance-to-trace-Lewis.3141156.jp

View Gallery

By REBECCA BLACK

CS Lewis and his links to Belfast have been remarkably unexploited, although this is starting to change now with tours exploring a Lewis trail run by Belfast City Council and private individuals.

We took a tour with Ken Harper in his distinctive red taxi. Sadly, he tells us that his political tours around the Falls and Shankill roads are much more popular than the tours he runs on CS Lewis and George Best.

"It's so nice to be able to do this tour, because I don't get to do it very often, tourist tend to be more interested in seeing the political murals."

Our tour started at the CS Lewis mural at Convention Court at the bottom of the Newtownards Road.

The mural, which was painted for the centenary of his death, commemorates his life and depicts the main characters from his best-known book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Next stop was the little-noticed sculpture at the Holywood Arches.

The sculpture was created by Northern Irish artist Ross Wilson and it is based on the character of Diggory Kirke from one of Lewis's novels, The Magician's Nephew.

It features the wardrobe, which in the books represents the portal to Narnia. The man opening the wardrobe is based on pictures of Lewis as a young man.

Moving on, we travelled deeper into east Belfast stopping at Dundela Avenue, the street on which Lewis was born. Although the house he was born in has long since gone, there is a plaque helpfully placed on the wall showing where the house had stood.

Interestingly, Ken tells us that while living at this house Lewis started to be called Jack, a name he would be known as for the rest of his life. The name dated back to a family pet who lived in the Dundela house with them – the dog was called Jacksie but was knocked down and killed by an early motor vehicle. The young CS Lewis was distraught at the animal's death and we are led to believe he went to his mother and requested to be known as Jacksie from then on.

From Dundela Avenue, we moved to his proverbial second childhood home, St Mark's Church on the Holywood Road, a short distance away.

Lewis was baptised here in 1899 by his grandfather, the Rev Thomas Hamilton of St Mark's, and spent much time in the grounds at the church and visiting his grandfather when he was a child.

He must have retained fond memories of the old church as along with his brother, Warnie, he presented a stained-glass window to the church in 1933 in memory of their mother and father. Three saints are shown on the window – two gospel writers on either side of St James. St James holds a silver chalice, similar to one which the Lewis family presented to the church in 1908 in memory of Lewis's paternal grandfather, Richard Lewis, engineer and shipbuilder, who lived at Ty-Isa near the Holywood Arches.

The Rev Thomas Hamilton as minister at the church lived in the manse next door. The house itself is fairly unremarkable unless, that is, you take a closer look at the door knob which would have been eye level to a young child. The door knob is a striking lion's head and you can't help but wonder if this was where the lion associated with Christianity first entered Lewis's subconscious.

Next, we visited the second and last house that Lewis would live at in Belfast – of course, Little

Lea on the Circular Road.

This is the one part of the tour where it is not possible to wander around and imagine the young Lewis, because it is still a private residence.

The house came up for sale in recent years but sadly it was not bought to be turned into a museum. Out of respect for the residents, we simply took a picture of the sign at the front.

However, it was in this house where Lewis's vivid imagination was fed by mountains of books around the house.

We finished the tour by scaling the Craigantlet Hills where Lewis reputedly played and loved the stunning views across Belfast. It is thought he conceived the idea of Narnia while admiring the view across County Down to the often cloud-swathed Mourne Mountains.

*The tour cost us £45 based on two people in the car sharing for a two-hour tour. More information can be found on Ken Harper's website at www.harpertaxitours.co.nr

http://www.harpertaxitours.co.nr/

Hello and Welcome to Harper POLITICAL Taxi Tours.

(AS FROM 07.07.2007. KEN IS OFFERING MASSIVE DISCOUNTS AND BARGAINS ON ALL HIS TOURS)

See the real Belfast by taxi. Pick up and drop off points from anywhere in the city centre, Ken offers an informative way to see Belfast, past, present and future, including the political murals of the Shankhill and Falls Roads, landmark buildings such as Stormont, City Hall and Harland and Wolff’s yellow cranes Samson and Goliath within the Titanic Quarter. Step into the wardrobe with Ken’s CS Lewis Homeland Tour, and find out where the famous author was born and brought up.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY TOURS AND OTHER TOURS IE BUS TOURS, IS MY DRIVERS GO INTO THE BACK STREETS OF BELFAST AS WELL AS THE USUAL SIGHTS.

Harper Taxi Tours offers tailor made tours of Belfast by taxi at UNBELIEVABLE prices.

IE = FROM £ 6.00 PER PERSON.

Flora Augusta Hamilton

Madre di Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis nasce nel 1898 a Belfast, Irlanda del Nord, da Albert James Lewis e Flora Augusta Hamilton, secondo di due figli. Il fratello Warren Hamilton Lewis era di più grande di tre anni. Il padre di Lewis era un avvocato di origini gallesi trasferito in Irlanda del Nord per ragioni di lavoro, mentre la madre era figlia di un pastore protestante e aveva compiuto studi di matematica e logica.

All'età di sei anni Lewis trasloca con la sua famiglia a Strandtown, ed è lì che nel 1908 muore la madre. La morte della madre ha un impatto emotivo molto forte su Clive (che ha solo 10 anni) e viene considerato un evento molto importante per comprendere l'evoluzione della sua filosofia.

La madre, Flora Augusta Hamilton, era figlia di un pastore protestante, aveva studiato al Queen's College di Belfast e vi si era laureata in Lettere; gli Hamilton erano, a differenza dei Lewis, dotati di "spirito critico e ironico, possedevano al massimo il dono della felicità" e sapevano trovarla ovunque.

In una precocissima biografia: (La mia vita durante il Natale del 1907) Lewis la descrive come "una signora di mezza età, ben piazzata, con i capelli castani e gli occhialetti, sempre con i ferri da calza in mano". Era anche lei una "divoratrice di buoni romanzi" e gli comunicò la sua stessa passione per la letteratura.

Sfortunatamente morì quando Lewis aveva solo dieci anni ed egli fu cresciuto da un padre amorevolmente severo e da uno stuolo di tutori.

http://www.fantasymagazine.it/approfondimenti/5285

http://www.orvietonews.it/index.php?page=notizie&id=11327&data=1148464080

Clives Staple Lewis nasce a Belfast (Irlanda) il 29 novembre 1898. Figlio secondogenito del procuratore Albert James e di Flora Augusta Hamilton, fu istruito per lo più in Inghilterra. Per vari motivi (sue condizioni di salute, insoddisfacente qualità delle istituzioni), fu più volte indotto a cambiare scuola. Sperimentò anche contesti arbitrariamente vessanti e punitivi, come quello della scuola di Wynyard, a Watford, nell'Hertfordshire, che Clive non esitò a definire "un campo di concentramento". Rivelò giovanissimo una spiccata propensione per il latino e l'inglese, come pure un grande interesse per la mitologia nordica.

http://cslewis.drzeus.net/bio/

1898 Born Clive Staples Lewis November 29 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Albert James Lewis (1863-1929) and Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis (1862-1908). His brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis had been born on June 16, 1895.

1905 The Lewis family moved to their new home, "Little Lea," on the outskirts of Belfast.

1908 Mother died of cancer on August 23, Albert Lewis' (her husband's) birthday; C. S. Lewis (nicknamed "Jack") and Warren sent to Wynyard School in England.

Attends Campbell College Belfast for one term due to serious respiratory difficulties.

http://library.thinkquest.org/27864/data/lewis/cslworks.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211762/home.htm

http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2718

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ulster (now Northern Ireland), 29 November 1898. His father, Albert, read law and became a solicitor, the first generation of his family to achieve professional status. His mother, Florence (Flora) Augusta Hamilton, descended from a titled Scottish family and an Anglo-Norman family that had been landowners in Ireland since the twelfth century. She graduated from Queens College, Belfast, with a First Class Honors in logic and Second Class Honors in mathematics. The Lewises were married in 1894. Their only other child, Warren, was born in 1895.

Lewis grew up in a household which valued education, reading, and music - both parents were voracious readers, and their house was filled with books. The boys began their education at home; Lewis learned French and Latin from his mother before her death (of cancer, in 1908), and other subjects from a governess, Annie Harper. His mother’s death and Lewis’s departure for boarding school in England a few weeks later were traumatic events in the young boy’s life. The Lewises chose for their sons the education of an English gentleman, instead of educating them in Ireland, in part because of the greater social mobility it would afford. Both boys were sent to Wynyard School in Watford, outside London; Warren in 1905 and Lewis in 1908. The school’s headmaster was tyrannical and abusive (though the Lewis boys were spared from beatings); as a result, only a handful of students were enrolled at that point. Lewis’s attitude toward schools, expressed frequently in his fiction and nonfiction, was shaped by his unhappy experience at Wynyard, which he referred to in his autobiography as "Belsen". After Wynyard School closed in 1911, Lewis spent a term at Campbell College in Belfast, then entered Cherbourg School in Malvern. Here his real education began, under some excellent teachers, and here he ceased to be a Christian.

Lewis was raised in a home with deep Christian roots on both sides. Albert Lewis’s grandfather was a religious enthusiast who became a Methodist minister, and his father wrote evangelical pamphlets. Flora Lewis was the daughter and grand-daughter of clergymen. Albert and Flora regularly attended St. Mark’s Church, Dundela, where Flora’s father was rector - an emotional preacher, fervently anti-Catholic. Although Lewis numbered many Catholics among his friends later in his life, his attitude toward Catholicism itself could never escape the effects of his Ulster childhood. Lewis attributes his departure from his childhood faith to several factors: the influence of two tutors at Cherbourg House (one who taught him worldliness and another who dabbled in the occult), the burden of performing private devotions daily, and his inability to accept (as he was being taught) that one religion – Christianity – was true and all others false. However, his mother’s untimely death and the brutality of

Dal libro

C. S. Lewis

A Shiver of Wonder

By Author:

Derick Bingham

http://www.emeraldhouse.com/prodinfo.asp?PID=shiverofwonder&currpage

Chapter One: THE LOST ADDRESS

Of all months, April is probably the best loved in Western Europe. Shakespeare wrote of "proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim." The skies in April are bluer, and there is such a "clear shining after rain."1 In April the songs the birds sing with their wings still wet sound more joyous than any other songs. There is a proliferation of tulips and forget-me-nots, blushing daisies and snowy blackthorns.

On the island of Ireland, the green foliage of tree and hedge is almost intoxicating in April; virtually every shade of green can be found. All across the country buds are swelling, and fresh molehills show that Mr. Mole is again spring-cleaning. Young rabbits speed across the meadows. In sleepy gardens bees swarm from their hives, and whole columns of whirling wings can be seen rising and falling. It is the month when the swallows return from Africa and set about the very hard work of nest building from the very moment they arrive. They mend their old nests and can be seen setting the foundations of new ones.

In the Ireland of April 1905, the swallows were not the only ones busy building new homes. A little family had just moved into their new residence in the suburbs of Belfast. They gave their home the name Little Lea. Earlier that year there was a notice in the Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory:

Circular Road. Strandtown. Off Holywood Road. Rt. hand side. New house in course of erection for A. J. Lewis, Solicitor.

The details given in the Directory of Mr. Lewis’s neighbours, in the immediate and wider vicinity of his new home, display a microcosm of Irish society just following the close of the Victorian era. We find Mr. Sam Quillan, gardener, at Lakeview Cottage; Mr. W. Masterson, tea merchant, at Ballymisert House; Mr. William H. Patterson, ironmonger, at Garranard; Robert Symington, coachman, at Glenfarlough Cottages. At Bernagh lives Joshua M. Greeves, millowner; Mr. Thomas Rice, the stationmaster, looks after the local Tillysburn Railway Station.

Moving a little farther away from the new house being built for the Lewis family, we find Sir W. G. Ewart living at Glenmachan House. Amongst others living at Glenmachan Cottages there is a labourer, a meter inspector, a groom, a land steward, and a ploughman. Col. McCance lives at Knocknagoney House, and W. Davis, a coachman, lives at Knocknagoney House Lodge. At Ormiston Buildings, we find a ship carpenter, a tobacconist, a druggist, a hairdresser, a plumber, a gas fitter, a draper, and a boat merchant.

Even in 1905 the wider City of Belfast had moved a long way from its origins. Its name is derived from the words beol, meaning "ford," and fearsad, meaning "sandbank." The first recorded account of the building of ships in Belfast appeared in the year 1636, when the Presbyterian clergyman of Belfast built a vessel of 150 tons’ register. More recently, Harland & Wolfe had launched the Oceanic, then the largest ship on earth. "In the years running up to the Great War, citizens could boast that their City had the greatest shipyard, rope works, tobacco factory, linen spinning mill, dry dock, and tea-machinery works in the world."3 The city was justly considered to be the commercial metropolis of Ireland.

Albert James Lewis, a Police Court Solicitor, whose father had emigrated from Wales to Ireland, was educated at Lurgan College in the beautiful "Orchard County" of Ireland, the County of Armagh. A local brewer, Samuel Watts, had left an endowment for the building of a school that would provide an "English classical and agricultural education." The second Headmaster of that school was Mr. W. T. Kirkpatrick, who came to Lurgan College from the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in 1875. His influence was to reach far beyond the newly established and flourishing school on Lurgan’s College Walk. Besides having Albert Lewis under his care at Lurgan College from 1877 to 1879, Kirkpatrick was to become his lifelong friend and a tutor to his son Clive. On retirement from the school, Kirkpatrick was to have Clive at his home in Great Bookham in Surrey to prepare him for entrance examinations to Oxford University. He was to teach Clive his mother’s formidable gift of logic, to devastating effect. Albert’s Welsh temperament—full of rhetoric, passion, and sentiment—could easily be moved to anger and just as easily to tenderness. Laughter and tears played a large part in his life, but happiness was not a dominant feature. He was a kind and generous man, possessing an excellent memory and a very quick mind. He had a deep, clear, ringing voice, and exuded a considerable presence.

Albert was a brilliant and skillful teller of short, entertaining stories about real incidents or people. He could act all the characters in his stories. He loved poetry that contained pathos and rhetoric; this significant literary streak, being encouraged by his Headmaster, led Albert to write his own stories and poetry. He loved the liturgy of the Church of Ireland as contained in its Prayer Book, and he loved the infinite treasures found in the verbal vaults of the Bible. With these gifts and interests, it is not surprising that he was the first Superintendent of the Sunday School at St. Mark’s, Dundela, a nearby Belfast suburb. Albert’s law practise was at 83 Royal Avenue, and he was to become Sessional Solicitor of the Belfast City Council and the Belfast and County Down Railway Company, as well as Solicitor to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He impressed many juries with his effective speaking abilities, and he also gave his services as a speaker to the Conservative Party, gaining frequent acclaim from newspapers for his efforts. He loved to read Anthony Trollope’s political novels. Later both his boys claimed that, given the freedom and the resources, he would have made a significant politician.

Through his love for literature, Albert came to meet the love of his life. It is said that a faint heart has never won a fair lady. His heart had been stirred by the Rector’s pale, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Florence Augusta (Flora) Hamilton, but her love was difficult to win. Flora was born at Queenstown in County Cork in 1862 and as a young girl lived in Rome with her parents. She proved to be of a much cooler temperament than her father, who was a chaplain in the Royal Navy during the whole of the Crimean War and a chaplain of the Anglican Holy Trinity Church in Rome from 1870 to 1874. The Hamiltons were the descendants of a titled Scottish family that was allowed to take land in County Down in the reign of James I. The Reverend Hamilton was a very highly principled and emotionally charged man. We are told that he frequently wept in his pulpit. It must have caused him and his family great sadness that he had to spend much of his short life in a mental hospital. It seems that he suffered from scant praise. Yet surely a man is not without memorable significance who willingly served in the Crimea and, in fact, volunteered for duty in camps where death from cholera occurred every single day. Perhaps he saw things that others of us will never see. Let his Maker be his judge.

So, Thomas Hamilton was the first Rector of St. Mark’s, Dundela, ministering there from 1874 to 1900. His wife, Mary, was a liberal in politics, an enthusiastic feminist, a supporter of the suffragettes, and a Home Ruler. (A Home Ruler was a person who believed that Ireland should be self-governed but still remain part of the British Empire.) She was a committed vegetarian and a cat collector, and she kept an extremely untidy and disorganised rectory! Mary Warren Hamilton came from an Anglo-Norman family planted in Ireland in the reign of Henry II. She was an extremely political animal indeed, and very intelligent with it.

Mary Hamilton’s daughter, Florence, known as Flora, is of great significance in any study of the life of C. S. Lewis. She was to have a profound influence upon him, even though she died when he was only ten years of age, leaving him horrendously bereft. She had a great gift that she would pass on to him: a mind that thought distinctly and logically.

Between 1881 and 1885 Flora attended ladies’ classes at Methodist College, Belfast, and, at the same time, the Royal University of Ireland, now known as Queen’s University. The University’s beautiful main college building, designed by Charles Lanyon, is modelled on Magdalen College, Oxford, where Flora’s son would achieve great fame. Nearby, stretching across seventeen acres, are the beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens, with their lawn, Teak Ground, Yew Ground, and Hawthorn Collection. The Ornamental Water, the Fernery, and the famous Palm House conservatory enhance all of these grounds.

Queen’s University is nowadays famous for its major contribution to world medicine and engineering. In Flora Hamilton’s time the Maths Department had a significant reputation. Flora read Mathematics and Logic. In her first public exam in 1880, she got a first in Geometry and Algebra, and in her finals in 1881, a first in Logic and a second-class honours degree in Mathematics. She took a B.A. in 1886.

With regard to Mathematics, Flora was extraordinary, and many regarded her as a bit of a bluestocking. Perhaps in her time a more prevalent Ulster view of mathematics was that of Mother Goose:

Multiplication is a vexation,

Division’s twice as bad;

The rule of three perplexes me,

And practise makes me mad!

Another unusual aspect in Flora’s make-up was a deep love of literature; few mathematicians carry such a trait. A voracious reader of good novels, Flora saw one of her own stories, "The Princess Rosetta," published in The Household Journal of London in 1889.

Albert’s brother, William, had first courted Florence, but she turned him down, telling him she could never love him. From the beginning Albert had to approach Flora very carefully indeed. When he proposed to her in 1886, she offered him only friendship. By now devoted to her, Albert exploited their love of literature as a major link between them. Flora used him as a sounding board for her short stories and articles, and over the seven years following the proposal they wrote many letters to each other. It took a long time to win Flora’s love; but her friendship with Albert began to shift to a fondness for him, and eventually she woke up to the fact that she would be deeply unhappy if they parted. Her feelings for him were deeper than she outwardly demonstrated. Even at the time of their engagement in June 1893, she admitted to him that she was not sure if she loved him, but she was sure that she could not bear not seeing him. So, on 29 August 1894, the pale, gifted, cool-headed, blue-eyed mathematician and the somewhat tempestuous lawyer were married at St. Mark’s, Dundela. They honeymooned in North Wales and moved into Dundela Villas in East Belfast. It was a marriage that was to be marked by deep devotion from each partner. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895; and three years later, on 29 November 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was born.

In looking at the childhood of C. S. Lewis, all kinds of threads combine to make up the intriguing tapestry that will emerge. It was William Wordsworth who wrote, "the child is the father of the man"; and looking back on his own childhood, he wrote in a section of The Prelude:

There was a boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs

And Islands off Winander! Many a time

At evening, when the stars had just begun

To move along the edges of the hills,

Rising or setting, would he stand alone

Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake,

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Press’d closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

That they might answer him. And they would shout

Across the watery Vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call, with quivering peals.

It is not the fells and water of the beautiful Lake District that touch the very young C. S. Lewis, but a little town called Castlerock in the northwest corner of Northern Ireland. The middle classes of the time, and in particular the middle classes of Belfast, took their children to the seaside for two or three months of the summer. The thinking behind this practise was that fever such as typhoid (an infectious bacterial disease) was more common in the warm weather of the summer than in other seasons. The year before Clive was born, typhoid had affected 27,000 people.

Over many years, the Lewises were to take a furnished house at Castlerock during the summer months. Albert, who loathed summer holidays, was happier at work; but Flora went with a nursemaid and one or two other servants to Castlerock. Clive and Warren loved the place. The journey begins with a ride in a hansom cab to the railway station. The boys just delight in the train journey that steams its way along the coastline to the backdrop of the nine Glens of Antrim. A high plateau, cut by the deep glens that sweep eastward to the sea, dominates the landscape. They pass gentle bays separated by blunt headlands and exposed moorlands that give way to gentle valleys and wide vistas, that in turn give way to enclosed farmland. Maybe, at Ballymoney Station, they recited the little doggerel much loved by Ulster schoolchildren, referring to actual places in their province:

If you weren’t so Ballymena,

And you had some Ballymoney,

You could buy a Ballycastle

To be your Ballyholme.

Castlerock, the Lewis’s summer holiday home, was hugely important in Clive’s spiritual development. What was the little town like in 1905? Again, our Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory of 1905 proves to be invaluable. It tells us that Castlerock is "a pleasant and rapidly-rising watering-place close to the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway Line, advancing in popularity year after year, as shown by the increasing number of visitors who annually patronise it."

It has also become a favourite resort for Sunday School excursions. In bygone years its visitors were almost entirely drawn from the City of Derry and Limavady Districts, but that has ceased, and it is now inhabited during the Summer Season by holiday-seekers from England and Scotland. Its residents are well aware that this little watering place is without rival in these parts. Though relatively small, it has a decided look of superiority. With the exception of several blocks of large houses, it is made up of detached villas surrounded with tastefully laid out gardens and grounds. There is also a beautiful strand—behind which are the sand-hills, with their tufts of tall wiry looking grass—which stretches along the coast for nearly a mile, to the mouth of the River Bann, where the two piers—one 1,920 feet, and the other 3,680 feet—extend from the sand-hills seaward. There is good bathing accommodation provided, and boxes are erected among the rocks for both classes of bathers. On the Western side of the town on the bold headlands is situated Downhill Castle, the seat of Sir H. Hervey-Bruce, Bart., HML, who was the last sitting Member of Parliament for the Borough of Coleraine.

We learn that there is a golf club and a recreation club with facilities for lawn tennis and cricket. There are two schools, namely Castlerock and Articlave. There is a Post Office, a Police Barracks, and Refreshment Rooms at the North Counties Railway Station. There are around fifty inhabitants listed, and thirteen local farming families.

Clive Lewis took to the water early, and being immersed in water was a pleasure which he would love for the rest of his life. In fact, being in the water was more pleasurable to him than actually swimming. What effect did the sand, the crabs, the rock pools, the boats, and the ambience of Castlerock have upon him? Probably, they were the seeds of his romantic love of "Northerness." "One of the most important of his feelings was sown during these seaside holidays," writes his friend, George Sayer.4 Anyone who knows the area would not doubt him. The long skyline, fringed by Downhill and the Mussenden Temple, the distant hills of County Donegal and Innishowen Head, draws the heart and mind like a magnet.

We have pored over the maternal, psychological, and environmental background to little Clive Lewis’s childhood; we have traced the emotions, the rhetoric, and the literary leanings of his father; we have looked at the brilliant, logical mind of his mother, and the link of literature between them. All these elements are vital in understanding the genius being moulded in the life of C. S. Lewis; but what about the spiritual element?

C. S. Lewis wrote of three great impressions that touched his childhood that he considered to be absolutely central to what he was about. He records standing by a flowering currant bush one summer’s day, when he had a flash of memory. He remembers a morning at his family’s first home when his brother brought into the nursery a toy garden in a biscuit tin that he had created for Clive. The garden was made of tiny flowers, twigs, stones, and moss. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with a sensation. Later, he felt that the nearest thing to it was what Milton called "the enormous bliss" of Eden. It was, Lewis said, a sensation of desire; but it was gone, even before he knew what it was he desired. Passionately, he longed for the longing he had just felt and lost.

He again glimpsed this desire, this sensation, when reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. He called it "the Idea of Autumn."5 Perhaps it was a glimpse of the impermanence of things; for later he described this present life as being like an inn by the side of the road; and the idea, he said, troubled him.

The third experience of this sensation occurred while reading Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf:

I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead.

He writes of being again uplifted into the whole realm of northern sky. The sensation of desire was beyond description, except that it was "cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote."6 The description sounds very like an Irish sky at Castlerock after an Irish shower! He described all three experiences by one word: joy.

So it was from a toy garden in a biscuit tin at Dundela Villas, from the pen of the most famous Fell Farmer in England’s Lake District, and from a poem about the death of Balder the beautiful that the young C. S. Lewis was touched by intimations of immortality. He didn’t hear of it in a sermon; he didn’t read of it in a Christian book. The momentary state of joy came from what seemed like something very ordinary, something that led into another world—a presently unknown Eden that was simply beyond words.

Which of us have not had similar moments—moments when we have felt there is something more than the world we live in? We suddenly see something beautiful, and it is so beautiful it makes us ache. Why? Because when it comes, there are within it intimations of something even more beautiful—something unspeakable, even. That there are more beautiful things outside of this world is a truth seriously believed by men and women such as, for example, the Apostle Paul. "I know a man who," he wrote, "fourteen years ago, was seized by Christ and swept into ecstasy to the heights of heaven. I really don’t know if this took place in the body or out of it; only God knows. I also know that this man was hijacked into paradise—again, whether in or out of the body, I don’t know; God knows. There he heard the unspeakable spoken, but was forbidden to tell what he heard."7 Explain that!

The truth is that humankind has not so much lost its way as it has lost its address. What we long for, though often we are not aware of it, is for Eden to be restored. The Scriptures assure us that it will be restored:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My Holy Mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

http://www.nndb.com/people/238/000044106/

The little seven-year-old boy who, on 21 April 1905, moved with his family into Little Lea on Belfast’s Circular Road would one day be used to show millions where to find their lost address. But first he had to find it for himself.

Father: Albert James Lewis (lawyer, d. 24-Sep-1929)

Mother: Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis (d. 23-Aug-1908 cancer)

Brother: Warren Hamilton Lewis (b. 16-Jun-1895)

Girlfriend: Janie King Moore (unproven)

Wife: Joy Davidman Gresham (m. 23-Apr-1956, d. Jul-1960 bone cancer)

Son: Douglas Gresham (stepson)

Son: David Gresham (stepson)

High School: Cherbourg School, Malvern, England

University: Greek and Latin Literature, University College, Oxford University (1925)

Professor: English, Magdalen College, Oxford University (1925-54)

Professor: Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Magdalene College, Cambridge University (1955-63)

Converted to Christianity 1931

Welsh Ancestry

Risk Factors: Smoking

Birth dates, beyond the year, for Albert and Flora are tricky. I'm not sure I've ever seen those, but I'll look around.

Warren was born 16 June 1895.

Albert died on 25 September 1929

Flora died on 23 August 1908

Warren died on 9 April 1972.

Edited to add:

Albert was born 23 August 1863 in Cork, Ireland.

Flora was born 18 May 1862 in Queenstown, Ireland.

http://www.faithalone.org/journal/2000i/townsend2000e.htm

| Publications | For More Information |

GRACE IN THE ARTS:

C. S. LEWIS’S THEOLOGY:

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN RANSOM AND REEPICHEEP

JAMES TOWNSEND

Bible Editor

Cook Communications

Elgin, IL

I. INTRODUCTION

Would you like to pretend that you haven’t just read the title above and to try your hand at a trivia quiz? Here goes. Who was the gentleman who:

was converted to Christianity while riding to the zoo in a sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle?

had his Christianity affirmed by Dr. Bob Jones but questioned by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones(!)?

would never have been a professor if the entrance math exam (which he failed to pass twice) hadn’t been conveniently dropped as a requirement?

taught at colleges spelled with one letter’s difference-Magdalen and Magdalene?

smoked at least sixty cigarettes a day-between pipes?

lived in the same house for thirty years with a woman to whom he wasn’t married?

had tiffs with the other leading Anglican literary critic of his time (T. S. Eliot)?

had as his longest lifetime friend a homosexual (Arthur Greeves)?

died the same day as President John F. Kennedy?

This composite trivia quiz does not sound like the personality profile of a candidate for the "evangelical of the year." Then again, modern conservatives probably wouldn’t have picked three murderers (or accomplices to murder), such as Moses, David, and Paul were, to have authored nineteen books of God’s inspired Word! In light of this, it’s rather amusing that C. S. Lewis-so much read by evangelicals-would probably be turned away from many of their churches if he were an aspiring pastoral candidate.

In the subtitle for my article, I placed Lewis: "Somewhere between Ransom and Reepicheep." These two Rs are characters in Lewis’s fiction. The fictional Dr. Elwin Ransom is a Cambridge philologist (as Lewis was) whose first name has the same letters (except the substitution of an "n" for an "s") as Lewis’s last name. Ransom appears in Lewis’s space trilogy as the Christian character whose chosen role is to save the world. Another of Lewis’s fictional characters, Reepicheep, appears in his Narnia series. Reepicheep, an oversized mouse with a needle-like sword, possesses chutzpah disproportionate to his mousely size. Therefore, I raise the question: did Lewis see himself as Ransom or Reepicheep-or a bit of both? Was he the chosen apologist of the age, whose role was to save the planet (like Ransom) or was he merely a minor critter with an oversized sense of the daredevil, taking on all comers (like Reepicheep)?

Lewis’s friend, clergyman Austen Farrer, asserted: "You cannot read Lewis and tell yourself that Christianity has no important moral bearings, that it gives no coherence to the whole picture of existence, that it offers no criteria for the decision of human choices…." Lewis became a Christianized version of movie swordsman Errol Flynn with his apologetics swordplay. Like Robert Louis Stevenson’s swordsman in Kidnapped, Alan Breck Stewart, he was (to borrow Austen Farrer’s image) "a bonny fighter." Lewis’s long-term friend Owen Barfield noted that Lewis’s former student John Lawlor had reported that in Lewis’s presence he felt like he was "wielding a peashooter against a howitzer." John Beversluis called Lewis "the 20th century’s foremost defender of the faith." Lewis’s apologetics was so barbed because his learning was so encyclopedic. William Empson believed Lewis "was the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read." Lewis was reputedly Oxford’s most popular lecturer for many years. By 1978 Macmillan had "published more than fourteen million copies of Lewis’ books."

Biographical sources are particularly rich for Lewis since many of his friends wrote biographies about him. Lewis’s father left a "mass of diaries, letters, and papers" and Lewis’s brother, Warnie, spent "several years typing the 3,563 pages that make up the eleven volumes of Lewis Papers…which cover the years 1850-1930." In addition, there is the "million-word diary of Warnie Lewis" and Lewis’s extensive correspondence, including close to 300 letters interchanged with lifetime friend Arthur Greeves.

II. A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Jack attended four different boys’ schools from 1908 to 1914 and presented a bleak picture of them in his autobiography. He became a young atheist and owned up to sexual immorality on one occasion.

From 1914 to 1917 Jack studied privately (to prepare for Oxford) with his father’s former college headmaster, W. T. Kirkpatrick (affectionately known as the "Great Knock"). Young Lewis expected Kirkpatrick to be maudlin like his father, but was jolted upon their initial meeting by the atheist Kirkpatrick’s rigorous grilling in logic over the most mundane matters. Three years of logical dueling left an indelible impression upon the malleable mind of Lewis, the future apologist. During that time Jack "found that he could think in Greek." Little wonder, since practically all Jack did for three years was to translate the Greek and Latin classics under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage. Kirkpatrick reported to Jack’s father (September 16, 1915): "He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met," and (on April 7, 1916): "He has read more classics than any boy I ever had-or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of…"

Also during his younger years, Jack formed a lifelong friendship with Arthur Greeves, due to their mutual interest in "northernness" or Norse mythology. Greeves’s harsh father was of a strict Plymouth Brethren background. Ironically, Lewis and Greeves later crisscrossed in their theological thinking. Whereas Lewis moved from atheism to Christianity, Greeves shifted from conservative Christianity on through Unitarianism, Bahai, and Quakerism.

Jack’s entrance to Oxford University was interrupted by World War 1, in which he was wounded with shrapnel and once (to his relief) found sixty German soldiers emerging from the fog with their hands up surrendering to him. Before entering battle, Jack had compacted with his friend Paddy Moore that if Paddy should die, he would assume responsibility for Paddy’s mother (and sister). As a result, the forty-five-year-old Mrs. Moore moved in with eighteen-year-old Jack. Her daughter, Maureen, was then eleven. Virtually all Lewis biographers agree that young Jack had a romantic crush on Mrs. Moore-though only the warts-on biographer A. N. Wilson concludes that theirs was an explicitly sexual relationship. For thirty years they occupied the same house, and when senility forced her to enter a nursing home, Jack visited her each day for a year until she died.

Lewis failed the entrance math exam to Oxford twice, but it was then waived for returning soldiers. At University College, the oldest of the thirty Oxford colleges, Lewis graduated with honors in Greek and Latin classics, English literature, and philosophy.

On October 12, 1916, Lewis penned his position in a letter to Arthur Greeves: "I think that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, i.e., all mythologies…are merely man’s own invention-Christ as much as Loki. In every age the educated and thinking [people] have stood outside [religion]."

Slowly Lewis’s view shifted. On June 3, 1918, he again wrote Greeves: "I believe in no God, least of all in one that would punish me for the ‘lusts of the flesh’; but I do believe that I have in me a spirit, a chip, shall we say, of universal spirit…"

In addition to his reading of George MacDonald, Lewis seemed to be surrounded with Christian influence at Oxford. Owen Barfield, a lawyer, would later become an anthroposophist. Nevill Coghill ("clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class…a Christian") was later to become Merton Professor of English at Oxford. Hugo Dyson was an Anglican. J. R. R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

From 1925 to 1954 C. S. Lewis was a tutor and lecturer at Magdalen College at Oxford. Lewis lost four different professorships while at Oxford, and so in 1954 he moved to take the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at rival Magdalene College at Cambridge University, where he remained until 1963.

During those middle years, Lewis was to write of his ideological safari: "My own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ [atheism] to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity."

On December 21, 1929, Lewis-upon reading John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding-wrote: "I…am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs [that] I feel I cannot dismiss… There must be something in it; only what?" In this pre-conversion period Lewis wrote: "I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt." As a result, in 1929 Lewis was converted to theism. He journaled of that experience: "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," but this conversion "was only to Theism. I knew nothing about the Incarnation."

Lewis’s autobiography zeroes in primarily upon his conversion to theism (in 1929) rather than on his conversion to Christ (in 1931). In fact, his Christian conversion almost seems anticlimactic.

That his views had not settled into concrete is apparent from his letter of January 9, 1930 to Arthur Greeves: "In spite of all my recent changes of view, I am…inclined to think that you can only get what you call ‘Christ’ out of the Gospels by…slurring over a great deal." In a letter of January 30, 1930 to Greeves, he "attribute[d] everything to the grace of God…" On March 21, 1930 Lewis wrote to A. K. Hamilton Jenkin that what he held "is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end." During this period Lewis was attending the morning university chapels. By January 10, 1931 his brother "was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true."

The critical change came in September of 1931. The night of September 19, Lewis walked and talked (until around 4 a.m.) with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson about myth and Christianity. Hugo Dyson’s "main point was that Christianity works for the believer. The believer is put at peace and freed from his sins."

On September 28, 1931, at age thirty-two, Lewis was "riding to the Whipsnade zoo in the sidecar of Warren’s motorcycle. ‘When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.’" According to 1 John 5:1 and 5, all those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God are "born of God." To Arthur Greeves on October 1, 1931, Lewis wrote: "I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ-in Christianity."

From June 1930 to August 1931 he’d been reading Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God, Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, William Inge’s Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion, Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and others. In December of that year Lewis began "communicating," that is, taking communion in his local Headington (Anglican) church.

Lewis’s fame as a Christian did not emerge until his BBC radio broadcasts (which later developed into the book Mere Christianity) and his 1942 publication of Screwtape Letters. About the same time students founded the Oxford University Socratic Club for Christians, agnostics, and atheists to have discussions, and Lewis served as president of the club for twenty-two years.

One highly significant Socratic Club debate occurred on February 2, 1948. Lewis had a debate with a woman-Elizabeth Anscombe, a Roman Catholic philosopher who would later be professor of philosophy at Cambridge University. Anscombe’s position was opposed to that of Lewis’s chapter 3 in his book Miracles, namely, that "Naturalism is Self-refuting." "The meeting is said to have been the most exciting and dramatic the Socratic [Club] has ever seen." John Beversluis observed, "Although hardcore [Lewis] loyalists disagree, the unanimous consensus of those actually present was that Anscombe had won hands down…" George Sayer, Lewis’s former student and friend, asserted that Lewis told him: "I can never write another book of that sort" [as Miracles] "and he never did. He also never wrote another [distinctly] theological book [except Reflections on the Psalms]." Any analyst who is a gender equalitarian can easily point to at least fifty references in Lewis’s fifty-something books where his traditionalist views on gender would be offensive (at best) to an equalitarian; some would think him a misogynist. The blow to Lewis’s ego at being defeated philosophically and publicly by a woman would have proven psychologically very difficult for him.

In light of his known views on the issue of gender, it seems all the more ironic that when Lewis was fifty-eight he married a woman who was ultra-outspoken. Joy Davidman was an intellectual American Jewess (an ex-Communist) with practically a photographic memory. She entered college at age fourteen, graduated at nineteen in 1934, and got her master’s degree from Columbia University in 1935 after three semesters. By age twenty-four she had authored a book of poetry. However, her marriage to Bill Gresham proved disastrous, since he was an alcoholic, physically abusive, and a womanizer. After her divorce, she and her two young sons wound up on the doorstep of C. S. Lewis in Oxford in 1952.

To protect her from being extradited back to America and the abusive Gresham, she and Lewis underwent a civil marriage in 1956. (Later Bill told Joy-despite his profession of Christianity: "I am not a Christian and will probably never be one since I cannot…accept ["the basic doctrines"]…"

In 1957 when it became apparent that Joy had cancer, she and Lewis underwent a religious marriage ceremony and she moved into his home. At that hospital bedside wedding, Reverend Peter Bide prayed for her healing, and her cancer went into remarkable remission for several years. In 1960 Joy "died at peace with God." Lewis himself died in 1963 on the same day as President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley.

III. BOOKS

Lewis penned over fifty books, some of them compiled posthumously. There are seventeen biblical, theological, and philosophically related works, fourteen works of literary criticism, twenty of a more imaginative literary nature (including seven children’s books, four science fiction thrillers, and four books of poetry-two of these penned as a youthful atheist), and three compilations of his letters.

His close friend Walter Hooper claimed that Lewis "was a failed poet," presumably because Lewis’s early ambition was to become a poet and because T. S. Eliot (whose poetry Lewis strongly disliked) proved to be a successful poet. England’s two most famous Christian literary critics of their epoch never hit it off-despite the fact that their mutual friend, writer Charles Williams, got them together for an experimental lunch (which failed).

Lewis’s first two books of atheistical poetry were published under a pseudonym-Clive Hamilton (his first name and his mother’s maiden name). Interestingly, even his first book written as an unbeliever borrowed a biblical title-Spirits in Bondage (1919), a phrase suggested by 1 Peter 3:19.

Two years after his Christian conversion, Lewis transformed his philosophical and experiential journey into an allegory-The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). His first intellectual volume, The Allegory of Love (1936) is considered by some to be "his greatest scholarly book." It earned Lewis the Hawthornden Prize and was the catalyst for his most meaningful male friendship with Charles Williams.

From 1938 to 1945 he was engaged in publishing his space fantasy in a trilogy. The first two books land the reader on Mars and Venus (under other names). Regarding the second of the trio Richard Cunningham said: "Perelandra is the most hauntingly beautiful and theologically important of the [space travel] trilogy." The last and bleakest of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, had its theological counterpart in his 1943 The Abolition of Man. Concerning this last volume Peter Kreeft wrote: "The Abolition of Man contains the most important and enlightening single statement about our civilization that I have ever read…"

The Screwtape Letters (1942) proved Lewis’s most popular seller. The seven-book Narnia series was also perennially popular, though Lewis was hurt by J. R. R. Tolkien’s negative criticism of it. The final book in the series, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie medal in 1956.

Lewis’s most massive volume was English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954). He frequently abbreviated it OHEL since it was one of the multi volume set entitled the "Oxford History of English Literature." A. N. Wilson appropriately appraised the tome by saying that it "must rank as about the most entertaining work of criticism ever written."

Surprised by Joy (no sure relation to his wife’s name) was his autobiography, written eight years prior to his wife’s death. Lewis considered the allegorical Till We Have Faces (1956) his best book. At least fifteen of his books were released after his death. Kathryn Lindskoog questioned the authenticity of The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977).

IV. THEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Friends accused Lewis of a rumpled dress and a somewhat rumpled theology too. In explanation, Clyde Kilby wrote: "It is not correct to say that Lewis has a ‘theology,’ if by that term is meant a systematic, all-embracing complex like that of John Calvin or Karl Barth." Yet, as Elizabeth Elliot wrote in a 1982 interview for Discipleship Journal, Lewis claimed he was no theologian, "but he was. He covered the whole field of theology in popular, understandable language."

Not only did Lewis dress in a rumpled theology (like the rather unsystematic John Wesley), but he was somewhat like quicksilver in that he was difficult to pin down or classify. In Mere Christianity he professed to be promulgating only the beliefs which all orthodox Christians commonly hold. As a Christian supernaturalist he once observed "how much more one has in common with a real Jew or Muslim than with a wretched liberalizing, occidentalized specimen of the same category."

In two of his books he acknowledged accepting "the Nicene or Athanasian creed." Nevertheless, Lewis appeared as "an unorthodox champion of orthodoxy." Below we will survey Lewis’s treatment of the salient subjects of the traditional theological categories.

A. The Bible

Naturally one who espouses Darwin’s theory of human biology forces a different view of some parts of the Bible than the traditionally accepted evangelical viewpoint. This was the case with Lewis.

On the positive side, Lewis owned: "The Scriptures come before me as a book claiming divine inspiration." Also he wrote that "all Holy Scripture [including even the imprecatory psalms] is in some sense-though not all parts of it in the same sense-the word of God."

The following statement would seem to categorize Lewis as neo-orthodox in his understanding of the Bible: "Naivete, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed [from the pages of the Bible]. The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God…"

In his books Lewis amplified on his understanding of the Bible’s inspiration: "The earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical…things like Noah’s Ark or the sun standing still upon Ajalon," while in the New Testament "history reigns supreme." Elsewhere he wrote, "The first chapters of Genesis, no doubt, give the story in the form of a folktale…" Referring to the notion that "every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth," Lewis admitted: "This I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation ‘after the manner of a popular poet’ (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction." Again, Lewis penned: "The Old Testament contains fabulous elements" which would include "Jonah and the Whale, Noah and his Ark,…but the Court history of King David is probably as reliable [historically] as the Court history of Louis XIV."

Lewis appraised the New Testament documents as falling in the realm of authentic history-and so at this point he was anti-Bultmannian. He opined: "As a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are, they are not legends." In another context he reiterated: "I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths." Elsewhere Lewis stated that finding "a ‘historical Jesus’ totally different from the figure in the Synoptic tradition…I confess is a mode of ‘research’ I heartily distrust."

Not only did Lewis widen his view of inspiration to include Old Testament myths, but he also allowed for the "inspiration" of later extra-biblical material. He once wrote (in a May 7, 1959 letter) to Clyde Kilby: "If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of lights, then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired." With reference to the writing of Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan said: "It came," and Lewis remarked: "It came. I doubt if we shall ever know more of the process called ‘inspiration’ than those two monosyllables tell us."

After researching such preceding material, Edgar Boss concluded: "Lewis does not accept the plenary verbal theory of Inspiration." Similarly, Lewis analyst Richard Cunningham deduced: "Lewis did not believe in the infallibility or the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures." Michael Christensen’s conclusion differs when he says that Lewis’s "example proved that one can be a dedicated evangelical, accept the full authority of Scripture, yet disbelieve in inerrancy." Of course, in order to buy Christensen’s conclusion one would have to present a formulated definition of what constitutes an "evangelical."

B. God and His Work

Because Lewis adhered to the traditional orthodox view of God (though he always managed to derive fresh insights from it), we will pause only briefly on this subject. Though Out of the Silent Planet is fictional, Lewis was representing his own view when he commented: "There was one God [according to the hrossa or inhabitants of the planet Malacandra]…[who] made and still ruled the world." In arguing for monotheism as over against dualism, Lewis affirmed: "You cannot accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the self-grounded, self-comprehending Absolute."

Lewis subscribed not only to the unity of God but also to the Trinity. He wrote: "In God’s dimension…you find a being who is three persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube."

On the subject of divine predestination, Lewis’s views come through his fiction in the mouth of Dr. Ransom who held: "Predestination and [human] freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject." (Later we will see that Lewis would be classified as Arminian.)

In the matter of God’s creation, Lewis had no difficulty in being committed to theistic evolution. Lewis called man "the highest of the animals." He also acknowledged: "If by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no objection." Elsewhere he said: "What difficulties I have about evolution are not religious…."

Lewis made the following distinction: "Evolutionism is something quite different from Evolution as the biologists understand it." Concerning the former, Lewis stated: "In my opinion the modern concept of Progress or Evolution (as popularly defined) is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatever." Consequently, while he denied uniformitarian evolution as an inevitable theory of all human development, Lewis declared, "I am assuming that Darwinian biology is correct." Obviously theistic evolution is not considered kosher by many evangelicals, though such Bible scholars as A. T. Robertson, B. B. Warfield, and Augustus Strong either espoused it or did not rule it out as a live possibility.

C. Christ

In Mere Christianity Lewis referred to "Christ, the Man who was God." In The Problem of Pain he spoke of "the Incarnate God" and the Son "co-eternal with the Father." In The Weight of Glory Lewis mentioned "the humanity of Christ" and "His deity." The liberal scholar Norman Pittenger blamed Lewis "for believing that Jesus claimed deity because the fourth Gospel says He did," to which Lewis replied: "I think that Jesus Christ is (in fact) the Son of God." To Arthur Greeves (December 26, 1945) Lewis wrote that at Bethlehem "God became man."

One of the sad realities is that as a young man, Arthur Greeves had adopted the Christian view and Lewis the atheistic one. Later Greeves wandered through Unitarianism and other quagmires. Lewis replied to his letter (December 11, 1949): "Your doctrine, under its old name of Arianism, was given a…very full run for its money. But it didn’t last." Lewis asked his friend, "If [Christ] was not God, who or what was He?" He concluded: "The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on…but something that peeps out at every point [of the New Testament] so that you have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it…and if you take away the Godhead of Christ, what is Christianity all about?" In Mere Christianity Lewis includes his belief in "the Virgin Birth of Christ."

Lewis also tackled an explanation of what is commonly called "the eternal generation of the Son." He wrote: "One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God ‘begotten, not created’…[which] has nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on the earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin." Rather, "what God begets is God." This negative explanation clarifies somewhat but is not overly helpful. Elsewhere he penned that "the one begets and the other is begotten. The Father’s relation to the Son is not the same as the Son’s relation to the Father." Christ as "Son," Lewis observed, "cannot mean that He stands to God [the Father] in the very same physical and temporal relation which exists between offspring and male parent in the animal world;" this doctrine involves a "harmonious relation involving homogeneity." The normally ingenious and down-to-earth Lewis left his readers in the complicated and heady realms of theological disquisition on this doctrine, but (let’s face it) who has ever heard a clearly illustrated exposition of it from a pulpit? In one more attempt Lewis declared: "The Son exists because the Father exists; but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son." Lewis would probably have done better to steer clear of this subject altogether.

Two other of Lewis’s Christological opinions are interesting. In speaking of the kenosis (Philippians 2:7) he stated: "I certainly think that Christ, in the flesh, was not omniscient-if only because a human brain could not, presumably be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness…." In another comment, bearing upon John 3:13, Lewis claimed "Christ’s divine nature never left [heaven] and never returned to it." For one who never claimed to be a theologian, Lewis certainly managed to involve himself in some intricate theological twine. Nevertheless, he was emphatic about retaining the full deity and humanity of Christ as addressed in the early Christian creeds.

Lewis exquisitely represented Christ in His death and resurrection under the image of the lion Aslan in the Narnia series. There Aslan is villainously killed, but comes back to life again. It is a lovely metaphor in fantasy form.

D. Humanity and Sin

On the matter of human will, Lewis wrote: "God willed the free will of men and angels in spite of His knowledge that it could lead in some cases to sin and thence to suffering: i.e., He thought freedom worth creating even at that price." In his radio broadcast Lewis indicated that God "gave [humans] free will. He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love…"

Lewis once argued: "The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value perceived in him. He loved us not because we are lovable, but because He is love."

On the subject of human sin, Green and Hooper comment that "many find it difficult to accept Lewis’s belief in a literal…fall of man and his fundamentalist doctrine of original sin…." While Lewis did hold to a serious doctrine of sin, one wonders if the preceding two authors have overstated their case by attaching the qualifiers "literal" and "fundamentalist" to their assessment, since Lewis did regard Genesis 3 mythically. He wrote: "The Fall consisted in Disobedience"…while the Fall consisted in Disobedience, it resulted, like Satan’s [fall], from Pride…." As Dr. Ransom, the Christian in Perelandra, pictorially put it: "We are all a bent race." On a broader canvas Lewis brush-stroked: "A sound theory of value demands…that good should be the tree and evil the ivy. Evil has…its parasitic existence."

Concerning the doctrine of "total depravity," Lewis wrote: "I disbelieve that doctrine." Yet he may have misunderstood the nature of the doctrine due to its nomenclature, for in the same section he wrote that "we all sin" and are "in some respects a horror to God" and "vile." Indeed, in his radio broadcasts he told thousands of listeners: "The first step [for us] is to create, or recover, a sense of guilt."

E. Angels, the Devil, and Demons

Lewis was quite traditional here as he stated: "No reference to the Devil or devils [demons] is included in any Christian Creeds, and it is possible to be a Christian without believing in them. [However,] I do believe such beings exist…" Elsewhere Lewis reported:

I do…believe in devils [or demons]. That is to say, I believe in angels and I believe that some of them, by abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature [I think the term "constitution" might be better than "nature"] from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite not of God but of Michael.

In other words, Satan is inferior to God; there is no true dualism.

F. Salvation

1. Substitutionary Atonement

Since JOTGES was conceived in response to a concern over soteriology, we will spend considerable space here. In commenting upon his friend Charles Williams’s poem, Lewis offered this commentary: "The Atonement was a Substitution, just as Anselm said: ‘All salvation, everywhere and at all time,…is vicarious.’" This, however, appears to be Williams’s view rather than Lewis’s.

In The Allegory of Love Lewis referred to a poem whose "theology turns on a crudely substitutional view of the Atonement." In Mere Christianity Lewis indicated that he did not accept the substitutionary view of atonement.

Arthur Greeves’s cousin, Sir Lucius O’Brien, claimed that the atonement was not taught in the Gospels. Lewis countered that the atonement must have been an integral part of Christ’s teaching because "the Apostles…did teach this doctrine in His name immediately after His death."

Unless Lewis altered his opinion in later years, it would appear that he saw some difference between vicarious and substitutionary atonement, for he wrote: "In the Incarnation we get…this idea of vicariousness of one person profiting by the earning of another person. In its highest form that is the very center of Christianity."Lewis’s apparent devaluing of substitution led Edgar Boss to conclude that Lewis held "the Example Theory [of the Atonement] with a very important modification. Mr. Lewis is a supernaturalist, while the Example Theory is usually held by Naturalists." However, I do not think Lewis would have wished to be so neatly pigeonholed into that single category. For him this was the bottom line: "Christ’s death redeemed man from sin, but I can make nothing of the theories as to how!"

2. Justification by Faith

Two analysts of very different stripes articulated one major weakness in the expression of Lewis’s soteriology. A. N. Wilson asserted: "If the mark of a reborn evangelical is a devotion to the Epistles of Paul and, in particular, to the doctrine of Justification by Faith, then there can have been few Christian converts less evangelical than Lewis." In fact, the Methodist minister who reviewed Mere Christianity claimed that the book "does not really mention…the central Christian doctrine of Justification by Faith." From the other end of the theological spectrum, J. I. Packer spoke of Lewis’s "failure ever to mention justification by faith when speaking of the forgiveness of sins, and his apparent hospitality to baptismal regeneration…."

3. Salvation by Grace

Readers of this journal will nonetheless rejoice in Lewis’s emphasis on the doctrine of grace. In Reflections on the Psalms he summarized: "We are all in the same boat. We must all pin our hopes on the mercy of God and the work of Christ, not on our own goodness." In another context Lewis declared: "We are saved by grace…In our flesh dwells no good thing." In his allegory The Great Divorce, Lewis describes a man who wants only his "rights," and who has "done my best all my life" and now exclaims, "I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity." A former earthling responds to him: "Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought." In Studies in Words Lewis referred to "‘we humans in our natural condition,’ i.e., unless or until touched by [God’s] grace" or "untransformed…human nature."

In his radio broadcasts Lewis remarked:

I think everyone who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits…God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a passing mark in this exam or putting Him in your debts.

Later Lewis said that such an awakened individual "discovers his bankruptcy" and so says to God: "You must do this. I can’t." He elaborated: "Christ offers [us] something for nothing…." In connection with good works he stated: "[You are] not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already."

Probably Lewis’s finest statement on salvation by grace was formulated in the longest book he ever wrote, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. He said:

On the Protestant view one could not, and by God’s mercy, expiate one’s sins. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything to deserve such astonishing happiness. All the initiative has been on God’s side, all has been free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned, "Works" have no "merit," though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love; he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him; faith bestowed by sheer gift.

While the exegete might wish to finesse the preceding statement somewhat (for example, making it more objective and not so experiential, as in "happiness," "joy," "bliss"), certainly Lewis’s most lengthy explication of salvation by grace through faith falls clearly under the rubric of the orthodox Protestant understanding of salvation.

4. Conditions of Salvation

Another strategic question to ask is: What condition or conditions does Lewis prescribe for receiving the gift of salvation? In his radio broadcast he averred: A Christian "puts all his trust in Christ." In the lengthy quotation above (footnote 117) Lewis stated: "It is faith alone that has saved him; faith bestowed by sheer gift."

In an interview with Decision magazine’s Shirwood Wirt, Lewis indicated: "It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins. We also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. Not only do we need to recognize that we are sinners; we need to believe in a Savior who takes away sins." Wirt then asked Lewis if he "made a decision at the time of [his] conversion." Lewis answered that at that time he felt he "was the object rather than the subject."

William Luther White summarized: "Lewis repeatedly made the point that…salvation comes as a result of faith in God’s grace, not as the product of human moral effort." In a broadcast Lewis stated: "The business of becoming a son of God…has been done for us. Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work-the bit we could not have done for ourselves-has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts." Lewis was asked in an open session: "Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?" To this he replied that Christianity "will teach you that in fact you can’t be ‘good’ (not for twenty-four hours) on your own moral efforts…we cannot do it…"

In another open session on April 18, 1944, a factory worker who apparently thought Lewis was unclear said, "We don’t qualify for heaven by practice, but salvation is obtained at the Cross. We do nothing to obtain it…" Lewis rejoined as follows:

The controversy about faith and works is one that has gone on for a very long time, and it is a highly technical matter. I personally rely on the paradoxical text: "Work out your own salvation…for it is God that worketh in you." It looks as if in one sense we do nothing; and in another case we do a damned lot…and you must have [salvation] in you before you can work it out.

If we had only the preceding statements, subscribers to this journal could probably feel fairly at ease with Lewis’s soteriology. In other places, however, he mentions other conditions besides believing, uses different terminology, or is just plain murky. As a sampling of the murky approach in the April 18, 1944 open session, someone asked him: "How can I find God?" Instead of replying with something on the order of Acts 16:31, Lewis answered, "People find God if they consciously seek from Him the right attitude." Later he added that all people "were created to be in a certain relationship to God" and "God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness." While Lewis’s answers to the worker weren’t anti-biblical, they seem unduly vague.

In other contexts Lewis asked readers: "Will you…repent and believe?" (as the narrator was speaking to an apostate Episcopalian bishop). On the radio he announced: "Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness." When Lewis’s fictional, demonized scientist on another planet, Weston (the Un-man), writhes against another demonic attack upon him, the Christian Dr. Ransom orders him: "Repent your sins." (In the last two statements there is no mention of believing in Christ for salvation.)

Lewis said that repentance "is not something God demands of you before He will take you back…; it is simply a description of what going back is like." As Lewis put it so colorfully, repentance calls us to move "full speed astern." He also depicted repentance as a self-surrender. In another place Lewis proclaimed: "The guilt is washed out…by repentance and the blood of Christ."

On one of his radio broadcasts Lewis declared: "There are three things that spread the Christ life to us: baptism, belief, and…the Lord’s Supper." His meaning and his order of arrangement of the items are unclear.

Even more baffling is this notation in Lewis’s anthology of quotes from George MacDonald: "I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation." Indeed, if an "absoluteness" of "perfection" is required of us, who then can be saved? In a literary context Lewis wrote confusingly that Vergil the pagan poet "cannot have had Christian faith, hope, and charity without which no man can be saved." These kinds of statements would certainly be mystifying to the biblically untutored.

On the question of "Can one lose salvation?" Lewis has to be categorized as an Arminian for his answer would be "yes." Screwtape’s role, say Lewis’s biographers, was "to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian." In The Last Battle Susan is "of her own free will ‘no longer a friend of Narnia’ [that is, a believer]. Lewis is taking into consideration the fact that many people drift into apostasy." Even Dr. Ransom, a committed Christian in the trilogy, realizes that "everlasting unrest…might be my destination." After John (in The Pilgrim’s Regress allegory) is "converted," he is informed by his Guide: "You all know that security is a mortal’s greatest enemy."

In one article Lewis quoted some from the fourth-century Athanasian Creed: "’Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’" Lewis commented:

The author…is not talking about unbelievers, but about deserters; not about those who have never heard of Christ, nor even those who have misunderstood and refused to accept Him; but those who have…really believed, then allowed themselves…to be drawn away into sub-Christian mode of thought.

Naturally this Arminianism did not yield much "blessed assurance." Even though his wife-at her death-said, "I am at peace with God," Lewis labored: "they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? Why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death?"

As an Arminian Lewis espoused an unlimited atonement. In The Great Divorce he observed: "All may be saved if they so choose" (which included people on the bus ride from hell). To his old friend Greeves he wrote, "About half of [Beyond Personality] is taken up with the…doctrine…that all men can become sons of God…."

5. The Fate of Moral Non-Christians

Beyond the parameters of traditional Arminianism, however, Lewis expected that some non-Christians would be saved. "Though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that He cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life." On the radio he announced: "We do know that no [one] can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him."

In the children’s Narnia series, the lion Aslan is Lewis’s Christ-figure. In The Last Battle deceivers say: "[The god] Tash and Aslan are only two different names for You Know Who." Later they use the hybrid or compound name Tashlan to make their point. At the end of this last book in the Narnia series one of the outsiders, a Calorman named Emeth (which is the transliteration of the Hebrew word for "truth"), who has been a life-long worshiper of Tash, approaches Aslan. To this Tash-server Aslan says, "Son, thou art welcome." Emeth counters, "I am no son of Thine but a servant of Tash." Aslan rejoins: "All the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me." This is a clear indicator that for Lewis the non Christ-worshiper may be received into heaven. Similarly, in another fictional setting, Jane Studdock, an unbeliever, says to Ransom the Pendragon: "I know nothing of Maleldil [the Christ-figure]. But I place myself in obedience to you." To her acknowledgment Ransom replies:

It is enough for the present. This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you know. It will not be for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.

This issue raises the question of Christianity in relation to other world religions. Lewis said: "I couldn’t believe that 999 religions were completely false and the remaining one true." Similarly he stated: "We are not pronouncing all other religions to be totally false, but rather saying that in Christ whatever is true in all religions is consummated and perfected." Kathryn Lindskoog wrote: "Lewis expressed hope that many true seekers like Akhenaton and Plato, who never had a chance to find Christ in this life, will find Him in the next one."

G. The Church

Lewis was an Anglican Christian who sought to preserve what he considered the common core of centrist Christianity. His late-in-life secretary (an Anglican-become-Roman Catholic) recalled: "I remember the first (and only) time I mentioned ‘low’ and ‘high’ churchmanship in [his] presence. He looked at me as though I had offered him poison. ‘We must never discuss that,’ he said…."

1. Baptism and Communion

J. I. Packer felt that Lewis bordered on espousing baptismal regeneration even though this is not a prominent strand in his fifty-plus books. Lewis did attach special significance to Communion in his writings. In answer to a factory worker, Lewis commented: "If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obligated to take the Sacrament and you can’t do it without going to Church." In the same vein Lewis preached: "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object present to your senses." In regard to the preceding sentence A. N. Wilson concluded that Lewis "clearly had a full belief in the Eucharistic Presence" or he wouldn’t have made such an assertion.

When Jack and Warnie were out walking one day, they passed a church sign that declared that "the Blessed Sacrament…should be treated with ‘special reverence.’" Over lunch the two brothers argued about this. Warnie said if one was a Roman Catholic, then "the aumbry contains our Lord and…even prostration is hardly reverence enough." However, if one is Anglican, then it "contains but a wafer and a little wine, and why in front of that should one show any greater reverence than in any other part of the church?" Jack sought to find a middle ground between the two views.

To the less sacramentally minded, Lewis acknowledged that he got "on no better with those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ." Rather, he thought: "Here is big medicine and strong magic." Elsewhere he owned: "My ideas about the sacrament would probably be called ‘magical’ by a good many modern theologians."

2. Confessing Sins to a Priest

Only some years after conversion did Lewis make auricular confession to an Anglican priest. He wrote (on October 24, 1940) that "the decision was the hardest I have ever made…" From that time on he made regular confession to a priest.

H. Last Things

Richard Cunningham summarized Lewis’s eschatology by observing that he believed in "purgatory, heaven, hell, the second coming, the resurrection of the body, and the judgment." As a young atheist Lewis wrote (on October 18, 1916) that he could do without "a bogey who is prepared to torture me forever and ever if I should fail in coming up short to an almost impossible ideal. As to the immortality of the soul, …I neither believe nor disbelieve…" Early after his conversion experience he thought very little of an afterlife and rewards.

Praying for the dead and a concept of purgatory pretty well go hand in hand. Lewis "emphatically believed in praying for the dead." He prayed for his wife after she died. He thought that John Henry Newman had the right idea-that saved souls before God’s throne would ask to be thoroughly cleansed. Consequently, this necessitated a purgatory, though not as in a medieval doctrine of torture. In this way there would exist "Purgatory (for souls already saved) or…Limbo (for souls already lost)." A television interviewer pointed out to Lewis that he "believe[d] in Purgatory." To this Lewis returned: "But not the Romish doctrine." (The Anglican view is found in Article XXII of The Book of Common Prayer). Lewis likened purgatory to sitting in a dentist’s chair, saying: "I’d rather be cleaned first." Of course, most evangelicals believe this viewpoint founders upon the perfect purgation which has already transpired in the crosswork of Christ (Hebrews 1:3; 9:15; 10:2, 10-12, 17-18).

Concerning Lewis on the Second Coming, William Luther White said: "Edgar Boss attributes to Lewis the belief that ‘Jesus is literally, personally coming again.’ …However, I am unable to find in Lewis anything to support this apparent fundamentalist position." But the prima facie reading of Lewis certainly makes it sound as if he champions an orthodox view of Christ’s Second Coming. Kathryn Lindskoog asserted: "Lewis found it impossible to retain our belief in the divinity of Christ and the truth of our Christian revelation if we abandon…the promised, and threatened, Return [of Christ]."

Lewis wrote illuminatingly of the wonders of heaven. He also spoke about hell. In one of his last published stories (disputed by Kathryn Lindskoog as to its authorship) Lewis had Dr. Elwin Ransom assert: "A man can’t be taken to hell, or sent to hell; you can only get there on your own steam." This is in line with Lewis’s Arminian soteriology, as when he remarked: "The doors of hell are locked on the inside." Yet when Lewis depicted hell fictionally in The Great Divorce, only one of the bus riders visiting heaven preferred to stay there; all else preferred their misery.

To Arthur Greeves he wrote:

About Hell. All I have ever said is that the N. T. plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in ‘the outer darkness.’ Whether this means…being left to a purely mental state…or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you could call a world or a reality, I would never pretend to know.

Also Lewis clarified his opinion when he penned: "Whether this eternal fixity [of hell] implies endless duration-or duration at all-we cannot say." Therefore, once more Lewis’s view cannot be labeled typically evangelical.

I. Evaluation and Conclusion

Predictability was not the trademark of C. S. Lewis. Nor was his an assembly-line theology. The liberal scholars of his day regarded him as a mousely Reepicheep in his attack upon their "assured results" of biblical criticism. Yet, because of his denial of biblical inerrancy, conservatives could not regard him as their knightly Dr. Ransom. When it came to New Testament historicity, Lewis siphoned off of his own expertise in the field of literary criticism to deny the Bultmannians free reign (or rein). Similarly his popularity as a BBC speaker and in spiraling book sales (especially children’s fantasies!) made him unpopular with some scholarly colleagues in the Oxbridge world.

Lewis navigated well within the orbit of orthodoxy when it came to regarding God as a trinity and Christ as deity. Here he stood in sync with the historic position of Christians since antiquity. Not only did he embrace the full supernaturalness of the Father and Son (while commenting only rarely upon the Spirit), but he accepted the bonafide existence of angels, demons, and Satan as invisible, supernatural personalities.

He refused to confine himself to one stated formulation of an Atonement theory, and he was Arminian on the extent of the Atonement and the question of whether salvation could be lost. Ironically, while he believed some Christians could lose their salvation, he believed some non-Christians could receive their final salvation.

As a member in good standing of the Anglican Church, Lewis accepted an Anglican position on purgatory and prayers for the dead, as well as practicing auricular confession of sins. He believed in a substantive reality to heaven and hell but was agnostic about matters such as the precise dimension and duration of hell.

While Lewis was not known for personal evangelism (for example, many of his students went through years of tutoring from him without ever learning that he was a Christian), ironically he became one of the most renowned international defenders of the Christian faith through his writings. Even when we disagree with some of his theological tenets, we are better off for his having forced us to grapple with his immense intellect. Like the local Christian congregation at Corinth, C. S. Lewis came up with some aberrant views and engaged in some heavy drinking, but he was never dull and the world has never been the same.

Panchina di Lewis in Irlanda a Belfast

Bangor (Irish: Beannchor) is a large town in County Down, Northern Ireland, with an urban area population of 76,851 people in the 2001 Census, making it the most populous town in Northern Ireland and the third most populous settlement in Northern Ireland. It is a seaside resort situated on the southern side of Belfast Lough and is situated in the Belfast Metropolitan Area

"Little Lea",

At six his family moved into "Little Lea", the house the elder Mr. Lewis built for Mrs. Lewis, in Strandtown, Northern Ireland.

Ancestry of C. S. Lewis

by Alston Jones McCaslin V

& Silas Dobbs McCaslin

Our mother, Mary Margaret (DOBBS) (McCASLIN) WARD (1913-1980), from 1950 to 1962, received at least 13 letters from C. S. LEWIS. These letters are published in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III, by Walter Hooper, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. We each have an inscribed, presentation copy of this work that was sent to us by Walter HOOPER. Moreover, we have two inscribed, presentation copies of books sent to Mother by LEWIS. Mother gave us the letters several years before her death, and we inherited her collection of books. Additionally, we have collected over 20 other books signed or inscribed by LEWIS, most of which are first editions.

Ostensibly Alston Jones McCASLIN V (b. 1939) presently has the largest personally held collection of C. S. LEWIS first editions in the world (see "COLLECTIONS" in the ADDENDUM). Foremost is the procurement of all of the first British editions and first American editions of the 42 hard-bound books published by LEWIS, buttressed by some 400 duplicate, first edition copies. That honor earlier had been enjoyed by Dr. Edwin W. BROWN, of Indianapolis, Indiana, from whom many of our signed or inscribed first editions were purchased, and from whom as well a host of other LEWIS first editions were acquired.

Silas Dobbs McCaslin (b. 1940) has a collection of more than 150 LEWIS books, including all first British and first American editions of the 42 hard-bound books published by LEWIS. Together, our LEWIS books number about 700, most of which have dust jackets.

IN PURSUIT OF C. S. LEWIS, Adventures in Collecting His Works, by Edwin W. Brown, M.D., with Dan Hamilton, Authorhouse Publishers, Bloomington, Indiana, 2006, is an exceptional work in which is described the extraordinary collection of Dr. BROWN, which was donated to the library of Taylor University, in nearby Upland, Indiana. At Taylor, a Christian liberal arts University, a repository was created to house this elite collection, namely "The Edwin W. Brown Collection" (see ADDENDUM).

We give God all the praise and glory for the privilege of having assembled this particular Lewisiana to enjoy during our lifetimes. And, it is our hope that the genealogy to follow will be "for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified by it." (John 11:4)

"Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God." (I Cor 10:31)

PREFACE

In August of 2006, we discovered the lack of availability of a published source for the ancestry of C. S. Lewis and we collaborated in an effort of deriving what we could to that end--the development of a concise genealogy for the late C. S. LEWIS (1898-1963). In early September 2006, utilizing Google, there were several million web sites found on the Internet for C. S. LEWIS, and hundreds of thousands established for Clive Staples LEWIS. None of these sites contributed to his early ancestry. Furthermore, neither the Latter Day Saints (LDS) nor the Ancestry.com web sites supplied any more than the names of LEWIS's parents and grandparents. The LDS International Genealogical Index (IGI) and addendum contain approximately 725 million names; Ancestry.com boasts of a repository of over 350 million names. One would surmise that the absence of genealogical information for C. S. LEWIS results from his having had no natural children.

Census records for the LEWIS family from 1841 to 1891 in Wales were found on Ancestry.com. As explained by this writer herein, only 1901 and 1911 census records are available for Ireland, and no census records after these dates have been released to the public in the British Isles. The available census records that are accessible were extracted for this ancestry, and copies of the census manuscripts are in our files.

On September 9, Jay had expressed his zeal about publishing this work in hard-bound copies. That task may not be pursued. The manuscript essentially was completed in October 2006, and is available on the website: www.silasdobbsmccaslin.com, or can be accessed directly with the URL: http://home.comcast.net/~smccaslin2/AncestryofC.S.Lewis.html

ANCESTRY OF C. S. LEWIS

C. S. LEWIS: A BIOGRAPHY, by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, pub. 1974, was the first biography of C. S. LEWIS to be published.

Roger Lancelyn GREEN (1918-1987) was LEWIS's authorized biographer. Walter HOOPER (b. 1931) became LEWIS's secretary in 1963, for the final few months of LEWIS's life. Since then, HOOPER has been a trustee and literary advisor of the estate of C. S. LEWIS.

C. S. LEWIS -- A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2002, is the authority for the life of Clive Staples LEWIS. It is a monumental and thoroughgoing work, providing exhaustive family information. (q.v.)

THE LEWIS FAMILY OF WALES AND AMERICA, Origin, Ancestry, and Some of the Descendants, by Edward Simmons Lewis, Quintin Publications, Albany, New York, 1928, is the standard for the Wales family. THE LEWIS FAMILY OF WALES AND AMERICA, by Edward Simmons Lewis, was reprinted in "The Journal of American History," Vol. XXII, Third Quarter, Number 3. 1928, a copy of which we have on file, where on p. 225, it begins a discussion, "LEWIS OF THE VAN," as follows:

"The ancestors in the direct line of this family were for many years great Lords in East Glamorganshire, Wales, and the chief of those who claimed descent from Gweathvoed, Prince of Cardigan, descended form Teon, Prince of Britain, in tenth generation....

"The generations following are in descent, Madoc, Llewellyn, Llewellyn Ychn, Rees Vwya, Llewellyn Anwyl, Richard Gwyn, to Lewis ap Richard Gwy, whose son, Edward (d. 1560), assumed the name of Lewis as a family name, and is known as the founder of the family of Lewis. Edward Lewis of the Van was a very wealthy person. The twelve preceding generations of his paternal ancestors had each married an heiress of large wealth, and these accumulated possessions–more than sixty manors, coal and mining operations, and other assets of value–now came into his ownership.

"He selected the Manor of Van, in Bedwas, enclosed the park, and built the older part of the house, of which the ruins are still so stately. He also built the great dove-cote, which still stands, in good preservation. He married Ann, daughter of Sir William Morgan of Pencoed, Knight, by Florence Bridges of Cuberly. He was Sheriff of Glamorgan in 1548, 1555, 1559, and Deputy Custos Rotulorum for the County, the Earl of Pembroke being Custos. He died about 1560, and, with his wife, was buried at Llanover.

"They had children: Thomas, eldest son and heir; William, of Glyn-Taff; Edward, of Llanishen; Mary, married Rowland Kemeys; Elizabeth, married Edward Herbert; Margaret, married Sir Miles Button; Jane, married George Avan; Blanche, married George Kemeys; Cecil, married William Prichard.

"Thomas Lewis (d. 1593)of the Van, eldest son and heir, was Sheriff, 1569, and Deputy Custos. He married Margaret, daughter of Robert Gamage of Coyty, by Joan Champernoun of Dartington. By Margaret Gamage, Thomas Lewis had: Edward (b. 1560), heir; George, of Llystalybont; Edmund, the first of the family to bear that English name; Ann, married John Thomas; Mary, married Humphrey Mathew; Jane; Florence, married William Fleming; also a son, John, named in his will, where he leaves him certain lands, money, and cattle.

"Sir Edward Lewis, eldest son and heir, of Saint Fagan’s Castle, Penmark Place, etc., born 1560, and thirty-four years old at his father’s death, was knighted at Whitehall, 1603. He was Sheriff, 1601, 1612. He married Blanche, daughter of Thomas Morgan of Machen and Middle Temple, by Elizabeth Bodenham. Thomas Morgan was brother to Sir William Morgan of Tredegar.

"Sir Edward died January 9, 1628, having children: Sir Edward (d. 1630), heir; Sir William, of Cilfach; Nicholas, died unmarried; Thomas, of Penmark Place; Catherine, married Sir Lewis Mansell; Margaret, married Harry Rice.

"The Inquisition on the death of Sir Edward Lewis, taken at Cardiff, 1628, showed that he died seized of the Van, and lands in Bedwas, Ruddrye, &c.: lands in Llandaff, Saint John’s, Peterson, &c....

"To his wife, Dame Blanche, he bequeathed Saint Fagan’s Castle, its household stuff, plate, horses, cattle, &c., and his coach and four horses.

"Sir Edward Lewis, of Van, and Edington, Wiltshire, eldest son and heir, was knighted by King James I at Theobalds, 26 April, 1603 His wife was Ann Sackville, daughter of Robert, second Earl of Dorset. He died 10 October, 1630, and was buried, with his wife, in the church at Edington, where a fine monument is inscribed:

"'Here lye the bodies of–Sir Edward Lewis of the Vane–and his wife, the Right Honble, Anne, daughter of Robert, Earl of Dorset, by the Lady Margaret Howard, sole daughter of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk. They had issue living, fower sonnes, Edward, William, Richard, and Robert, and one daughter, Anne Lewis. His mournefull deceased the 25th of Sept., 1664.'

"Robert Lewis, the fourth son, mentioned in the foregoing inscription, sailed from Gravesend, England, for Virginia, in 1635.

"George Lewis of Llystalybont was second son of the abovementioned Thomas Lewis of the Van and his wife, Margaret Gamage. He was Sheriff in 1610, and living in 1645. He married, first, Catherine, daughter of Miles Mathew of Castell-y-Mynach, by Catherine Mathew of Radyr; and, second, Mary, daughter of Francis Zouche. His third wife was Mary, daughter of Edward Gore of Wiltshire.

"By Catherine he had: Edward, who died young; Anthony, second son, who inherited Llystalybont; Edmund, third son (This Edmund Lewis is called, subsequently herein, Edmund of Lynn, Massachusetts. The Compiler). By Mary Zouche, he had a daughter, Mary. By his third wife, Mary Gore, he had Harry; Herbert; William (This William Lewis is called, subsequently herein, William of Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Compiler); John (named in will); Catherine, married to Hopkin Popkin; Barbara, married to John Williams; Mary; Blanche.

"Richard Lewis, third son of the abovementioned Sir Edward and his wife, Anne Sackville (daughter of the Earl of Dorset), inherited the estates. He neglected, and probably dismantled Van, and, when in the County, used the Manor and Castle of Saint Fagan. He was succeeded by his son, Sir Thomas Lewis, whose daughter, and only child, married the Earl of Plymouth, and carried the great estate to that family, which occupies Saint Fagan’s Castle at the present time.

"Sir Thomas made his daughter, Elizabeth, a wedding gift of forty thousand pounds, upon her marriage to the Earl of Plymouth. In his will, dated 6 May, 1735, he bequeathed legacies to various friends, amounting to forty thousand pounds, and the remainder to his daughter, Elizabeth (The foregoing account is the substance of extracts from Clark’s History of Glamorganshire, pages 38 &c).

Edward Simmons LEWIS then carries descendants across the ocean, where he discusses "LEWIS OF THE VAN AND THE FAMILY IN AMERICA." He begins, p. 229, with Cunnedda the Great, in 460 A. D., discussing the history of Wales and associated lineage. It is stated:

"Each generation following made an advantageous marriage, so that when the succession came to Lewis ap Richard ap Llewellyn, the estate had become one of the greatest in Wales. Lewis ap Richard, by purchase, united the whole Merthyr property to the main line–now an estate of vast proportions, which passed down to his son, Edward ap Lewis, later known as Edward Lewis of the Van.

"Until 1541 A. D., no family names existed in Wales. Family records and titles to property were recorded in a long list of single names–son to father, to grandfather, and so on–as John ap Thomas ap Richard ap William, etc.

"About that time King Henry VIII decreed that all Welshmen should assume family names, and, in obedience to the royal order, Edward ap Lewis assumed his father’s name as his family name and, selecting the Manor of Van for his seat, became known as Edward Lewis of the Van. Clark’s History of Glamorganshire describes his as "a very wealthy person." Extent of the estate is indicated by the report of the jury after an inquisition upon the death of Thomas Lewis of the Van, son of Edward, the first Lewis of the Van. The report declared that Thomas Lewis died, possessing the Manor of Van, three hundred and forty acres, and other manors in Glamorganshire; "also, 300 Messuages, cottages, and tenements in various parishes." A similar inquisition for the County of Monmouth, describes other manors and tenements. Thomas Lewis’s son, Sir Edward Lewis, who died in 1628, inherited the estate, and the inquisition upon his death reported forty-seven manors in Glamorganshire, nineteen in Monmouth, four in Brecon, besides other property. The Court of Chancery, in 1743, in its report, showed that Thomas Lewis of the Van had given his daughter, Elzabeth, forty thousand pounds, English money, as a wedding gift upon her marriage to the Earl of Plymouth, and had distributed legacies, by will, of money, amounting to forty thousand pounds. He also left manors in Glamorganshire which were sold by order of the Court, for forty-seven thousand pounds, and also had property in Bristol valued at ten thousand pounds, and six manors in England, the total value of his estate approximating more than one hundred thousand pounds. The Welch estates passed down through the Earls of Plymouth and are owned by that family at the present time.

"Edward Lewis of the Van, first of that name, married Ann Morgan, and, dying in 1560, was succeeded by his son, Thomas Lewis of the Van, who married Margaret Gamage and died in 1593, leaving sons, Edward, George, and Edmund. The eldest son, Edward, inherited the great estate. He was knighted at Whitehall in 1603, and, like his father and grandfather, held the office of Sheriff, a position of dignity and importance at that time. He married Blanche Morgan, and their son, Edward, succeeded to the estate and was knighted by King James I, at Whitehall.

"This last-named Sir Edward married Ann Sackville, daughter of Edward, second Earl of Dorset, whose wife was Margaret Howard, daughter of Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and of that great house which ranked in power and prestige next to the royal family of England....

From CLARK’s work, much of the information heretofore again is provided, leading down to the migration of several LEWIS’s to America. THE LEWIS FAMILY OF WALES AND AMERICA, p. 237, continues:

"George Lewis of Lystalybont (father of the just-described Edmund Lewis of Lynn, Massachusetts), married, third, Mary Gore, daughter of Edward Gore of Wiltshire, and had sons, Herbert, Harry, William, and John, and several daughters. Of these, William came to America in 1630, and, settling in Roxbury, Massachusetts, became known as William Lewis of Roxbury. References to Edmund of Lynn and William of Roxbury, as brothers (they being, actually, half-brothers), are made in several histories of that period, as follows:

"'William Lewis of Roxbury, brother to Edmund Lewis of Lynn, was descended from a very respectable family in Wales. His descendants enjoy great satisfaction in being able to trace their descent from a very high antiquity."–Annals of Lynn.

'Edmund Lewis of Lynn was brother to William Lewis of Roxbury, who descended from a Welsh family with a pedigree running back centuries."–History of Lynn, by Alonzo Lewis and James Newhall (second edition).

'Edmund Lewis of Lynn was one of the first settlers of Watertown. He removed to Lynn and died there in 1651. William Lewis, brother of Edmund, came from England in 1630 and settled in Roxbury."–The General Register of First Settlers in New England, by John Farmer.'"

THE LEWIS FAMILY OF WALES AND AMERICA, p. 239, continues with a thoroughgoing presentation of various collateral LEWIS families of early Virginia, the progenitors of many prominent American LEWIS families, where it is stated in part:

"LEWIS–How the name thrills the heart with patriotic emotions–Next to that of Washington, there is no name which stands forth more prominently upon the pages of Virginian history than that of Lewis.

"General Robert Lewis, first of the Virginia family, son of Sir Edward Lewis, of Brecon, Wales, and descended from the Duke of Dorset, landed in Virginia in 1635, received a grant of thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three acres of land in Gloucester County.

"He built Warner Hall, and lived in regal style. His son, John Lewis....

-----------------

"Edmund Lewis of Lynn settled at Watertown in 1634, and in 1636 was allotted lands which had been purchased from the Indians. His homestead was six acres on the Lexington road, at Warren road, now a vacant lot, partly surrounded by portions of a stone wall or fence. He was elected selectman in 1636, the governing body at the time...."

Whereas extensive and valuable genealogical information is given in the foregoing work, the parentage of Richard LEWIS (b.a. 1771, Wales) is not provided. We may at a later date find the proof by which we will connect Richard LEWIS (b. 1771, Wales; d. 1845, Wales) with the appropriate patriarch of 17th century Wales.

C. S. LEWIS: A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, provides exhaustive family information. From the vital records provided by Walter HOOPER in the "FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION" (2002), we have established a site on Ancestry.com for Clive Staples LEWIS under "Public Member Trees," entitled "C. S. Lewis Family Tree." The dates were extrapolated from the foregoing sources. Roger Lancelyn GREEN and Walter HOOPER had full and undivided access to the family records of C. S. LEWIS prior to their 1974 first edition.

From the Internet sites for C. S. LEWIS, and the hundreds of books written about him, from varying perspectives, a huge amount of information can be assembled. The purpose of this manuscript primarily is to provide an overview of his lineage. Our contribution is for those few collateral descendants of LEWIS, as well as the millions who know of his work. Moreover, we consider the genealogy that follows a watershed event for genealogists who may have an interest in the ancestry of C. S. LEWIS.

Walter HOOPER, in C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, p. xvii, states in part:

PROLOGUE – ANCESTRY

"'Live in Hope and die in Caergwrle' says the pun still current in these two North Wales villages between Hawarden and Wrexham in Flintshire. C. S. Lewis’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Lewis (ca. 1775-1845), fulfilled at least the second part of this dictum, though he was probably also born in Caergwrle and was certainly a farmer there for most of his life. He had one daughter and six sons, the fourth of whom, Joseph (1803?-1890)–a farmer like his father–moved some miles north-east and settled at Saltney, then still a little village just south of Chester.

"The family were members of the Church of England until Joseph, thinking he was not being given the prominence that was his due in the parish, seceded and became a Methodist minister. Farming must have been merely the necessary means of supplementing the scanty tribute of his congregation, for it is as a Methodist minister that he is remembered, and in this capacity he enjoyed a considerable local reputation. Though the handwriting and letters of Joseph Lewis are not those of an educated man, it is recorded that he was an impressive speaker of an emotional type.

"Of Joseph’s eight children, it is his fourth son, Richard (1832-1908)...."

Heretofore, C. S. LEWIS -- A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, stated that Richard LEWIS was b.a. 1775, "probably" Co. Flintshire, and d. 1845, Co. Flintshire, Wales.

The 1841 Census of Wales, erroneously indexes Richard LEWIS as "Richard LOOTS." However, he is found as Richard LOOES, written in manscript, in Civil Parish of Mold, Hundred: Mold, Co. Flintshire, Registration District: Holywell, Sub-registration District: Mold, ED 2, Wrexham Street, p. 33 (ostensibly this street leads to the next town of Wrexham). His household is enumerated as follows:

Name - Age - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

Richard Looes, age 70, "Tailor," "n"

Jane Looes, age 40, "n"

John Looes, age 20, "Tailor," "n"

William Looes, age 14, "n"

We have no way to determine the county of birth of Richard and his children, but clearly the 1841 census substantiates that Richard stated to the census taker that it was not Flintshire, where the question "Whether Born in Same County" is answered "n."

Ostensibly Richard LOOES (b.a. 1771) is the father of Joseph LEWIS (b. 1805). The census taker wrote phonetically what he heard--"Richard LOOES for "Richard LEWIS." Other family members followed with "do," commonly used in the census records, meaning "ditto." We can neither prove nor disprove this thesis, but worse cases--in terms of spelling, transliteration, and mispronunciation--are not uncommon, which fact would sustain our conclusion. It is a fact that the perpetuation of the family names is a great indicator of relationship, and Richard LEWIS (b.a. 1832) was the son of Joseph (b. 1805); and Joseph was the son of Richard (b. 1771). Often genealogical conclusion, if not proof, rests on the inability, as well, to disprove an idea.

The wife of Richard LEWIS (b.a. 1771) is not enumerated, and must have died. Richard had at least four children: first Joseph, then Jane, John, and William above. And in 1841, Joseph LEWIS was nearby, 35 years of age, married, and heading up his own household. (q.v.)

In Co. Flintshire, Mold Parish, there are heading up their households three other LEWIS men of the same approximate age, viz.: David, b.a. 1771, Lowry, b.a. 1776, and William LEWIS, b.a. 1776. A LEWIS family genealogy may hold the key to any relationship that these various LEWIS families may have to Richard LEWIS (1771-1845).

The 1841 Census of Wales, Civil Parish: Hawarden, Hundred: Mold, Co. Flintshire, Township of Great Mancott, ED 10, Registration District: Great Boughton, Sub-registration District; Hawarden, pp. 10-11, lists:

Name - Age - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

Joseph Lewis, 35, Ag L, y

Jane Lewis, 40,y

Mary Lewis, 11, y

Richard Lewis, 9, y

Jane Lewis, 7, y

John Lewis, 5, y

Joseph Lewis, 3, y

Samuel Lewis, 1, y

Joseph LEWIS indicates that he, his wife, and all of the children were b. Flintshire. We earlier noticed that Richard LOOES was enumerated as not being b. Co. Flintshire. Ostensibly Joseph’s county of birth heretofore was not Flintshire, whereas the rest of the members of the household probably were b. Co. Flinthsire. Only a family genealogy would offer proof.

As noticed earlier in HOOPER's work, Joseph had eight children, and his fourth son was Richard (b. 1832). The foregoing census names six children, of which four are males. Richard is the oldest son listed. Thomas LEWIS (age 23 in the 1851 census) should have been enumerated at age 13. He may have been omitted by the census taker.

Alternatively, one finds in early census records that older children occasionally are bound out, for reasons unknown–sometimes because of space limitations. Thomas LEWIS may be residing with another family, perhaps kin. With the beginning of the enumeration of the Township of Mancott, Little Mancott, Hundred: Mold, Co. Flintshire, Hawarden Parish, Enumeration District 10B, Great Broughton Registration District, p. 6, we find a Thomas LEWIS, age 13, in the household of John and Mary ELLIS (both age 75). Thomas's occupation is "M. L.," which may mean "Minor Laborer." Other members of the household are as follows: John ELLIS (age 35), Samuel ELLIS (age 30), and Frances ELLIS (age 25). This ELLIS household is not far removed from that of the household of Joseph LEWIS (age 35) above.

The only other Thomas LEWIS of the age range of 12 to 14 in the immediate vicinity in Co. Flintshire is clearly enumerated as a son in another LEWIS household. He is 14 years of age.

Richard LEWIS (b.a. 1775) d. 1845--according to HOOPER's work heretofore.

The 1851 Census of Wales, Township of Saltney, Co. Flintshire, Registration District: Great Broughton, Sub-registration District: Cathedral Division, Enumeration District 27, "No. of Householder's Schedule...47," Ratcliffe Houses, Household No. 47, p. 851, lists:

Name - Age - Relationship - Condition - Occupation - Place of Birth

Joseph Lewis, 48, Head, Widower, Land(?) Farmer, Flintshire, Hope

Frances Lewis, 25, Daughter, U, Flintshire, Hawarden

Thomas Lewis, 23, Son, U, Agricultural Laborer, Flintshire, Hawarden

Jane Lewis, 17, Daughter, U, Dress maker (App), Flintshire, Hawarden

Joseph Lewis, 13, Son, Flintshire, Hawarden

Samuel Lewis, 11, Son, Scholar, Flintshire, Hawarden

From the 1851 census it is clear that Joseph’s wife, Jane, had died, for he was a "Widower." Frances (Mary Frances?), age 25, may be the same as 11-year-old Mary of 1841. Otherwise, Frances was missed in the 1841 census, and by 1851, Mary had married and left the household. Jane, Joseph, and Samuel all are ten years older. John LEWIS, who would be 15 years of age, had either died or had left the household. The bottom of the column of "No. of Householder's Schedule" lists "Total of Houses" printed, and in manuscript, "4." It is presumed that this is the number of the householder, or No. 47.

The 1851 Census of Wales, Township of Bannel, Co. Flintshire, Registration District: Great Broughton, Sub-registration District: Cathedral Division, Enumeration District 26, Ratcliffe Houses, Household No. 19, p. 5, lists a John LEWIS in the household of Thomas DAVIES (age 51) and his wife, Jane (age 55). Thus, apparently 10 pages away in the census, John LEWIS is enumerated as age 14, "unmarried," Relationship: "Servant," Occupation: "Farm Servant," b. Flintshire, Hope. Moreover, Mary LEWIS is also enumerated in the household at age 17, "unmarried," Relationship: "Servant," Occupation: "Servant;" b. Flintshire, Hope. One could conclude that these two minors, Mary and John, had been bound out by their father, Joseph LEWIS.

Richard LEWIS, who would have been 19 years of age, either had left the family, or he was missed by the census taker. The only young LEWIS male that we find in Flintshire is found in Caerfallwch, District 3A, Household No. 60, p. 18, is James, enumerated at age 19, "grandson." He is the only child in the household of three of Edward JONES (age 69) and his wife, Mary (age 60). One would wonder if this actually is Richard, age 19, living with his maternal grandparents. This James LEWIS was b. Flintshire, Northop. However, this is purely supposition.

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, pp. xvii-xviii, continues with further discussion of Richard, where it is stated that by 1853 he was in Ireland and married, thus:

"...(Richard), who first emigrated to Ireland, where he found work in the Cork Steamship Company as a master boiler maker. Richard was one of the working-class intelligentsia in the fore of that artisan renaissance of which the chief symptoms in the 1860s were th birth of the Trades Union and the Co-operative movements. In his concern for the elevation of the working classes, he set about improving his education, and writing essays for the edification of fellow membes of the Workmen’s Reading Room in the Steamship Company. Most of his essays were theological and are remarkably eloquent for a man who had had little education. Though he had returned to the Anglican Church, his essays were sufficiently evangelical to satisfy his Methodist father.

"In 1853, Richard married Martha Gee (1831-1903) of Liverpool. Their six children, Martha (1854-1860), Sarah Jane (1856?-1901), Joseph (1856-1908), William (1859-1946), Richard (b. 1861), and Albert James, were all born in Cork...."

Brothers and Friends, by Warren Lewis, Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco,1982, pp. xxvi-xxvii, provides two family trees, the data for which is as follows:

LEWIS FAMILY GENEALOGY

Richard Lewis II(1832-1908)=Martha Gee (1831-1903). They had issue:

1. Martha Lewis (1854-1860)

2. Sarah Jane Lewis (?-1901)

3. Joseph Lewis II (1856-1908)=Mary Taggert. They had issue:

i. Martha Lewis (1884-?)

ii. Richard Lewis IV (1891-?)

iii. Elizabeth Lewis (1893-?)

iv. May Lewis (1887-?)

v. Joseph Lewis III (1897-1969)

4. William Lewis (1859-1946)=Wilhelmina Duncanson. They had issue:

i. Norman Lewis (1891-?)

ii. Claire Lewis (1895-?)

iii. William Desmond Lewis (1897-1968)

5. Richard Lewis III (1861-?)=Agnes Young. They had issue:

i. Eileen Lewis (1892-1968)

ii. Leonard Lewis (1896-1968)

6. Albert James Lewis (1863-1929)=Florence Augusta Hamilton (1862-1908). They had issue:

i. Warren Hamilton Lewis (1895-1973)

ii. Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963).

WARREN, HAMILTON, AND EWART FAMILY GENEALOGY

Sir John Borlase Warren, Fourth Baronet (1800-1863)=Mary Warren (first cousin). They had issue:

1. Robert Heard=Charlotte Warren. They had issue:

i. Katie Heard

ii. Mary Heard=Sir William Ewart. They had issue:

a. Quintus Ewart

b. Robert Ewart

c. Hope Ewart

d. Kelso Ewart

e. Gundreda Ewart

f. Gordon Ewart

2. Thomas Hamilton (1826-1905)=Mary Warren (1826-1916). They had issue:

i. Cecil Hugh Waldegrave Hamilton

ii. Lily Hamilton

iii. Florence Augusta Hamilton (1862-1908)=Albert James Lewis (1863-1929). They had issue:

a. Warren Hamilton Lewis (1895-1973)

b. Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

iv. Augustus Warren Hamilton (1866-1945)=Anne Sargent Harley. They had issue:

a. Mary Warren Hamilton (1898-1904)

b. Ruth Hamilton (1900-?)

c. Harley Hamilton

d. John Borlase Hamilton (1905-?)

From the foregoing family history by HOOPER, we know that the GEE family was "of Liverpool." There are three of the name Martha GEE indexed in the 1841 census of England of age 10 to 11 years. The first was b. 1830, Staffordshire County. The second was b. 1831, Yorkshire County. The third is Martha GEE, age 10, of Co. Lancashire, Liverpool (b. Co. Cheshire, Liverpool, according to the 1851 census to follow).

The 1841 Census of England, Co. Lancashire, Borough of Liverpool, Parish of Liverpool, Hundred: West Derby, Registration District of Liverpool, Sub-registration District of St. Martin, Burlington Street, p. 39, lists:

Name - Age and Sex - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

Margaret Gee, 80, F, Ind., y

William Gee, 33, M, Lab., y

Elizabeth Gee, 41, F, y

Martha Gee, 10, F, y

William Gee, 3, M, y

William was b. 1808; Elizabeth was b. 1800; and Martha GEE was b. 1831, Co. Cheshire (1841 census of England). Margaret GEE (b.a. 1761), age 80, is the mother of William. Her occupation--"Profession, Trade, Employment, or of Independent Means,"--is abbreviated as "Ind.," or Independent Means.

The 1851 Census of England, Co. Lancashire, Borough of Liverpool, Civil Parish of Liverpool, Sub-registration: St. Martin, 104 N. Portland St., p. 24, lists:

Name - Relationship - Age and Sex - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

William Gee, Head, 43, M, Laborer, Cheshire, Latchford

Elizabeth Gee, Wife, 50, F, Cheshire, L.pool

Martha Gee, 20, F, Cheshire, L.pool

Mary Gee, 7, M, Scholar, Cheshire, L.pool

There seems to be little doubt that this is the family of Martha GEE. Younger brother, William, age 3 in 1841, should have been 13, and was either missed in the census or had died. Walter HOOPER states in the foregoing family history that Martha mar. Richard LEWIS in 1853, and that they resided in Ireland.

The 1861 Census of England, Co. Lancashire, Municipal Borough of Liverpool, Parish of Liverpool, Ecclesiastical District of St. Aidan, Municipal Ward of Scotland Yard, Sub-registration: St. Martin, 2 Millard St., Page 4, lists:

Name - Relationship - Sex - Condition - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

William Gee, Head, 53, M, Mar., Laborer, Cheshire, England

Letitia Gee, Wife, 50, F, Mar., Wife, Clifton, England

Mary Gee, Daur., 17, F, Unmar., Dress Maker, Liverpool

Samuel Gee, Brother, 39, M, Widower, Laborer, Cheshire, England

William now is appropriately 53, and he still resides in Liverpool Parish. Apparently Elizabeth (b. 1800), who would be 60 years old, had died, and Letitia is a younger wife, b.a. 1811. Younger brother, Samuel, is a widower with no children.

The 1871 Census of England, Co. Lancashire, Municipal Borough of Liverpool, Parish of Liverpool, Ecclesiastical District of St. Aidan, Municipal Ward of Scotland Yard, Sub-registration: St. Martin, 2 Haulgrave (?) St., Page 4, lists:

Name - Relationship - Sex - Condition - Occupation - Whether Born In Same County

William Gee, Head, 63, M. Mar., Foreman ? Distiller, Latchford, Cheshire

Letitia Gee, Wife, 60, F, Mar., Clifton, Lancashire

Mary Gee, Dau., 26, F, Unmar., Liverpool, Lancashire

Betty Gee, Cousin, 28, F, Unmar., Liverpool, Lancashire

Neither William nor Letitia is indexed in the 1881 census of England.

The 1861 Census of Wales, Township of Saltney, Co. Flintshire, District 10, Ratcliffe Row, Page 11, lists:

Name - Age - Relationship - Occupation - Where Born

Joseph Lewis, 58, Head, Engine Fitter, Flint., Caergwle

Frances Lewis, 52, Wife, Flint., Mancote

Thomas Lewis, 33, Son, Wire Rope Maker, Flint., Mancote

We find that Joseph remained in Wales, where apparently he took for himself a younger wife, Frances. The only child still residing with them in 1861 was Thomas. The places of birth given in the 1851 census differ from the 1861 record.

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY. REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, p. xviii, continues FULLY with the further discussion of Richard, in this way:

"...Albert (1863-1929), the father of C. S. Lewis, was born on 23 August 1863, and in 1864 his father proceeded to Dublin to take up a better job. His new position was something like an 'outside manager' in the shipbuilding firm of Messrs Walpole, Webb and Bewly.

"In 1868, Richard moved with his family to Belfast, where he and John H. MacIlwaine entered into a partnership under the firm name of 'MacIlwaine and Lewis: Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders.' The business was a success, for a time anyway, and in 1870, the Lewises moved from the area of Mount Pottinger to the more fashionable one of Lower Sydenham...."

Richard LEWIS resided in Ty Isa (one researcher stated that this was Welsh for "the house alone"), on Parkgate Avenue, Belfast, in 1870 (where he resided until the death of his wife, Martha, in 1903). Ty Isa was near St. Marks Church.

(Author Grahame DAVIES is compiling a personal guide to Wrexham, to be published late in 2007. The work will be entitled Real Wrexham. DAVIES stated the following in regard to Ty Isa:

"‘Ty Isaf’ literally means ‘Lowest House’. Wales being a mountainous country, it's common for farms to be denoted by their respective location on the hillside. ‘Ty Isaf’ = Lowest House, ‘Ty Canol’ = Middle House and ‘Ty Uchaf’ = Highest House. The same is true in parts of England where ‘Lower House’, ‘Middle House’ and ‘Upper House’ are common. It's common for ‘Isaf’ (and ‘Uchaf’) to be abbreviated to ‘Isa’ by the loss of the final letter. Hence, ‘Ty Isa’ and ‘Ty Ucha’ are common forms. As a matter of interest, the name should be pronounced ‘Tee Eessa.’ There's a 'Ty Isaf' two km west of Caergwrle. I don't know how the mistake ‘The House Alone’ came about. Perhaps someone thought ‘isaf’' looked like ‘isolated’ in English, and then added the definite article...."

This farm named "Ty Isaf," two miles west of Caergwrle, may be the family farm of C. S. LEWIS’s great, great grandfather, Richard LEWIS).

The 1871 Census of Wales, Township of Saltney, Co. Flintshire, Hawarden Ecclesiastical Parish, District 10, Household No. 84, Page 15, finds Richard’s parents still in the same area, where it lists:

Name - Age - Relationship - Occupation - Where Born

Joseph Lewis, 68, Head, Iron Luvnen, Cuerfwley, Flint.

Frances Lewis, 63, Wife, Mancote, Flint.

Thomas Lewis, 43, Son, Mancote, Flint.

Thomas clearly had not gotten married.

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, p. xviii, continues with the discussion of Albert, in this way:

"Whether it was because of his early precocity or because of the rising fortunes of the family, his father was induced to give Albert a more elaborate education than had been bestowed on his three brothers. After leaving the District Model National School, he went in 1877, when he was fourteen, to Lurgan College in Co. Armagh. This was a fortunate choice and was to have wide-reaching effects, for the headmaster of Lurgan College at this time was W. T. Kirkpatrick–the 'Great Knock' who was to play an important part in C. S. Lewis’s life, and of whom we shall hear more in the course of this narrative. Kirkpatrick was 31 at the time, and a brilliant teacher. He seems to have taken Albert under his wing, and, once it was decided that the boy would pursue a legal career, he set about preparing him for it.

"Albert left Lurgan College in 1879 and was articled the day after leaving school to the law firm of Maclean, Boyle, and Maclean in Dublin. Kirkpatrick had inspired him to continue his general education, and most evenings were set aside for the study of literature, composition, logic and history...."

Joseph LEWIS, his wife, Frances, and son, Thomas, all remained in Wales.

Irish census records are available neither for Richard LEWIS from 1861 through 1891, nor for his son, Albert James LEWIS in 1881 or 1891 (we do have 1901 and 1911 census enumerations that follow; see ADDENDUM).

The 1881 Census of Wales, Township of Bangor-is-y-Coed, Co. Flintshire, Page 10, enumerates the family of Samuel LEWIS, age 43, "Farmer & Dealer," with a wife, age 41, and ten children. One of the sons is named Albert J. LEWIS. He is 15 years of age. Ostensibly Samuel (b. 1840) is the younger brother of Richard LEWIS (b. 1832).

The 1881 Census of Wales, Township of Saltney, Hawarden, Co. Flintshire, District 5, Page 23, enumerates the family of Joseph LEWIS, 5 Watkin Street, Sandycroft, Household No. 129, as follows:

Name - Age - Relationship - Occupation - Where Born

Joseph Lewis, 78, Head, Annuitant, Co. Flintshire, Hawarden

Frances Lewis, 73, Wife, Flintshire, Hawarden

Thomas Lewis, 53, Son, Fitters Assistant, Flintshire, Hawarden

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, pp. xviii-xix, continues, as it deals with Albert James LEWIS in Ireland, viz.:

"In 1881 (Albert James Lewis) joined the Belmont Literary Society and was soon considered one of their best speakers. One member predicted that, "Since Mr. Lewis joined the Society his matrimonial prospects had gone up 20 per cent," little knowing that they had been quite high since he first met Miss Edie Macown when he went off to Lurgan. Both, it seems, were more "in love with love" than with one another, and by 1884, Edie had faded out of Albert’s life.

"The following year, Albert qualified as a solicitor and, after a brief partnership, started a practice of his own in Belfast which he conducted with uniform success for the rest of his life.

"On returning to Belfast, Albert was united not only with his family, but with their neighbours, the Hamiltons. When the Lewises moved to Lower Sydenham in 1870, they had become members of the parish of St. Mark, Dundela. Four years later, the church acquired a mew rector, the Reverend Thomas Hamilton. Richard Lewis was always a stern critic of Thomas Hamilton’s sermons, but the young Lewises and Hamiltons became warm friends immediately. Whereas the Lewises sprang from Welsh farmers and were, despite their evangelical Christianity, materially minded, the Hamiltons were a family of reputable antiquity with a strong ecclesiastical tradition.

"The Irish branch of the Hamilton family was descended form one Hugh Hamilton, who settled at Lisbane, Co. Down, in the time of James I, and was one of the Hamiltons of Evandale, of whom Sir James Hamilton of Finnart (d. 1540) was an ancestor..."

Albert James LEWIS, as earlier noticed, had siblings Martha, Sarah Jane, Joseph, William, and Richard, all born in Cork. Richard and William moved from Ireland to Scotland in 1883, forming a business in Glasgow.

A Shiver of Wonder:A Life of C. S. Lewis, by Derick Bingham, Ambassador Emerald International, Greenville, South Carolina, 2004, Chapter 1, "The Lost Address," states:

"Albert was a brilliant and skillful teller of short, entertaining stories about real incidents or people. He could act all the characters in his stories. He loved poetry that contained pathos and rhetoric; this significant literary streak, being encouraged by his Headmaster, led Albert to write his own stories and poetry. He loved the liturgy of the Church of Ireland as contained in its Prayer Book, and he loved the infinite treasures found in the verbal vaults of the Bible. With these gifts and interests, it is not surprising that he was the first Superintendent of the Sunday School at St. Mark’s, Dundela, a nearby Belfast suburb. Albert’s law practise was at 83 Royal Avenue, and he was to become Sessional Solicitor of the Belfast City Council and the Belfast and County Down Railway Company, as well as Solicitor to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He impressed many juries with his effective speaking abilities, and he also gave his services as a speaker to the Conservative Party, gaining frequent acclaim from newspapers for his efforts. He loved to read Anthony Trollope’s political novels. Later, both his boys claimed that, given the freedom and the resources, he would have made a significant politician.

"Through his love for literature, Albert came to meet the love of his life. It is said that a faint heart has never won a fair lady. His heart had been stirred by the Rector’s pale, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Florence Augusta (Flora) Hamilton, but her love was difficult to win. Flora was born at Queenstown in County Cork in 1862 and as a young girl lived in Rome with her parents. She proved to be of a much cooler temperament than her father, who was a chaplain in the Royal Navy during the whole of the Crimean War and a chaplain of the Anglican Holy Trinity Church in Rome from 1870 to 1874. The Hamiltons were the descendants of a titled Scottish family that was allowed to take land in County Down in the reign of James I. The Reverend Hamilton was a very highly principled and emotionally charged man. We are told that he frequently wept in his pulpit. It must have caused him and his family great sadness that he had to spend much of his short life in a mental hospital. It seems that he suffered from scant praise. Yet surely a man is not without memorable significance who willingly served in the Crimea and, in fact, volunteered for duty in camps where death from cholera occurred every single day. Perhaps he saw things that others of us will never see. Let his Maker be his judge.

"So, Thomas Hamilton was the first Rector of St. Mark’s, Dundela, ministering there from 1874 to 1900. His wife, Mary, was a liberal in politics, an enthusiastic feminist, a supporter of the suffragettes, and a Home Ruler. (A Home Ruler was a person who believed that Ireland should be self-governed but still remain part of the British Empire.) She was a committed vegetarian and a cat collector, and she kept an extremely untidy and disorganised rectory! Mary Warren Hamilton came from an Anglo-Norman family planted in Ireland in the reign of Henry II. She was an extremely political animal indeed, and very intelligent with it.

"Mary Hamilton’s daughter, Florence, known as FLORA, is of great significance in any study of the life of C. S. Lewis. She was to have a profound influence upon him, even though she died when he was only ten years of age, leaving him horrendously bereft. She had a great gift that she would pass on to him: a mind that thought distinctly and logically.

"Between 1881 and 1885 FLORA attended ladies’ classes at Methodist College, Belfast, and, at the same time, the Royal University of Ireland, now known as Queen’s University. The University’s beautiful main college building, designed by Charles Lanyon, is modeled on Magdalen College, Oxford, where FLORA’s son would achieve great fame. Nearby, stretching across seventeen acres, are the beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens, with their lawn, Teak Ground, Yew Ground, and Hawthorn Collection. The Ornamental Water, the Fernery, and the famous Palm House conservatory enhance all of these grounds.

"Queen’s University is nowadays famous for its major contribution to world medicine and engineering. In FLORA Hamilton’s time the Maths Department had a significant reputation. FLORA read Mathematics and Logic. In her first public exam in 1880, she got a first in Geometry and Algebra, and in her finals in 1881, a first in Logic and a second-class honours degree in Mathematics. She took a B.A. in 1886.

"With regard to Mathematics, FLORA was extraordinary, and many regarded her as a bit of a bluestocking. Perhaps in her time a more prevalent Ulster view of mathematics was that of Mother Goose:

"'Multiplication is a vexation,

Division’s twice as bad;

The rule of three perplexes me,

And practise makes me mad!'

"Another unusual aspect in FLORA’s make-up was a deep love of literature; few mathematicians carry such a trait. A voracious reader of good novels, FLORA saw one of her own stories, "The Princess Rosetta," published in The Household Journal of London in 1889.

"Albert’s brother, William, had first courted Florence, but she turned him down, telling him she could never love him. From the beginning Albert had to approach FLORA very carefully indeed. When he proposed to her in 1886, she offered him only friendship. By now devoted to her, Albert exploited their love of literature as a major link between them. FLORA used him as a sounding board for her short stories and articles, and over the seven years following the proposal they wrote many letters to each other. It took a long time to win FLORA’s love; but her friendship with Albert began to shift to a fondness for him, and eventually she woke up to the fact that she would be deeply unhappy if they parted. Her feelings for him were deeper than she outwardly demonstrated. Even at the time of their engagement in June 1893, she admitted to him that she was not sure if she loved him, but she was sure that she could not bear not seeing him. So, on 29 August 1894, the pale, gifted, cool-headed, blue-eyed mathematician and the somewhat tempestuous lawyer were married at St. Mark’s, Dundela. They honeymooned in North Wales and moved into Dundela Villas in East Belfast. It was a marriage that was to be marked by deep devotion from each partner. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895; and three years later, on 29 November 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was born."

(Note: Edwin W. BROWN, M. D. acquired a first edition of SPIRITS IN BONDAGE, inscribed Richard Lewis, West Dean, Helensburgh. Later BROWN determined that brothers William and Richard LEWIS had moved to Scorland in 1883, and that he lived in Helensburgh {In Pursuit of C. S. Lewis, pp. 19-20}. It is not known if C. S. LEWIS gave his Uncle Richard the book, or if he had acquired it himself).

Frances LEWIS, widow of Joseph, should be age 83 in the 1891 census, to be consistent with earlier records.

The 1891 Census of Wales, Township of Uwchymynydd Ucha, Co. Flintshire, Registration Distict Chester, Sub-registration District Hawarden, Household No. 29, Page 5, enumerates the household of Frances LEWIS. She is head of household, "widow," and has family members living in her household as follows:

Name - Age - Relationship - Occupation - Where Born

Frances Lewis, 76, Head, Widow, Flint., Hope

Elizabeth Lewis, 19, Ni(e)ce, Flint., Hope

Cathrine Lewis, 7, Granddaughter, Scholar, Flint., Hope

There seems to be little doubt that Frances LEWIS is the widow of Joseph. She shaved about seven years from her age. It was the 1851 census that listed Joseph’s place of birth as Flintshire, Hope Parish, where Frances's place of birth was listed as Hawarden. However, in each census thereafter, the places of birth varied. Uwchymynydd Ucha is an old township of Hope Parish–an old ecclesiastical parish, which included Saltney (East and West), now separate parishes.

Frances is surrounded by a number of JONES and HUGHES families, but the nearest LEWIS household is Household No. 38, with head of household enumerated as "Widow" Sarah A. LEWIS, age 47, with one other person, a son Thomas, age 15. Ostensibly the JONES and HUGHES families are kinsmen. There other families interspersed nearby, namely: John ROBERTS, age 38, whose wife is Catherine; another John ROBERTS, age 52, with a wife and son; Edwin JOSEPH, widower, with children, the oldest of which is Sarah A., age 21, who may be related to Sarah A. LEWIS above, residing two doors away. Only a family history would prove any presumed relationships.

C. S. LEWIS: A COMPANION & GUIDE, by Walter Hooper, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1996, p. 3, states:

"Clive’s mother, Florence Augusta "FLORA" Hamilton, was the daughter of the Rector of St. Mark, Dundela, the Rev. Thomas Hamilton (1826-1905). Thomas came from a long line of Church of Ireland (Anglican) ecclesiastics. His father, Hugh, had been Rector of Benmore, Enniskillen, and his grandfather, Hugh Hamilton (1729-1805), had been Bishop of Clonfert and later Bishop of Ossory. FLORA was a graduate of Queen’s College in mathematics and logic...."

DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY, p. 1045, provides a biography of Hugh HAMILTON (1729-1805), where it states:

"HAMILTON, HUGH, D.D. (1729-1805), bishop of Ossory, eldest son of Alexander Hamilton, M.P., of Knock, Co. Dublin, and Newtownhamilton (named for Alexander HAMILTON, a descendant of the John HAMILTON of Scotland who founded Hamiltonsbawn in 1619), Co. Armagh, by Isabella Maxwell, his wife, was born at Knock on 26 March 1729. He was descended from Hugh Hamilton, who settled in Ireland in the time of James I, and was one of the Hamiltons of Evandale, of whom Sir James Hamilton of Finnart (d. 1540) [q.v.] was an ancestor. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, 17 Nov. 1742, under the tutorship of Rev. Thomas McDonnell, and graduated B.A. 1747, M.A. 1750, B.D. 1759, and D.D. 1762. In 1751he was elected a fellow, having been unsuccessful, though his answering was very highly commended, at the examination in the preceding year. In 1759 he was appointed Erasmus Smith’s professor of natural philosophy in the university of Dublin; he was elected about the same time a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Royal Irish Society. He resigned his fellowship in 1764, and was presented by his college to the rectory of Kilmacrenan in the diocese of Raphoe; in 1767 he resigned his preferment and was collated to the vicarage of St. Anne’s, Dublin, which benefice he exchanged in 1768 for the deanery of Armagh, by patent dated the 23rd of that month (Lib. Mun. Hib.) On 20 Jan. 1796 he was promoted to the bishopric of Clonfert of Kilmacduagh; and by patent dated 24 Jan. 1799 he was translated to Ossory. He died at Kilkenny 1 Dec. 1805, and was buried in his cathedral of St. Canice in that city, where there is a monument inscribed to his memory.

"In 1772, he married Isabella, eldest daughter of Hans Widman Wood of Rossmead, Co. Westmeath, and of Frances, twin sister of Edward, earl of Kingston, and by her had two daughters and five sons; Alexander (d. 1552), a barrister, Hans, Henry, George (1785-1830) [q.v.], and Hugh.

"Hamilton was author of several learned treatises, including: 1. De Sectionibus Conicis Tractacus Geometricus, London, 1758. 2. Philosophical Essays on Vapours, &c., London, 1767. 3. An Essay on the Existence and Attributes of a Supreme Being, Dublin, 1784. 4. Four Introductory Lectures on Natural Philosophy. His principal works were collected and republished, with a memoir and portrait, by his eldest son, Alexander Hamilton, in two 8vo vols., London,1809. [Burke’s Landed Gentry, 3rd edit., p. 513; "Gent. Mag.," 1805, lxxv. pt. ii., 1776; Dublin University Calendars; Todd’s Cat. of Dublin Graduates, p. 247; Cotton’s Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae, ii. 290, iii. 34, iv. 173; Mant’s Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. 742; Stuart’s Hist. of Armagh, p. 528.] B.H.B."

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, pp. xix-xxii, continues:

"(Hugh Hamilton’s) great-great-grandson (Thomas’s grandfather) was Hugh Hamilton (1729-1805), successively a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Dean of Armagh, Bishop of Clonfert, and finally, Bishop of Ossory. In 1772, Hugh married Isabella, eldest daughter of Hans Widman Wood. Their fifth son, also named Hugh (1790-1865) was likewise educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1813,and was Rector of Inishmacsaint, Co. Fermanagh. He married Elizabeth, daughter of the Right Hon. John Staples, and their second son, Thomas, was the grandfather of C. S. Lewis.

"Thomas Robert Hamilton, who was born on 28 June 1826, took a first in Theology at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1848, and was made deacon in the same year. He was much afflicted with his throat and in 1850 set out with his family on a grand tour of Europe. Two years later he took another trip for his health, this time to India. He was ordained priest in 1853. The following year, Thomas was appointed chaplain in the Royal Navy and served with the Baltic squadron of the fleet throughout the Crimean War. In 1859 he married Mary Warren (1826-1916), the daughter of Sir John Borlasse Warren (1800-1863), by whom he had four children: Lilian (1860-1934), Florence Augusta (1862-1908), Hugh (1864-1900) and Augustus (1866-1945). From 1870 until 1874, Thomas was chaplain of Holy Trinity Church, Rome, after which he returned to Ireland and took up the incumbency of St. Mark, Dundela.

"Through the Warrens the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey,' wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy. This was the very 'William of Warene' of Kipling’s poem 'The Land'–and it seems a pleasant coincidence that the author of Puck of Pook’s Hill owned and wrote his series of tales about the land which had once belonged to an ancestor of the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

"Hamilton was an impressive and eloquent preacher, and during many of his sermons was often seen to be shedding tears in the pulpit ('one of his weepy ones today,' the Lewises would say). His religion was, unfortunately, marred by his intense bigotry towards Catholics, whom he considered the Devil’s own children. He was also especially sensitive to swearing and in his naval journals he often recorded how he took a sailor aside to whisper some admonition in his ear. Once when returning to his ship in the captain’s gig, in a dangerous sea, he heard the officer in charge rebuke one of the crew with an oath...

"Hamilton’s wife, Mary Warren, was infinitely his superior in energy and intelligence. This clever and aristocratic woman was a typical daughter of a Southern Irish seigneur of the mid-nineteenth century, and the Rectory at Dundela reflected her tastes...

"Despite this unusual home life, Hamilton tried to ensure that his children received a good education. He was particularly successful with his second daughter, Florence (or 'FLORA'). She was born in Queenstown, Co. Cork, on 18 May 1862, and was old enough to have benetitted for the years the family spent in Rome. On their move to Belfast, she attended "Ladies Classes" at the Methodist College. At the same time she went to Queen's University (then the Royal University of Ireland), where she performed brilliantly. While Albert was preparing for the Bar, FLORA was reading Mathematics. In 1880, the eighteen-year-old FLORA took her first degree at Queen’s. In another examination the following year, she passed the First Class Honours in Geometry and Algebra. She remained at Queen’s University until she was 23 when, in 1885, she passed the second university examination and obtained First Class Honours in Logic and Second Class Honours in Mathematics.

"Albert had long been a favourite of Thomas and Mary Hamilton–especially of the latter, who liked discussing politics with him. He, however, was far more interested in FLORA than in her parents, and in 1886 he made his feelings known to her. FLORA made it at once clear that she could never have 'anything but friendship to give in exchange' and urged him to stop writing to her. Though they lived only a mile apart, the correspondence continued. In 1889, FLORA began writing magazine articles and, because of his superior knowledge of English literature, she found in Albert an able and flattering critic. Hamilton, with considerable astuteness, realized that Albert’s attachment to his daughter could be made to serve his own purpose. He was a man much addicted to short jaunts or holidays and in the unfortunate Albert he found not only a courier but, on many occasions, a disbursing officer. 'I’m a mere parcel,' he would say genially, leaving Albert to make all the arrangements. Never had a Jacob served more arduously for his Rachel than did Albert, and he was at last rewarded for his patience. In 1893, FLORA agreed to marry him, and in her cool-headed and matter-of-fact way, she wrote: 'I wonder do I love you? I am not quite sure. I know that at least I am very fond of you, and that I should never think of loving anyone else.'

"After a year’s engagement, during which many love letters were exchanged, Albert and FLORA were married. The wedding was celebrated on 29 August 1894 at St. Mark’s Church, Dundela. The reception was held immediately afterwards in the Royal Avenue Hotel, and Albert’s somewhat disappointed father-in-law was heard to say, 'Now that he’s got what he wanted, there’ll be no more jaunts.'

"Albert and FLORA went to North Wales for their honeymoon, after which they returned to Belfast and settled at Dundla Villas, one of a pair of semi-detached houses within a mile of Albert’s old home. It is in this house that their first son, Warren Hamilton, was born on 16 June 1895, and their second son, Clive Staples, on 29 November 1898...."

Ancestry.com supplies a credible and thoroughgoing genealogy that traces the ancestral line of Admiral Sir John Borlase WARREN (b. June 22, 1803, Stapleford Hall, Nottinghamshire, England; d. 1866) back 20 generations to William (Earl of Surry) De WARRENE (b.a. 1081, Surry, Sussex, England). Many dates of birth and marriage, as well as the names of spouses, are supplied. The reader may study the WARREN genealogy on the Ancestry.com website at a public library. Ostensibly this information came from a published WARREN genealogy. We rest our case on the authority of family tradition, particularly the reference heretofore, where in C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, Walter HOOPER stated:

"Through the Warrens the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey," wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy. This was the very "William of Warene" of Kipling’s poem "The Land...."

C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, FULLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION, p. 1, leads next with Chapter I, "EARLY DAYS," and continues in a brilliant and comprehensive presentation of the life of C. S. LEWIS.

Clive Staples (Jack) LEWIS was b. November 29, 1898, Belfast, Antrim, Ireland, in "one of a pair of semi-detached houses called Dundela Villas, in an inner suburb of Belfast" (C. S. LEWIS: A COMPANION & GUIDE, p. 3). He was the second son of solicitor Albert James LEWIS (1863-1929) and Florence (FLORA) Augusta HAMILTON (1862-1908). His brother, Warren Hamilton LEWIS, was three years of age, having been b. June 16, 1895.

The baptismal registry of St. Marks, in the Parish of Dundela, in the Diocese of Down, Belfast, lists the baptism of Clive Staples LEWIS–entered into the registry in manuscript on printed form. The baptismal record is portrayed on the Internet: http://dundela.down.anglican.org/lewis.html

Dated January 29, 1899, the record states that LEWIS was b. "Nov. 29, 1898," his parents "Albert James and Florence Augusta, Dundela Strand Lower," and that his father was a "Solicitor." C. S. LEWIS actually was born in number 47 Dundela Avenue, Dundela Villas. Clive Staples LEWIS was baptized by his grandfather, the Rev. Thomas HAMILTON, Rector of St. Marks, who signed the registry: "By Whom This Ceremony Was Performed – Thos. Hamilton." (In 1935, Jack and Warnie presented a window to the church in memory of their father and mother. Three Saints are shown: two Gospel writers, St. Mark and St. Luke, on either side of St. James).

We are hampered from tracing in Irish census records the HAMILTON line earlier (only 1901 and 1911 census returns for Ireland are extant; see ADDENDUM).

SURPRISED BY JOY, The Shape of my Early Life, by C. S. Lewis, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1955, is his autobiography, on p. 11 of which LEWIS states:

"I was born in the winter of 1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor and of a clergyman’s daughter. My parents had only two children, both sons, and I was the younger by about three years. Two very different strains had gone to our making. My father belonged to the first generation of his family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been a Welsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaine and Lewis, 'Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders.' My mother was a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, and the like behind her; on my mother’s side, through the Warrens, the blood went back to a Norman Knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. The two families from which I spring were as different in temperament as in origin. My father’s people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree–went straight for it as experienced travelers go for the best seat in a train. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother’s cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and down of my father’s emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was old enough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous...."

Genealogist Tim VINCENT, from Salt Lake City, supplied a copy of the CENSUS OF IRELAND 1901 (FHL 829,977). The LEWIS family lived in Dundela Villas, at Dundela Strand Lower, namely, No. 47 Dundela Avenue. The address is not noted on the page.

The CENSUS OF IRELAND 1901, "FORM A, No. on Form B., ‘21,’ RETURN of the MEMBERS of this FAMILY and their VISITORS, BOARDERS, SERVANTS, &c., who slept or abode in this House on the night of SUNDAY, the 31st of MARCH, 1901," enumerates the family of Albert James LEWIS as follows:

NAME - RELATIONSHIP - RELIGION - EDUCATION - AGE - SEX - RANK, OCCUPATION - MARRIAGE - WHERE BORN

Albert James Lewis, Head, Church of Ireland, Read & Write, 37, M, Solicitor, Married, City of Cork

Florence Augusta Lewis, Wife, Church of Ireland, Read & Write, 38, F, Married, County of Cork

Warren Hamilton Lewis, Son, Church of Ireland, Read, 5, M, Scholar, City of Belfast

Clive Staples Lewis, Son, Church of Ireland, Cannot Read, 2,M, City of Belfast

Martha Barber, Servant, Presbyterian, Read & Write, 28, F, House, Domestic Servant, Not Married, County Monaghan

Sarah Ann Conlon, Servant, Roman Catholic, Read & Write, 22, F, Cook, Domestic Servant, Not Married, County Down

Warren would be six years of age on June 16, and Clive three, on November 29. Clive Staples LEWIS was less than fond of the two Christian names given him from his mother’s side of the family. It was just short of the age of four that his dog, Jacksie, was killed by a passing car that he announced that he was "Jacksie," later abbreviated to "Jack." It is the latter sobriquet by which he was known for the rest of his life.

As earlier noticed, Richard LEWIS, Jack’s grandfather, resided in Ty Isa (Welsh for "the house alone"), on Parkgate Avenue, Belfast, from 1870 until the death of his wife, Martha, in 1903. (Following her death, Richard parceled out his time by staying with each of his sons until finally settling at Little Lea, in 1907. His son, Albert James LEWIS, had built Leeborough House, or Little Lea, in 1905. The house is situated in Strandtown, on Circular Road, on the outskirts of Belfast).

Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory lists the following:

"Circular Road. Strandtown. Off Holywood Road. Rt. hand side. New house in course of erection for A. J. Lewis, Solicitor."

C. S. LEWIS: A COMPANION & GUIDE, p. 4, gives the following account:

"Albert and FLORA had one other child, Warren Hamilton (for ‘Warnie’), who was born in 1895. The combination of good Christian parents and a loving elder brother ensured Clive a very happy childhood. The year 1905 was an eventful year for the family. In April, the family moved into a large house, ‘Little Lea,’ on the outskirts of Belfast, which Albert Lewis had specially built for them."

Jack LEWIS was very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. Jack "knew both Greek and Latin by the age of six." By ten years old he had read Milton’s Paradise Lost.

His mother, FLORA, died of abdominal cancer, August 23, 1908, on her husband’s birthday. Jack was nine years old. Clive and Warnie, from that time, were thereafter reared by their father.

Richard LEWIS, grandfather of Jack, d. 1908.

Anne Sargent HAMILTON (1866-1930) was married to Gussie (Augustus Warren HAMILTON), the brother of LEWIS’s mother, FLORA LEWIS. Both Jack and Warren were close to their Aunt Annie, particularly following the death of their own mother.

Although it is agreed that as a child, he was happy and content with life, Jack experienced a tragedy early that served to mold his life. After the long illness and death of his mother, FLORA, his life was markedly disheveled. A month following her death, Jack was sent to Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. The environment there was hard, but that difficulty was assuaged with the companionship of his older brother, Warnie.

In 1910, he enrolled at Campbell College, Belfast. Apparently having respiratory difficulties, in 1911, when thirteen years old, Jack was sent to Cherbourg College, Malvern, England, a famous health resort–particularly for people with lung problems. It was in 1911 that Jack abandoned his childhood faith in God, becoming an atheist.

The 1911 Census of Ireland lists the household of Albert James LEWIS, where he then lived in Leeborough House, or Little Lea. The house is situated in Strandtown on Circular Road, on the outskirts of Belfast. Clive, age 13, and Warnie, age 16, were away at school. Therefore, neither Jack nor Warnie would be enumerated in the household of Albert James LEWIS.

Genealogist Tim VINCENT found the 1911 Census on microfilm (ref.: FHL 2,093,593). The enumeration is as follows:

1911 Census of Ireland, 8 Circular Street, Victoria Ward, East Belfast:

Name - Relationship - Age - Church - Occupation - County Where Born

Lewis, Albert James, Widower, 47, Church of Ireland, Solicitor, Cork

Lynas, Marjorie, Servant, 50, Church of Ireland, Cook, Antrim

Atchinson, Margaret, Servant, 22, Church of Ireland, Housemaid, Antrim

The actual genealogy of C. S. LEWIS ends at this juncture. With the millions of web sites on the Internet for Clive Staples LEWIS/C. S. LEWIS, as well as the hundreds of books about his life and works, biographical details are readily and easily accessible.

C. S. LEWIS: A COMPANION & GUIDE, pp. 121-126, provides an exhaustive "Chronology of C. S. Lewis’s Life." Herewith follows only a brief, chronological overview of his life. And more. Begging the indulgence of the reader, this writer has taken poetic license in recording sundry favorite quotations from some of the works of C. S. LEWIS, which are interspersed herein, to emphasize and illustrate the changed life that emerged in 1931 on his Christian conversion.

On September 18, 1913, LEWIS began his first term at Malvern College.

In 1914, C. S. LEWIS began correspondence with Arthur GREEVES (which correspondence continued until LEWIS’s death). And, he began study under William T. KIRKPATRICK in Great Bookham, Surrey (until 1917). And, in 1914, Jack was confirmed at St. Mark’s, Dundela, Belfast.

From 1914 to 1917, in Great Bookham, Surrey, LEWIS was given private tutelage, in preparation for Oxford, by his father’s former college headmaster, W. T. KIRKPATRICK (also spoken of as the "Great Knock"). Jack early encountered the atheistic beliefs of KIRKPATRICK, and experienced extraordinary instruction. These three years of bantering in logic molded his mind. LEWIS "found that he could think in Greek." This resulting from his having translated the Greek and Latin classics under KIRKPATRICK’s charge, the latter of whom told Jack’s father (September 16, 1915): "He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met," and (on April 7, 1916): "He has read more classics than any boy I ever had-or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of…."

C. S. LEWIS: A BIOGRAPHY, 1974, p. 44, states:

"At the end of February 1916...Lewis made one of the literary discoveries which, he maintained, left the deepest and most enduring impression on both his literary and his spiritual life. 'I have had a great literary experience this week,' he wrote to Arthur Greeves. 'I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle–our very own set: never since I first read The Well at the World’s End have I enjoyed a book so much–and indeed I think my new ‘find’ is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s ‘Faerie Romance,’ Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy on our station bookstall last Saturday.

"Thirty years later, in the introduction to a selection from his works, Lewis wrote of George MacDonald, 'I have never concealed the fact that I regard him as my master; indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.'"

In 1916, C. S. LEWIS (1898-1963) was accepted at University College (founded 1249), the oldest college at Oxford--30 colleges make up the University of Oxford. It was then that he began to compose Dymer (which would become his second publication).

On October 12, 1916, LEWIS wrote in a letter to Arthur GREEVES: "I think that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, i.e., all mythologies…are merely man’s own invention-Christ as much as Loki. In every age the educated and thinking [people] have stood outside [religion]."

From April to September, 1917, Jack was a student at Oxford. His studies were interrupted when he enrolled in the army. Billeted in Keble College, soon he was sent to northern France, arriving there on his 18th birthday.

On April 15, 1918, LEWIS was wounded in Battle of Arras, and sent home. The armistice was signed on November 11.

LEWIS returned to Oxford, which campus now was becoming a very liberal environment. Sigmund FREUD was very popular on the intellectual scene, and according to FREUD, religion was a neurosis. This ambiance–coupled with LEWIS’s earlier having abandoned his Christian beliefs and embraced atheism–swept him along in the steam of anti-Christian culture.

In 1919, Lewis published his first book, Spirits in Bondage, under the pseudonym of Clive HAMILTON. In the autumn, he met Owen BARFIELD.

In 1920, Jack took a First in Classical Honour Moderations, and in 1922, a First in Literae Humaniores.

In 1923, he took a First in English Language and Literature.

In May 1925, he was elected Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he served as tutor in English Language and Literature

In 1926, he met J. R. R. TOLKIEN; C. S. LEWIS published Dymer, under the pseudonym of Clive HAMILTON. In this work, C. S. LEWIS attacked Christianity, which he regarded as a tempting illusion in one's life that must be rejected, even destroyed (Later he would write, "Christianity is a true myth"). LEWIS included Christianity collectively as an illusion, along with all forms of supernaturalism, including spiritism.

Albert James LEWIS had been ill throughout early 1929. Jack received a wire on Tuesday, September 24, 1929, that his father was near death. While Warren was serving in the Army in Shanghai, Jack was on the train hurrying to be with his father. During the afternoon, before Jack arrived, Albert James LEWIS had finally succumbed to that dreaded disease, cancer, the malignancy from which his mother earlier had died (and which would take the life of his wife, Joy, in 1960).

(LEWIS later would write of his quest for the truth: "My own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ [atheism] to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity." On December 21, 1929, after reading John BUNYAN’s Grace Abounding, wrote: "I…am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs [that] I feel I cannot dismiss… There must be something in it; only what?").

C. S. LEWIS became a theist in 1929. In C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, p. 103, HOOPER quotes from LEWIS’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy as follows:

"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. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own two feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."

The foregoing experience actually followed an extended debate in his room with his good friends J.R.R. TOLKIEN and Hugo TYSON that had lasted until about 4:00 a.m. This conversion was to theism, not to Christianity. Of this station in his spiritual journey, later LEWIS would write, "I knew nothing of the Incarnation." It is not until summer of 1930 that the letters to Arthur GREEVES show that earlier he had given little thought to the possibility of there being an after-life (C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, p. 109).

Ostensibly his views were not galvanized. Witness the letter of January 9, 1930 to Arthur GREEVES, viz.: "In spite of all my recent changes of view, I am…inclined to think that you can only get what you call ‘Christ’ out of the Gospels by…slurring over a great deal." And in another letter to GREEVES, little more than two weeks later, January 30, 1930, LEWIS "attribute[d] everything to the grace of God…" Then on March 21, 1930, in a letter to A. K. Hamilton JENKIN, Jack stated: "...is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end."

1930 brought the first meeting of the Inklings, and in the same year, he took up residence in "The Kilns" (where he would live until his death in 1963). It was this year that LEWIS resumed the taking of communion in his local Anglican church in Headington.

In 1931, the gravity of George MacDONALD's Phantastes had its ultimate effect. Jack returned to his belief in Christianity. In the introduction to George MacDonald – An Anthology, LEWIS writes:

"...In making this collection I am discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regard George Macdonald as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him...it must be more than thirty years ago that I bought-almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions-the Everyman edition of Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier...."

John Ronald Reuel TOLKIEN was one of LEWIS's closest friends. J. R. R. TOLKIEN had expressed his views on imagination, which to LEWIS were a persuasion of the truth of Christianity.

In 1916, as noticed heretofore, LEWIS had happened upon a copy of MacDONALD's Phantastes (1858), the reading of which he described as "a baptism of his imagination." The seed had been planted. MacDONALD perceived that all imaginative meaning originated with God, the Christian Creator, and this became the bedrock of the thinking and imagining of C. S. LEWIS. In fact, Jack LEWIS attributed his salvation to the works of George MacDONALD (1824-1905), whom he considered to be his master.

Apparently Phantastes, Book of Strife In The Form of A Diary of an Old Soul, and Unspoken Sermons were the favorite MacDONALD works of C. S. LEWIS.

No attempt will be made by this writer to summarize the spiritual path that LEWIS took in the period of time immediately preceding his conversion to Christianity. The reader is referred to Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, pp. 201ff, for the full, brilliant account. LEWIS's conversion to Christianity occurred in September 1931, of which rebirth he wrote the following (Surprised by Joy, p. 237):

"I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. 'Emotional' is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake."

Brothers and Friends, An Intimate Portrait of C. S. Lewis, The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982, p. 87, states in a footnote Warren's view of the incident, thus:

"On Monday 28th September, we had a family outing to Whipsnade Zoo. Jack making the journey in my sidecar; which at first sight may seem to be a singularly pointless bit of information. But in fact it records the most important day in Jack’s life. It was during that trip that he made his decision to rejoin the Church."

Jack wrote to Arthur Greeves on October 1, 1931, as follows: "I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ-in Christianity." From the moment of his conversion, he was a thoroughgoing supernaturalist.

August 15 to 29, 1932, LEWIS was a house-guest of his dear friend, Arthur GREEVES. C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, p. 128, states:

"After so many attempts to tell the story of his conversion, it sounds incredible to say that Lewis wrote his first full-length prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, during his fortnight’s holiday in Ireland. Nevertheless, we have it in his own words that he did. On 25 March 1933, he told Arthur GREEVES that he wished to dedicate the book to him because, as he said, 'It is yours by every right – written in your house, read to you as it was written.'"

1933 brought the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress. This, his third book and his first theological work, tells of his Spiritual journey to Christianity (a later account of which was his autobiography, Surprised by Joy).

In 1936, he met Charles WILLIAMS. And, he published The Allegory of Love.

In 1937, C. S. LEWIS received the Gollancz Memorial prize for great literature (for the next 15 years, he was a prolific writer, publishing about 25 more hard-bound books).

In 1938, he published Out of the Silent Planet.

In 1940, the Inklings began to meet weekly. And, in 1940, The Problem of Pain was published.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. LEWIS states:

"He whispers in our pleasures,

speaks in our conscience,

and shouts in our pains;

It is His megaphone

to rouse a dead world."

Screwtape Letters followed in 1942.

In 1946, LEWIS published The Great Divorce. As earlier noticed, it was the Christian fantasy of George MacDONALD, Phantastes, that first stirred the conviction of C. S. LEWIS, thus initiating his journey to Christian conversion. The Great Divorce reaffirms the connection of the Christian beliefs of C. S. Lewis with the views held by MacDONALD. In The Great Divorce, the quasi-autobiographical character meets George MacDONALD, the latter of whom is his guide to the regions of Heaven. The following dialogue is found, Chapter IX, pp. 60-61:

"'Where are ye going?' said a voice with a strong Scotch accent. I stopped and looked...'I–I don’t quite know,' said I.

'Ye can sit and talk to me, then,' he said, making room for me on the stone. 'I don’t know you, Sir,' said I, taking my seat beside him. 'My name is George,' he answered. 'George Macdonald.'

'Oh!' I cried. 'Then you can tell me! You at least will not deceive me.' Then, supposing that these expressions of confidence needed some explanation, I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the new life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness...."

Miracles followed in 1947.

In 1950, LEWIS published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (this, the first of the canonized Narnia Series, was released as a movie in December 2005).

In 1952, Helen Joy (DAVIDMAN) GRESHAM--who had earlier communicatedwith LEWIS--traveled to England to meet LEWIS, for he had made an appointment with her expressly for that purpose (later, she would move with her two sons to England).

In 1952, Mere Christianity was published in London. Had LEWIS written none other than this work and Screwtape Letters, he would have emerged as a famous author. Mere Christianity is perhaps the most often quoted of LEWIS’s works, and from one of the most often quoted statements, from the chapter, "The Shocking Alternative," comes the essential conclusion, p. 42, thus:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse. 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Some of the other Christian concepts eloquently penned by C. S. LEWIS–views that both led him to such a strong faith and illustrate his extraordinary knowledge of Scripture–were in turn imparted to his readers to their spiritual benefit, and are provided as follows:

"The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." (Screwtape Letters)

"The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe...[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centeredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that." (Mere Christianity)

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." (Mere Christianity)

"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it." (The Problem of Pain)

"God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise, we should have missed the great lesson that it is by His will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance. We should also have missed the all important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin." (Letters of C.S. Lewis, "23 February 1947")

"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." ("Is Theology Poetry?")

"Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable." (Mere Christianity)

"The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success." (The Problem of Pain)

"Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat." (Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain)

"The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience." (The World's Last Night)

"In God you come up against something which is in every way immeasurably superior to yourself...As long as you are proud you cannot know God." (Mere Christianity)

"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all." (Mere Christianity)

"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."

"What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands." (Mere Christianity)

"Thank you for your letter of July 25th. I will certainly put you in my prayers. I can well believe that you were divinely supported at the time of your terrible calamity. People often are. It is afterwards, when the new and bleaker life is beginning to be a routine, that one often feels one has been left rather unaided. I am sure one is not really so. God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least. Loneliness, I am pretty sure, is one of the ways by which we can grow spiritually. Until we are lonely we may easily think we have got farther than we really have in Christian Love: our (natural and innocent, but merely rational, not heavenly) pleasure in being loved – in being, as you say, an object of interest to someone – can be mistaken for progress in love itself, the outgoing, active love which is concerned with giving, not receiving. It is this latter which is the beginning of sanctity. But of course you know all this: alas, so much easier to know in theory than to submit to day by day in practice! Be very regular in your prayer and communion; and don’t value special 'guidances' any more than what comes thro’ ordinary Christian teaching, conscience, and prudence.

"I am shocked to hear that your friends think of following me. I wanted them to follow Christ. But they’ll get over this confusion soon, I think." (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III: original letter to Mary Margaret McCaslin, Aug. 2, 1954, in the possession of Silas Dobbs McCaslin).

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." (Mere Christianity)

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'" (The Great Divorce)

"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask–half our great theological and metaphysical problems–are like that. And now that I come to think of it, there's no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them." (A Grief Observed)

"All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt." (The Problem of Pain)

"Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed." (The Case for Christianity)

"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians ever imagine that they are guilty themselves....The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind...As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you." (Mere Christianity)

"[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him." (The Problem of Pain)

"I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else." (The Problem of Pain)

"In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with 'Thus saith the Lord.' It is...not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite–it excludes or repels–the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force...It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians." (They Asked for a Paper)

"All that we call human history–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery–[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." (Mere Christianity)

Terry Lee JOHNSON, Senior Minister, Historic Independent Presbyterian Church, Savannah, Georgia (est. 1755), in the "IPC Messenger," Vol. 5, No. 41, October 1, 2006, in the editorial, "The Bread of LIfe," stated:

"Deep down in our hearts we all know that we were made for eternity. Spiritual emptiness, longing, and discontent characterize our experience. Furthermore, nothing in this world has the capacity to fill the void. We yearn for significance, meaning, purpose, peace, rest, and joy. But when sought among worldly creatures and finite comforts, our yearnings prove illusive. C. S. Lewis describes the logical conclusion of our futile search:

"'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' (Mere Christianity, p. 136).

"Indeed, we were made for 'another world,' the world of the infinite, of the Eternal one...Only in knowing God can those made in the image of God find satisfaction and fulfillment...

"We may attempt to satisfy our spiritual hunger with things (the materialist's alternative), or with entertainment (the couch potato's alternative), or with sensual pleasure (the hedonist's alternative), or with power, prestige, position, fame, drugs, alcohol, or whatever other counterfeit that the world might devise. Yet none of them works. None of them satisfies. The world's pleasures are 'passing,' fleeting (Hebrews 11:25). The world's poor substitutes amount to 'vanity' and 'striving after the wind' (Ecclesiastes 2:11). Nothing finite, nothing in this world can ever satisfy us because God made us for Himself. God made us in His image and made us to know Him. The void in our souls, to paraphrase Pascal, is 'God-shaped.' Only in knowing Him do we find fullment, satisfaction, happiness, peace, and joy. 'Thou has made us for Thyself,' said the great Augustine, 'and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee, o' God....'

"Grasp this, and we have the proper foundation for life. No longer will we look to the finite for that which can only be fulfilled by the Infinite, to the temporal for that which can only be fulfilled by the Eternal, to the human for that which can only be fulfilled by the Divine, or to the material for that which can only be fulfilled by the Spiritual...if one does not find fulfillment and satisfaction in Christ, one will find it nowhere. If one is not content in all of one’s circumstances, then one will not be content in any circumstance."

In Mere Christianity, in the chapter entitled "Obstinate Toy Soldiers," LEWIS expressed his view of ancestry in this way:

"Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other."

Among our favorite analogies of C. S. LEWIS, from Mere Christianity, is the following:

"When I was a child, I often had a toothache. I knew that if I went to find my mother, she would give me something to take away the pain, and I should be able to sleep. But I only went to see her when the pain was really very bad. And this is why I was sure she would give me an aspirin, but I also knew that she would take me to the dentist in the morning. In fact, I couldn’t get what I wanted from her without getting something else that I did not want. Immediate relief was not available unless I agreed to having my teeth definitely fixed. I knew the dentist well, and I knew that he would take a look at the other teeth that had not yet begun to hurt. If you give an inch to these people, they will take a mile. If you don’t mind, I would like to say that our Lord is like the dentist. Quantities of people go to Him to be cured of some secret vice that they are ashamed of and that obviously spoils their daily life. Our Lord will cure them, but He will not stop there. Perhaps that is all you require of Him; but once you have called on Him for help, He will give you the full treatment."

1953 brought Walter HOOPER into an interesting encounter, thus: "(LEWIS’s) acceptance by the most extreme fundamentalists happened without his knowing it. Shortly after the war the hottest of all hot-gospelers from the ‘Bible Belt’ of South Carolina, Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., visited Lewis in Oxford...Walter Hooper was introduced to Dr. Jones in 1953...and asked the ultra-conservative what he thought of C. S. Lewis. ‘That man,’ said Dr. Jones fiercely, ‘smokes a pipe, and that man drinks liquor–but I do believe he is a Christian!'" (C. S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHY, p. 229).

In June 1954, while still at Oxford, he accepted the newly formed Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge University, assuming his duties at Magdalene College in January 1955. De Descriptione Temporum (1954) was LEWIS's inaugural lecture as Professor at Cambridge.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) is the autobiography of LEWIS up to his conversion to Christianity at the age of 31. "Joy" is a term used by LEWIS to describe a particular tone of feeling that he discovered in early childhood. Joy was an inconsolable longing that contradicted the atheism and materialism that his intellect earlier had embraced. First in theism and then in Christianity, both his intellect and his imagination were fulfilled.

On April 23, 1956, Jack and Joy were married in a civil ceremony at the Oxford Registry Office--essentially "a paper wedding." The marriage was altruistic–to gain citizenship for Joy, for her visa was about to be rescinded. They were friends, but lived separately.

A Christian marriage service was performed in 1957 in Wingfield-Morris Hospital, Oxford. This second ceremony was performed at her death bed–she had cancer. Clive earlier had arranged for Rev. Peter BIDE to come to minister to Joy, and while there, LEWIS told her that he was in love with her, and wanted to marry her. She accepted the proposal, and Rev. BIDE graciously officiated in the Christian ceremony.

Her cancer miraculously went into remission, and her health improved. Little more than three years later, in 1960, the cancer recurred, and she died on July 13, 1960.

While grieving the loss of Joy, LEWIS held on to his belief, as he continued to reply to those who corresponded with him. It is presumed that LEWIS’s frustration is clearly seen in a letter written to Jonathan GOLDBERG six weeks after Joy’s death. "Bewilderment" is a side of LEWIS, at this station in his life, that is expressed in this way:

The Kilns

Headington Quarry

Oxford

31 Aug. 1960

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

There doesn’t seem to be much use going on. You say "I expect you agree, man created God." But every book I have written either states or implies the opposite belief that God created man. I can very well understand that you don’t believe that I believe. But you seem to be denying that I believe what I say I believe. If this means you think me a liar, then – waiving the insult (I presume you don’t want to fight a duel!) – further correspondence wd really be unprofitable. If it doesn’t mean that then I can find no meaning in it all. I can discuss a disagreement. But what can I say to a man who, while obviously very eager to disagree with me, either will not admit or cannot understand that I disagree with him?

No offence, but total bewilderment!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

In 1961, Jack published A Grief Observed, under the pseudonym of N. W. CLERK. On page 112, In Pursuit of C. S. Lewis, Dr. Ed BROWN states the following:

"A book that has troubled some readers is Lewis’s poignant expression of the myriad feelings that overwhelmed him in the weeks following the death of his beloved Joy. Compiled from these 'MS books'–as he refers to them at the beginning of the final chapter–A Grief Observed traces Lewis’s emotional upheaval from the days immediately following her death to the time weeks later when he at last records a sense of closure...

"His grief was profound, and while he managed to write three more books in the next three years, it seems that the spark which ignited the enormous literary output of prior years had faded to a faint glow."

The Last Will and Testament of C. S. LEWIS, dated "Second November, 1961," can be found with the following link:

http://www.discovery.org/cslewis/articles/writingspblcdmn/will.php

In the summer of 1962, he wrote The Discarded Image (which was published in 1964).

Pursuant to correspondence between Walter HOOPER and C. S. LEWIS, HOOPER was invited to come to England for a visit. The two of them met on June 7, 1963, and HOOPER attended his first meeting of the Inklings a few days later. Jack’s health began failing in July 1963. Jack LEWIS accepted Walter HOOPER’s offer of secretarial assistance. LEWIS soon was admitted to a nursing home, where he suffered a heart attack. A coma followed, but he recovered, and was allowed to return to the Kilns. In August, he dictated to Walter HOOPER his letter of resignation from his Chair and Fellowship at Cambridge.

His death occurred at "The Kilns," Oxford, at 5:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, the week before his 65th birthday. Warnie was with him, and had just left the room after bringing him tea, when he heard a noise from the room. He rushed in to find his fallen brother.

C. S. LEWIS's death was the same day and one hour earlier than the assassination of President John Fitzgerald KENNEDY. There was but token mention of LEWIS’ death in the media, but his positive impact on twentieth century mankind is regarded to be far more profound than that of President KENNEDY. LEWIS is buried at Trinity Church (Warren Hamilton LEWIS--a noted British Major, a member of the Inklings, and author of seven books on seventeenth-century France, and sadly, an alcoholic--d. April 9, 1973).

In his will, C. S. LEWIS made a bequest of a portrait of his grandfather, Richard LEWIS. Clause 4 of the will of C. S. LEWIS states:

"I GIVE AND BEQUEATH my half share in the Portrait of Richard Lewis which at the date hereof is hung in my said rooms at Magdalene College to my said brother for life and after his death to my cousin Mrs. I.W. Purvis whose address at the date hereof is C/o W.K. Bellinger, West Gardens, Boars Hill, Oxford with the request (but not so as to create any enforceable trust) that she will in due course pass on the said Portrait to such descendant of the late Richard Lewis of Ty Isa, Lower Strandtown, Belfast, as she shall deem most likely to value it."

Much has been published since the 1963 death of Clive Staples LEWIS. He is widely accepted as both a scholar and a genius, and acclaimed to be among the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. Extraordinarily original and versatile, he is regarded by both Christian and lay readers as the most effective and influential Christian writer of his time. The eminent literary critic, William EMPSON, once stated that LEWIS was "the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read."

LEWIS claimed that he was not a theologian. Clyde KILBY wrote: "It is not correct to say that Lewis has a ‘theology,’ if by that term is meant a systematic, all-embracing complex like that of John Calvin or Karl Barth." However, Elizabeth ELLIOT stated in an interview for Discipleship Journal, in 1982, "but he was (a theologian). He covered the whole field of theology in popular, understandable language."

An extraordinarily prolific writer, LEWIS’s published works are on the various subjects of Christian apologetics, poetry, children’s literature, fantasy, science fiction, literary criticism, and novels. He personally wrote over 100 works in his lifetime, including 42 hard-bound books, books in "wraps," editorials for periodicals, magazine articles, essays, and sermons. Moreover, there are books for which LEWIS contributed a portion or wrote a preface or forward, &c.; a number of books that constitute the unpublished works of LEWIS, collected and published posthumously; many books written posthumously about LEWIS–i.e., books on his fiction; on his religion and religious writing. Among the several biographies and encyclopedic volumes published about C. S. LEWIS, the most comprehensive book of his life and work is regarded to be C. S. LEWIS: Companion and Guide, by Walter Hooper (1996). Many of the thousands of letters that he wrote have been published in three volumes: The Collected Letters of C. S. LEWIS, Vols. I-III, by Walter Hooper.

John BOUDREAU, a journalist for Knight Ridder News Service, characterized C. S. LEWIS by telling his readers that Lewis was "one of the most quoted writers in England and America" and "one of the few writers of his generation who has never been out of print."

Over 100 million copies of the works of C. S. LEWIS have been published.

We bring this manuscript to a close with a few more quotations from C. S. LEWIS to ponder:

"What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ–can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father. That present which is Himself and therefore us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning. (Mere Christianity)

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be." (Letters of C. S. Lewis,[29 Apr. 1959])

"May God's grace give you the necessary humility. Try not to think–much less speak–of *their* sins. One's own are a much more profitable theme! And if on consideration, one can find no faults on one's own side, then cry for mercy: for this *must* be a most dangerous delusion." (Letters to an American Lady [9 Jan. 1961])

"I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity."

"Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it." (The Case for Christianity)

"It is in the process of being worshiped that God communicates His presence to men." (Reflections on the Psalms)

"Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless." (The Problem of Pain)

"Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it." (The World's Last Night)

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God." (Letters to Malcolm)

"No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth.'" (Miracles)

"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality." (Letters to Malcolm)

"A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers–including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower." (A Preface to Paradise Lost)

"We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege." (Letters to Malcolm)

"The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends..." ("A Christian Reply to Professor Price," Phoenix Quarterly)

"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ." (Mere Christianity)

"Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind." C. S. Lewis

"Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me?' When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle." (The World’s Last Night and Other Essays)

ADDENDUM

Thirty-three of C. S. LEWIS’s better known works are categorized as follows:

Apologetics or Theology:

The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933

The Problem of Pain, 1940

The Screwtape Letters, 1942

Broadcast Talks,1942

Christian Behavior, 1943

Beyond Personality, 1944

The Great Divorce, 1945

Miracles, A Preliminary Study, 1947

George MacDonald: An Anthology, 1948

Transposition and Other Addresses, 1949

Mere Christianity, 1952

Scholarly literary criticism:

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, 1936

The Personal Heresy, 1939

Rehabilitations, 1939

A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 1954

Studies in Words, 1960

Biographical:

Surprised by Joy, The Shape of My Early Years, 1955

Romances, The Space Trilogy. Novels consisting of the following:

1st, Out of the Silent Planet, 1938

2nd, Perelandra, 1943

3rd, That Hideous Strength, 1945

A lesser known novel:

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, 1956.

The Narnia Series, or The Chronicles of Narnia, are children’s novels, viz.:

1st, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950

2nd, Prince Caspian, 1951

3rd, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, 1952

4th, The Silver Chair, 1953

5th, The Horse and His Boy, 1954

6th, The Magician’s Nephew, 1955

7th, The Last Battle, 1956

Poems:

Spirits in Bondage, 1919

Dymer, 1926

Social Theory:

The Abolition of Man, 1943

CHRONOLOGY: FIRST EDITIONS OF THE 42 HARD-BOUND BOOKS

1. 1919 Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, (Clive Hamilton)

2. 1926 Dymer (Clive Hamilton); reprint, 1950, FBE, C. S. Lewis, hardbound.

3. 1933 The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism.

4. 1936 The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.

5. 1938 Out of the Silent Planet.

6. 1939 Rehabilitations and Other Essays.

7. 1939 The Personal Heresy, A Controversy, (with E.M.W. Tillyard).

8. 1940 The Problem of Pain.

9. 1942 The Screwtape Letters.

10. 1942 A Preface to Paradise Lost.

11. 1942 Broadcast Talks.

12. 1943 Christian Behavior: A Further Series of Broadcast Talks.

13. 1943 Perelandra.

14. 1943 The Abolition of Man.

15. 1943 The Case for Christianity.

16. 1944 Beyond Personality, The Christian Idea of God.

17. 1945 That Hideous Strength: A modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.

18. 1945 The Great Divorce: A Dream.

19. 1946 George MacDonald, an Anthology.

20. 1947 Miracles: A Preliminary Study.

21. 1947 Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

22. 1948 Arthurian Torso.

23. 1949 The Weight of Glory, in U. S.; Transposition and Other Addresses, in England.

24. 1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

25. 1951 Prince Caspian.

26. 1952 Mere Christianity.

27. 1952 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

28. 1953 The Silver Chair.

29. 1954 The Horse and His Boy.

30. 1954 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.

31. 1955 The Magician’s Nephew.

32. 1955 Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

33. 1956 The Last Battle.

34. 1956 Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.

35. 1958 Reflections on the Psalms.

36. 1960 The Four Loves.

37. 1960 Studies in Words.

38. 1960 The World’s Last Night and Other Essays.

39. 1961 A Grief Observed, by N. W. Clerk (pseudonym).

40. 1961 An Experiment in Criticism.

41. 1961 Screwtape Letters, with Screwtape Proposes a Toast.

42. 1962 They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses.

COLLECTIONS

IN PURSUIT OF C. S. LEWIS, ADVENTURES IN COLLECTING HIS WORKS, pp. xiii-xiv, Dr. Edwin W. BROWN states:

"In December 2005, I was asked by the editor of a British magazine, 'Rare Book Review,' if I would consider writing the feature article for their next issue...I was more than pleased to share with its readers...I was not prepared for the accolades beginning with 'Finding Narnia...in the world’s largest C. S. Lewis collection' on the cover and 'the world’s foremost C. S. Lewis collector Ed Brown guides Rare through his private collection of first editions' in the introduction to the six-page article!.

"As most Lewis enthusiasts know, the 'world’s largest C. S. Lewis collection'–depending upon how one defines the term–is either at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, or the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford. The Wade Center enjoys the advantage; its founder, the late Dr. Clyde Kilby, was a friend of the Lewis brothers, from whom he received priceless unique materials. The Bodleian Library, as a copyright deposit library, not only receives the first edition of every book published in the United Kingdom, but houses an invaluable collection of Lewis manuscripts and other material deposited there by Walter Hooper, who served as Lewis’s personal secretary in mid-1963 shortly before Lewis’s death, and became the literary executor of the Lewis estate.

"If anyone should be considered 'the world’s foremost C. S. Lewis collector,' it is Walter, who for more than four decades has indefatigably devoted himself to preparing editions of Lewis’s unpublished works and seeking to find the original appearance in print of every poem, essay, sermon, letter, or whatever else Lewis wrote–and I am humbled that he should defer to me in that respect as a private collector.

"The Bodleian Library, however, does not retain the dust jackets of its books (which for the rarer and more popular Lewis titles have become far more valuable than the books themselves) and many of those of the Lewis first editions at the Wade Center are not of the best quality. Thus, although the collection at Taylor University is only the third most extensive Lewis collection known, each of the first editions is of the finest quality I could find over the years–and I have found dust jackets for all but Spirits in Bondage, all likewise are of the best available quality...."

The operative words are "personally held." As Walter HOOPER deposited many materials the with Bodleian Library, so did Dr. Edwin W. BROWN, his esteemed collection with the library of Taylor University. In contrast to the foregoing distinctions, Dr. Alston Jones McCaslin V retains his collection of about 550 books personally.

Also see:

http://www.taylor.edu/academics/supportServices/csLewis/

GENEALOGY

Another source, The Huguenots, Their Settlements, Churches & Industries in England and Ireland, by Samuel Smiles, John Murray Publisher, London, 1867; and The Huguenots in France, After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes with a Visit To the Country of the Vaudios, by Samuel Smiles, Harper, New York, 1874–a supplement to the 1867 work, states that the LEWIS family was originally French Huguenot. They fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes [Louis XIV 1685]. Three brothers, William, Samuel and John, went to England. It was at this time that they changed the original name of LOUIS to LEWIS. Shortly thereafter, William removed to the north of Ireland, where he married a Miss McCLELLAND. John continued in England. Samuel made his residence in Wales. Two of Samuel’s sons, General Robert LEWIS and Colonel John LEWIS, emigrated to America about 1700. (We do not have access to this work, and therefore cannot judge its credibility).

CENSUS RECORDS

A site on the Internet explains in detail the reason Irish records are not extant:

http://www.lalley.com/index.htm?feature.htm

The site states in part:

"CENTENARY OF 1901 CENSUS OF IRELAND

"While the British Government conducted a census in Ireland in 1821, 1831, 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911, none are completely extant before 1901. While the later census returns of the 19th century were deliberately destroyed (some to produce wood pulp during World War I), the mid-century returns from 1841 and 1851 (a critical period in Irish history as they span the 'Famine' decade) did survive. Until 1922 that is. Following the burning of the Four Courts in Dublin, home to the Public Records Office, during the Irish Civil War in June 1922 all of these returns were lost along with countless other public records–a devastating blow to genealogical research in Ireland. The 1901 and 1911 returns however survived as they were not housed in the Four Courts at that time.

"The 1901 returns are the only complete record of every house and townland in Ireland at the end of the 19th century. While "census substitutes" such as Griffith's Valuation are used for "head of household" and surname research in the mid-century period ( 1850 - 1860 ), 1901 remains the sole record of every individual on the island on Sunday, 31st March of that year.

"Under law, census returns in Britain/Ireland are not normally opened to the public until 100 years have elapsed. Because of the dearth of pre-1900 data due to the destruction of the Four Courts building in 1922, the Irish Government waived this rule for the 1901 and 1911 census returns and these are open to the public at the National Archives in Dublin. They are also available on microfilm and can be accessed at good libraries and genealogical centers around the world. The 1926 census