C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

A Protestant childhood in late-19th-century Ireland

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, the second son of Albert James Lewis (1863-1929), a solicitor, and Florence Augusta Hamilton, known as Flora (1862-1908), the first woman to graduate in mathematics from Queen's College, Belfast, and the daughter of an Anglican clergyman.^[3] The family, Protestant and cultivated, raised its two sons — Warren, born in 1895, and Clive — in a house full of books, Little Lea, where young "Jack" (a nickname he chose for himself at the age of four, in honour of a dog named Jacksie that had been run over by a car, and which he kept all his life) very early invented, with his brother, the imaginary world of "Boxen," populated by chivalrous animals.^[4][5]

The death of Flora Lewis and "sunken Atlantis" (1908)

In 1908, when Lewis was nine, his mother died of cancer after a long illness.^[6] He would later recount, in his autobiography, that this loss closed a door on his happy childhood that never reopened: "With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life... the great continent had sunk like Atlantis."^[7] His father, overwhelmed by grief and already psychologically fragile, withdrew into himself; the two brothers, sent to boarding school in England shortly afterwards, then drew closer to each other in a way that would last until Lewis's death.^[8]

Malvern, then tuition under the "Great Knock," William Kirkpatrick (1911-1917)

Lewis passed through several English schools that he would all retrospectively detest — Wynyard School, Campbell College, then Cherbourg House and finally Malvern College (September 1913 – June 1914), which he would rename "Wyvern" in his autobiography and where he suffered under the prefect system and the social pressure of games.^[9][10] Faced with his misery, his father withdrew him from Malvern and sent him, in the autumn of 1914, to study privately with William T. Kirkpatrick (1848-1921), a retired Presbyterian former headmaster living at Great Bookham in Surrey, who had already tutored Lewis's father and brother.^[11]

Nicknamed "the Great Knock" by the Lewis family for his implacable logical rigour, Kirkpatrick tolerated no unsupported assertion: Lewis recounts that, from his very arrival, an innocuous remark about "a fine day" would trigger in his tutor an immediate demand for definition and justification.^[12] This rigorous rationalist discipline — "a purely logical entity", "a Rationalist of the old, high and dry, nineteenth-century type", as Lewis would write of him^[13] — forged the intellectual instrument that would later serve, turned around, in defence of the faith: Kirkpatrick himself warned Lewis's father in these prophetic terms:

"You may make a writer or a scholar out of him, but you'll not make anything else." — William T. Kirkpatrick, quoted by C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Geoffrey Bles, 1955, ch. IX^[14]

Those three years (1914-1917) made Lewis as rigorous an atheist in his unbelief as he would later be in his faith: under Kirkpatrick, he abandoned the remnants of his childhood piety and declared himself a convinced materialist, while developing an undying love for Norse mythology and medieval literature which, ironically, was to become one of the paths of his return to God.^[15]

The Somme and the Arras wound

After his scholarship won in late 1916 and his arrival at Oxford in the spring of 1917, Lewis joined the British Army straight from the university Officers' Training Corps; commissioned second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, he joined the Somme front line on November 29, 1917, the very day of his nineteenth birthday.^[16] On April 15, 1918, in the Arras sector near Riez-du-Vinage, a shell fired by his own artillery fell short: Lewis was wounded in the hands, chest and leg by shrapnel, while two of his comrades died on the spot.^[17] Repatriated to convalesce at Andover, he was demobilised in December 1918. Like Tolkien, who had himself known the trenches of the Somme in 1916, Lewis would speak little, all his life, of this experience of fire.

The triple First and the militant atheism of a young academic

Back at Oxford, Lewis strung together three exceptional academic successes: First Class Honours in Classical Honour Moderations (1920), in Greats — Philosophy and Ancient History (1922) — and then in English Literature (1923): a very rare triple First.^[18] He first taught philosophy at University College before being elected, in 1925, Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, a post he would hold for twenty-nine years, until 1954.^[19]

Throughout those years, Lewis remained a declared atheist, marked by what he would later call the "Irish pessimism" inherited from his father and by the conviction, nurtured under Kirkpatrick, that the material universe has neither meaning nor purpose. He was a brilliant man, sarcastic towards religion, and yet haunted since childhood by fleeting experiences of Sehnsucht — that objectless longing he would call "Joy" — which he never stopped seeking and misinterpreting for fifteen years.^[20]

MacDonald and Chesterton: the two baptisms

Two books prepared Lewis's conversion from afar. In 1916, the discovery of the fantasy novel Phantastes by the Scottish minister George MacDonald made him feel for the first time that "Joy" now attached not to some vague aesthetic sentiment but to an almost holy quality — what he would call "the baptism of my imagination."^[21] Then, already established as an Oxford don, he read The Everlasting Man (1925) by G. K. Chesterton, whose vision of the whole of human history ordered towards Christ struck him in a way he had not expected:

"In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." — C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Geoffrey Bles, 1955, ch. XIV^[22]

If MacDonald had "baptized his imagination," Chesterton "baptized his intellect": the history of the world, read through The Everlasting Man, suddenly took on a coherent shape converging on the Incarnation.^[23]

The theism of Trinity Term 1929

Lewis's inward development quickened in the late 1920s, under the pressure of believing Oxford friends — including Owen Barfield and Hugo Dyson — and of steady reading in the great Christian authors. In 1929, alone in his Magdalen rooms, he gave in:

"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." — C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Geoffrey Bles, 1955, ch. XIV^[24]

That 1929 theism was as yet only a philosophical surrender — the admission of a personal God, but not yet faith in Christ. Two more years would be needed, and the decisive intervention of a Catholic friend, to take the final step.

Addison's Walk, September 19, 1931: "myth become fact"

The Ignispedia article on J. R. R. Tolkien tells in detail the story of the night of September 19, 1931: after dinner at Magdalen College, Tolkien and Hugo Dyson drew Lewis into a long walk along Addison's Walk, the tree-lined path of the college. Lewis, a theist for two years, still held myths — Christianity included — to be beautiful human inventions, "lies breathed through silver," in a phrase Tolkien would lend him in his poem Mythopoeia.^[25] Tolkien answered that in Christianity, the universal mythic motif of the dying and rising god had actually happened, at a precise date and place: myth had become fact, without ceasing to carry all its meaning.^[26][27]

The Whipsnade side-car, September 28, 1931

Nine days later, on September 28, 1931, riding to Whipsnade Zoo in the side-car of his brother Warren's motorbike, Lewis took the final step — without even realising it during the journey:

"When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought." — C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Geoffrey Bles, 1955, ch. XV^[28]

Lewis would always credit Tolkien and Dyson with the decisive role in that final conversion:

"Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion." — C. S. Lewis, letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, 1941^[29]

Tolkien had hoped for a full conversion to the Catholic Church; Lewis ultimately joined the Church of England, the denomination of his childhood — a choice that deeply disappointed his friend, as Humphrey Carpenter's standard biography reports.^[30]

The BBC wartime talks and Mere Christianity

Now a Christian, Lewis placed at the Gospel's service the same logical rigour Kirkpatrick had drilled into him against the faith. Invited by the BBC during the Second World War to give a series of radio talks (1941-1944) aimed at a nation at war, he met with immediate success; the talks were later gathered into a single volume as Mere Christianity (1952).^[31] The project, announced in the preface, is deliberately minimal: to set out not the points of disagreement between Christian confessions, but the common core — the "mere," the "merely" — that all profess:

"The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian 'denominations.' You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic." — C. S. Lewis, preface to Mere Christianity, Geoffrey Bles, 1952^[32]

The trilemma: "mad, demon, or Lord"

Lewis's most famous argument — now a classic of apologetics, Catholic apologetics included — answers the objection that would make Jesus a mere "great moral teacher" without acknowledging his divine claims:

"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 the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. [...] But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Geoffrey Bles, 1952, Book II, ch. 3^[33]

That argument — often summed up in English by the alliteration "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" — has since been taken up, discussed and refined by generations of apologists, Catholics included, among them Peter Kreeft, who makes it the dramatic mainspring of his own philosophical dialogue Between Heaven and Hell.^[34]

The argument from desire: "made for another world"

In the third book of Mere Christianity, Lewis turns into a philosophical argument the experience of "Joy" that had marked his whole youth: if every natural impulse corresponds to a real object that can satisfy it — hunger to food, thirst to water, sexual desire to bodily union — then that objectless longing for this world which everyone sometimes feels must likewise correspond to something real, albeit supernatural:

"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." — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Geoffrey Bles, 1952, Book III, ch. 10^[35]

He developed the same intuition, with a more homiletic accent, in his sermon The Weight of Glory (1941), preached at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford:

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." — C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, sermon preached June 8, 1941, University of Oxford^[36]

The Abolition of Man and the universal moral law

In 1943, in a short essay drawn from lectures given at Durham, The Abolition of Man, Lewis defends the existence of an objective moral law, which he designates — borrowing the term from Taoism, precisely to stress its universality beyond Christianity alone — by the name of the Tao: a bedrock of values acknowledged, give or take a few nuances, by all the great moral traditions of the world (Platonic, Confucian, Hindu, Christian).^[37] Against modern education, which claims to manufacture values without rooting them in this common law, he forges a formula that has remained famous:

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise." — C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Oxford University Press, 1943, ch. 1^[38]

That moral argument, which Lewis takes up again in Book I of Mere Christianity under the title "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe"^[39], overlaps almost exactly with the Thomist and catechetical argument of natural law; see the full exposition of that argument in the Ignispedia article devoted to the moral argument for the existence of God, where Lewis stands alongside Kant, Dostoevsky and William Lane Craig, and in the article on moral conscience, where his notion of a universal "moral law" is directly invoked against relativism.

The Screwtape Letters

In 1942 Lewis published The Screwtape Letters, thirty-one fictional letters from an elderly administrative demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter charged with securing the soul of a young Englishman. The success was immediate, yet Lewis himself confessed the psychological difficulty of the exercise, in the preface he would add to a 1961 reissue:

"Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. [...] Though it was easy to twist one's mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp." — C. S. Lewis, preface to The Screwtape Letters, Geoffrey Bles, 1961^[40]

The book, dedicated to Tolkien with the handwritten note "in token payment of a great debt," nonetheless displeased Tolkien, who was uneasy at the idea of giving a demon so long a hearing, even to confound him.^[41]

The Problem of Pain and the debate with Elizabeth Anscombe

In The Problem of Pain (1940), Lewis confronts the classic objection of evil against the existence of a good and all-powerful God — an objection developed in detail in the Ignispedia article How can the scandal of evil be explained? and in Evil and suffering. Seven years later, in Miracles (1947), he proposes an "argument from reason" against naturalism: if every human thought is merely the product of non-rational physical causes, then the naturalist's own thought in affirming naturalism is itself undermined at the root, and can claim no truth.^[42]

In The Great Divorce (1945), Lewis sums up his vision of hell in a formula that has become famous: "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'"^[43] And in The Problem of Pain (1940), he adds that "the doors of hell are locked on the inside."^[44] Lewis, who remained an Anglican all his life, is quoted here for his literary power, not as a Catholic doctrinal authority: hell remains a state of definitive, freely chosen self-exclusion.

On February 2, 1948, at the Oxford Socratic Club, the young Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe — a future leading figure of British analytic philosophy — subjected that argument to searching criticism, charging it with confusing non-rational causes with irrational ones.^[45] Marked by that exchange, Lewis acknowledged the partial force of the criticism and revised the chapter concerned in the 1960 edition of Miracles — an episode that has remained famous as one of the rare examples of one of the century's greatest Christian apologists publicly accepting the correction of an argument under pressure from a Catholic opponent.^[46]

The seven Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956)

Between 1950 and 1956 Lewis published the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) to The Last Battle (1956), which received the Carnegie Medal.^[47] Unlike Tolkien, who refused any explicit allegory in The Lord of the Rings, Lewis fully embraced, in Narnia, a deliberate transposition: the lion Aslan dies and rises again to redeem the traitor Edmund, in a scene modelled without evasion on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

Aslan and the avowed "supposal"

That deliberate choice sharply distinguishes the two great Christian Inklings: Tolkien "absorbed" his faith into the very structure of his story without ever naming it; Lewis, on the contrary, built a parallel world in which Christ appears in recognisable form, to reach the imagination of children — and adults — past the intellectual defences they would raise against an explicit theological discourse. Lewis himself rejected the word "allegory" in the strict sense: he spoke of "supposal" — supposing a world like Narnia in which the Son of God would become incarnate as a lion — which takes nothing away from the deliberate character of the Christological transposition of Edmund and Aslan. Lewis explained that method in these terms, in an essay on writing for children: bringing the Passion in "incognito," circumventing the reluctance that Sunday-school religious vocabulary arouses in many.

The Inklings: Tolkien, Williams, Barfield, and the regret of an unfinished conversion

Lewis was, with Tolkien, the central figure of the Inklings, that informal circle of Oxford writers — Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Warren Lewis and others — who met weekly, at The Eagle and Child pub or in Lewis's Magdalen rooms, to read and discuss their works in progress.^[48] It was in that circle that both The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia were read aloud, chapter by chapter.

Tolkien nonetheless remained marked, all his life, by the fact that his closest friend had stopped at Anglicanism without taking the final step to Rome — a regret reported by Humphrey Carpenter's standard biography and confirmed by Tolkien's own correspondence.^[49]

From communist atheism to Christian faith

Helen Joy Davidman (1915-1960), an American poet born into a Jewish family in New York, militated in her youth in the American Communist Party before breaking with Marxism in the mid-1940s, disillusioned by Stalinism.^[50] A spiritual experience undergone alone at home in 1946, while she was going through a grave marital crisis, led her to seek God; reading Lewis's works, begun in 1947, completed her journey to Christianity.^[51] She met Lewis in person in 1952, on a trip to England, then settled permanently at Oxford with her two sons, David and Douglas Gresham, after her divorce.^[52]

The civil, then sacred, marriage of 1956-1957

To enable her to remain in the United Kingdom, Lewis married Joy Davidman civilly on April 23, 1956, at the registry office at 42 St Giles', Oxford — a marriage at first purely administrative.^[53] But when Joy was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1956, Lewis became aware of the genuine love binding him to her; on March 21, 1957, an Anglican priest blessed their union at Joy's bedside in Churchill Hospital, turning the civil marriage into a fully sacramental union in Lewis's eyes.^[54]

The death of Joy and A Grief Observed (1961)

Against all medical expectation, Joy experienced a remission that gave the couple three years of married happiness, before the cancer returned and took Joy on July 13, 1960.^[55] Lewis then kept a journal of grief which he published, the following year, under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk: A Grief Observed (1961). The book opens with one of the barest evocations of the pain of bereavement ever written by a Christian apologist:

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." — C. S. Lewis (under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk), A Grief Observed, Faber & Faber, 1961^[56]

Far from belying his faith, the book deepens its texture: in it Lewis passes, unvarnished, through the temptation of doubt and revolt, before recovering there, more stripped bare, a Christian hope purged of all easy intellectual comfort.

Purgatory: "I'd rather be cleaned first"

Against Reformed theology, which rejects purgatory as a medieval invention without scriptural foundation, Lewis states plainly, in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964, posthumous), his own belief in a purification after death:

"Would it not break the heart if God said to us, 'It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drop with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy'? Should we not reply, 'With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first.'" — C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Geoffrey Bles, 1964, ch. 20^[57]

He pursues the same intuition with the even more prosaic image of the dentist's chair:

"I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am 'coming round,' a voice will say, 'Rinse your mouth out with this.' This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But... it will be Purgatory." — C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Geoffrey Bles, 1964, ch. 20^[58]

That conviction, which overlaps almost exactly with Catholic teaching as summarised in the Ignispedia article What does the Church say about purgatory?, sharply distinguishes Lewis from most of his Evangelical and low-church Anglican co-religionists.

The Eucharist without a theory: "Take, eat, not take, understand"

On the Eucharist, Lewis rejects both the purely symbolic memorialism of Zwinglian theology and the obligation to choose a precise philosophical explanation of the mode of the Presence. He affirms belief in a real and objective presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, without wishing to define its metaphysical mechanism:

"The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand." — C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Geoffrey Bles, 1964, ch. 19^[59]

That position — firmly believing in the reality of the eucharistic gift while avoiding a choice between Catholic transubstantiation and Lutheran consubstantiation — would remain one of the points where Lewis comes closest to Catholic sacramentality, without ever adopting its precise technical vocabulary.

Against the ordination of women: Priestesses in the Church?

In 1948, in an essay published in Time and Tide and later reprinted in the posthumous collection God in the Dock (1970), Lewis firmly opposed the plan, then debated within the Anglican Communion, to ordain women priests.^[60] His central argument — the priest sacramentally represents Christ the Bridegroom before the Church the Bride at the moment of consecration — anticipates almost word for word the reasoning the Catholic Church would later develop officially:

"Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to 'Our Mother which art in heaven' as to 'Our Father'. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride." — C. S. Lewis, Priestesses in the Church?, Time and Tide, August 1948, reprinted in God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970^[61]

In that reductio ad absurdum, Lewis sees proof that the ordination of women would break symbolic and sacramental continuity with the whole of Christian Tradition — a position which, voiced by an Anglican in 1948, proved prophetic in the face of the later evolution of the Anglican Communion, remaining in this far closer to Catholicism and Orthodoxy than to its own heritage.

The Latin correspondence with the future Saint Giovanni Calabria

In September 1947, an Italian priest from Verona, Don Giovanni Calabria (1873-1954), founder of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence and himself a future canonized saint, read The Screwtape Letters in Italian translation and, knowing no English, wrote to Lewis in Latin. Lewis, who spoke no Italian, answered him in the same language: thus began a correspondence in Latin which continued, after Calabria's death in 1954, with his successor Fr. Luigi Pedrollo, until 1961.^[62] Calabria's great project — fostering understanding between separated Christian confessions — pervades the whole exchange, which also touches on rising secularism and the paradox of petitionary prayer.^[63] Giovanni Calabria was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 1999, making this Latin correspondence a direct, documented, and lasting link between the century's greatest Anglican apologist and a saint of the Catholic Church.^[64]

An Anglican who stopped at the threshold, to Tolkien's great regret

It would be dishonest to make C. S. Lewis a crypto-Catholic: he remained, by reflective choice and not mere inertia, faithful to the Church of England until his death, despite Tolkien's discreet but real efforts to lead him to Rome.^[65] His eucharistic theology, deliberately held back from any precise definition, his near-total silence on Mary's role, his lack of any doctrine on the papacy and apostolic succession, mark a difference of kind, not merely of degree, from the fullness of the Catholic faith.

The hall and the rooms: a deliberately minimal theology

Lewis himself theorized that deliberate limit, in the famous image from the preface to Mere Christianity:

"Common Christianity resembles a hall out of which several doors open into rooms. [...] The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors — not a place to live in." — C. S. Lewis, preface to Mere Christianity, Geoffrey Bles, 1952^[66]

That image, of great intellectual honesty, amounts to acknowledging that the "common Christianity" he defends is not an end in itself, but an antechamber: it is the "rooms" — the constituted Churches, with their sacraments, their authority, and their concrete discipline — that contain, in his own words, "the fires, the chairs, and the meals" of really lived Christian life. A Catholic reader can thus read Lewis as a faithful guide up to the threshold of the hall, without ever being able to stop there — for the hall, by construction, has neither tabernacle nor altar.

The following table sums up the points of convergence and divergence between Lewis's personal positions and constant Catholic teaching.

What is missing: authority, the sacraments, Marian mediation

The most structural deficit in Lewis's thought, from the Catholic point of view, lies precisely in the absence of any theology of a unified magisterial authority. The "common Christianity" he defends functions by construction without a doctrinal arbiter capable of settling, as a last resort, the controversies he himself lists without resolving them — infant baptism, the mode of the eucharistic presence, Mary's role, the authority of councils. That gap, accepted and even claimed by Lewis as ecumenical prudence, is seen by Catholic theology as an objective lack: without a living magisterium, the "hall" can, in the end, only mirror the growing diversity — and sometimes division — of the "rooms" surrounding it, as his own Anglican Communion illustrates, fractured after Lewis's death over questions his Mere Christianity was never meant to settle.

An acknowledged ally: Lewis's Catholic posterity

Those doctrinal reservations never prevented Catholic apologetics from recognizing in Lewis one of its most precious allies. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College and one of the most widely read Catholic apologists in the English-speaking world, published his very first book on Lewis as early as 1969 and never stopped returning to him, even staging Lewis himself, dialoguing after death with John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley, in Between Heaven and Hell (1982) — see the Ignispedia article on Peter Kreeft. Joseph Pearce, Tolkien's biographer and a convert to Catholicism, likewise devoted several books to the Christian dimension of Lewis's work. That massive reception by contemporary Catholic apologetics rests on a paradox Lewis himself would probably not have disowned: by deliberately seeking the lowest common denominator of the Christian faith, he supplied Catholics themselves with the most effective rational arsenal for defending truths that their own Church professes with a fullness Lewis, by choice, never claimed for himself.

November 22, 1963: three deaths on the same day

Lewis had suffered for several years from kidney failure and heart trouble; he died at his home, The Kilns, at Headington near Oxford, on November 22, 1963, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday.^[72] His death went almost unnoticed by the world press, eclipsed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and by the death, on the same day, of the writer Aldous Huxley — a coincidence that would inspire in Peter Kreeft the idea of his imaginary dialogue Between Heaven and Hell, bringing the three men together in the afterlife to debate the identity of Christ.^[73] Lewis is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry; in 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial to him was dedicated in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.^[74]

What Lewis teaches today

More than sixty years after his death, Lewis remains one of the most effective mediators of the Christian faith to an audience that no longer knows it from within. He teaches first that reason and imagination are not opposed in the defence of the faith: the same man who constructs the logical trilemma of the madman, the demon, or the Lord invents, in the same breath, the lion Aslan passing through death. He teaches next that a deliberately minimal theology, designed to gather rather than to define, renders an immense service of evangelization — without being able, by construction, to stand in for the fullness of a visible, sacramental Church united under a magisterium. His meditation on Purgatory, his defence of the moral law, his opposition to the ordination of women, and his correspondence with a Catholic saint show finally that a sincere Christian, even one remaining outside full communion with Rome, can approach very closely, by the sheer force of reason and intellectual honesty, truths that the Catholic Church professes in their fullness.

• J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) — the Catholic friend whose Addison's Walk conversation was the immediate human cause of Lewis's conversion to Christianity.
• G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) — whose The Everlasting Man "baptized Lewis's intellect" before his conversion.
• Peter Kreeft (born 1937) — a Catholic apologist whose entire work is nourished by reading Lewis.
• The moral argument for the existence of God — where Lewis's "moral law" stands alongside Kant, Dostoevsky and William Lane Craig.
• What is moral conscience? — which directly takes up the Lewisian notion of a universal moral law.
• How can the scandal of evil be explained? and Evil and suffering — on the problem that The Problem of Pain confronts head-on.
• What does the Church say about purgatory? — the Catholic teaching that Lewis's own belief overlaps so closely.