(November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963), was an author, historian and professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was educated by a private tutor as a child; studied at Malvern College in England; University College, Oxford, 1916; served in World War I, 1918; taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925–54; and was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, 1954–63. Though his death went almost unnoticed, having died on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his works have become some of the most widely read in English literature. His works include: The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; 2 1936; Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; The Problem of Pain, 1940; The Screwtape Letters, 1942; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945; Miracles, 1947; The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950; and Mere Christianity, 1952; and his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, 1955, in which he wrote:
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 is the Son of God, and when we reached to 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. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous.
Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? At that maximum a man is what he does; there is nothing of him left over or outside the act. As for what we commonly call Will, and what we commonly call Emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much, to be quite believed, and we have a secret suspicion that the great passion or the iron resolution is partly a put-up job.
They have spoiled Whipsnade since then. Wallaby Wood, with the birds singing overhead and the blue-bells underfoot and the Wallabies hopping all round one, was almost Eden come again.3514
Having once been an agnostic, C.S. Lewis expressed:
I am trying to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I am ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claims to be God.” That is one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that 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.3515
In The Screwtape Letters, 1942, C.S. Lewis wrote:
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.3516
In Mere Christianity, 1952, C.S. Lewis wrote:
The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman’s body.3517
C.S. Lewis remarked:
God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.3518
Christianity is a religion you could not have guessed. It has that queer twist about it that real things have.3519
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.3520
Good people know about both good and evil; bad people do not know about either.3521
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.”3522
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.3523
If … I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.3524