C.S. Lewis is one of the more unusual entries in the canon of religious thinkers — partly because his path into faith was so reluctant, partly because his intellectual honesty stayed with him afterward, and partly because he wrote at a level of literary care that almost no "religious" writers maintain.
He was born Clive Staples Lewis in Belfast in 1898. His mother, Florence, died of cancer when he was nine years old. The loss was catastrophic for him — he later wrote that it was the moment when he stopped being able to assume that life made sense. His father, Albert, sent him and his older brother Warren to a series of English boarding schools, some of which were genuinely cruel. Lewis hated boarding school. He retreated into books, mythology, fantasy, and over time into an intense intellectual atheism.
At 18 he started at Oxford. At 19 he was drafted into World War I. He got to the front lines in 1917 and was wounded by a British shell that landed short — the same shell killed two of his friends standing next to him. He carried shrapnel in his chest for the rest of his life. The trenches confirmed his atheism rather than shaking it; he came home convinced that any God who allowed industrial warfare on this scale wasn't worth worshipping.
He returned to Oxford after the war, finished his degrees, and eventually became a tenured professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. He was famously brilliant. He had encyclopedic knowledge of European literature. And throughout the 1920s he was an outspoken, intellectually-rigorous atheist.
His circle at Oxford included a young philologist named J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a serious Catholic, and another professor named Hugo Dyson, also Christian. The three of them would meet regularly with other friends in a group called the Inklings. They argued endlessly. Lewis enjoyed the arguing but was sure he was right.
In September 1931, Tolkien and Dyson took Lewis on a long late-night walk through the grounds of Magdalen College. They walked and argued for hours. Lewis's intellectual objections to Christianity were, in his view, settled. He thought Christianity was just one mythology among many — true in its myth-structure perhaps, but not literally true. Tolkien made the argument that Christianity was the myth that turned out to be also historically true — what Tolkien called the "true myth." Something in the argument cracked Lewis's resistance. He didn't convert that night. But he started to.
Days later, riding to the zoo in his brother's motorcycle sidecar, he later wrote, "when we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." That's the conversion. Quiet. Internal. Not dramatic. The kind that comes after years of resistance finally crumbling.
He spent the rest of his life writing. The fiction is what most people know him for now — the seven Chronicles of Narnia books, the Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces. But he also wrote some of the most influential Christian apologetics of the 20th century. The Screwtape Letters (1942) — a senior demon writing letters to a junior demon about how to corrupt a young Englishman. Mere Christianity (1952) — based on radio broadcasts he gave during World War II — which lays out the basic Christian argument in plain, careful prose.
What's distinctive about Lewis's apologetics is the combination of literary craft and intellectual honesty. He doesn't pull punches about the difficulty of Christian faith. He doesn't pretend the hard parts aren't hard. He keeps his prose simple, his arguments tight, and his sentences memorable in a way that almost no other Christian writer of his era managed. Atheist readers can pick him up without feeling immediately preached at.
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.
His personal life had a late surprise. In his 50s, having lived with his brother Warnie for most of his adult life and never having married, he met an American writer named Joy Davidman. She'd been a Communist Party member and an atheist, had read his books, had converted to Christianity partly through them, and had moved to England partly to meet him. They got married in a civil ceremony at first, mostly so she could stay in the country, then later in a real church wedding when it became clear they'd actually fallen in love.
She had cancer. They knew it before the church wedding. They had four years together before she died in 1960. Lewis was devastated.
Out of that grief he wrote A Grief Observed, originally under a pseudonym. The book is unlike anything else he wrote. It's a raw journal of grief, including periods of intense doubt — moments where he wondered if God was a sadist, or didn't exist, or did exist but didn't care. He didn't edit those moments out. He let them stand, then worked through them on the page. The result is one of the most honest religious books ever published, exactly because it allows the doubt to be real.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
He died on November 22, 1963 — the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley died. His death barely made the news because of Kennedy. He was 64. Diabetes, kidney problems, prostate cancer. He'd been in declining health for years.
The reason C.S. Lewis still matters to me — even though I'm not particularly evangelical about Christianity — is that he's the rare Christian thinker who took the intellectual objections to faith seriously and wrote in a way that respected the reader's intelligence. He'd been an atheist. He knew the arguments. When he argued for Christianity, he was arguing with the part of himself that had been a skeptic for years.
If you're feeling lost af and you have a vague sense that something like faith might be part of the answer but you have a million intellectual objections to organized religion — Lewis is the writer who'll meet you with full intellectual respect. He won't try to bypass your skepticism. He'll engage it. And if you decide at the end that he hasn't convinced you, fine — at least you'll have read someone who took the question as seriously as you do.