Born in Belfast on 29th November 1898, C.S. Lewis is 100 years old this year. Andrew Walker wishes Lewis a happy birthday with an essay celebrating his life, thought and imagination (plus beer, Tolkien and Narnia).

I mention this not only to give Lewis due honour on this the centenary of his birth, but also to remind us that his religious imagination was baptized in oceans of great literature.

His university achievements also reminds us that this Oxford don was exceptionally talented and very, very bright – a fact that the film Shadowlands totally fails to reflect. His examiner at Oxford when Lewis went up in 1918 remarked that he was better read than any undergraduate he ever met.

He escaped the College quads only for the occasional walk, and the not so occasional trip to the English pub, where he liked nothing better than the company and conversation of other intellectual men. Lewis liked women, too, but he preferred them to be striking and clever, rather than beautiful and decorative. He seems, for example, to have had a hankering for, as well as a horror of, the witch Jadis in The Magician's Nephew. 'A dem fine woman,' Digory's uncle Andrew called her in the concluding words of the book.

What we might call Lewis's outer life was fixed from early manhood. This rather large, plain, red-faced, yellow toothed, dishevelled and balding man, whom A.N. Wilson, his most ascerbic biographer, describes as looking rather like a pork butcher, rose early, read and wrote all morning (he never typed), supped too much beer at lunch, walked it off in the afternoon, often with dog, dined in College rooms, went to pub, his favourite being the Eagle and Child, where he conversed late into the evening with friends – often with the so-called 'Inklings' which included fellow writers Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and occasionally Dorothy Sayers.

Lewis virtually chain-smoked throughout the day and night, both cigarettes and pipe, enjoyed bawdy humour with his beer, and was very loud and cheery – not at all retiring in manner or pious in outward behaviour. Christopher Tolkien, writing to his famous father, once said that Lewis told him that he was giving up beer for Lent after he had downed three pints in quick succession.

Sometimes, Lewis would briefly leave Oxford to give invited lectures – always travelling by train, for he hated cars and could not drive. In 1942 he broadcast on BBC Radio a series of talks that in 1952 became the famous Mere Christianity. Despite the fact that he hardly ever read newspapers, he wrote for the Daily Mirror during the Second World War, and even sallied forth from the closeted world of Oxford to talk religion to the troops.

Even when he was in his home, the Kilns, at Oxford, which was most of the time, he enjoyed a correspondence with literally thousands of ordinary people – many of whom lived in America. Perhaps nothing was more remarkable of Lewis than that this most academic and closeted of men had the common touch and a touching faith, like his hero G.K. Chesterton, in the moral good sense of the untutored masses.

As a tutor, Lewis was outstanding but demanding – he never backed down from an argument and he liked to win. His hectoring and sometimes bullying style was too much for some – the English poet John Betjeman, for example, came to loath him. He certainly could go over the top, as on the occasion when he chased an unfortunate undergraduate down the stairs from his rooms at Magdalene with a sword and shouted at him not to come back until he had learned to read a text correctly. But for most students, Lewis was an inspiring and tireless tutor.

One of the most extraordinary accolades he ever received came from the infamous literary critic, Kenneth Tynan – famous in Britain for being responsible for staging the nude musical Oh Calcutta. In later life, Tynan called Lewis the greatest man he had ever met and asked for his ashes to be scattered in the church at Headington Quarry, where Lewis was buried.

We could go on in this tantalizing way, taking angular snapshots of Lewis's life, but if we want some real insight into his work and life – his inner life which was never boring – then it is better if we turn to his childhood and early manhood, because it is there that the real Lewis, the champion of historic Christianity, Christian apologist, writer of children's classic tales, emerges.

The first thing to understand about Clive Staples Lewis, therefore, was that he was an Ulster Irishman, with all that that entails. When he was little and being toilet trained, his nanny used to called his stools 'little popes.'

The second thing to understand is that he had an elder brother, Warnie, whom he adored and stayed loyal to all his life. Warnie was an alcoholic, and when Lewis was buried in Headington Quarry Church, Warnie could not attend because he was drunk. It was Warnie who nicknamed Clive 'Jacksie', which became Jack, the name Lewis was called all his life by his friends. At the age of eight, Jack could write in his diary, 'Hoorah! Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking about him, and before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into the room, we shake hands and begin to talk...'

And how they talked and played. In 1905, they moved to Little Lea, a large rambling house in Belfast with attic rooms, creaking corridors and acres of space. There young Jack and Warnie played and wrote stories together. Little Big of Boxen was just one of the characters to emerge from Jack's pen and paintbrush. Little Lea was a haven for two rather lonely little boys whose parents preferred that they be neither seen nor heard.

The third thing to understand about Jack Lewis was that he loved his mother Flora more than anybody in the world. She was his rock, his security, his joy. In 1908, when he was 10 years old, Jack's mother died after a long fight against cancer. The young boy's life was shattered. He had to attend her wake, where she lay in an open coffin, the marks of corruption probably visible.

Jack never really got over his mother's passing nor the decay of death. Should we really be surprised that years later in The Magician's Nephew, Digory's mother is lovingly described on her death bed, as if she were Flora: 'There she lay, as he had seen her like so many other times, propped up on the pillows, with a thin, pale face that would make you cry to look at.'

And can we blame the middle-aged Lewis for curing Digory's mother of the terminal illness with the magic apple from Narnia? Never was a childhood wish fulfilment more touching, more understandable, more lovingly displayed – an imaginative balm to heal the broken heart.

A few short years after writing the first Narnia tale, Jack Lewis was to see his dear wife Joy seemingly healed of bone cancer by prayer, only for the two-year remission to be cruelly ended by Joy's premature death. Lewis's despair, anger, and the inklings of hope are starkly revealed in the scorchingly honest A Grief Observed. In my opinion, this short tract on grief, pain, and faith offers greater Christian vision and conviction than the rather clever but cold defence of God's dealings with the world of suffering in The Problem of Pain, published by Lewis in 1940.

But can you imagine what it must have been like, when two weeks after his mother's death, the young Lewis, grief still unresolved, is sent packing to boarding school in England. Not only might we find this cruel in itself, but Lewis was to find the school itself cruel, the matron obsessed with spiritualism, and the headmaster so unstable that some time after Lewis left he was found clinically insane.

We might think it was a relief for the young Lewis that in 1913, at the age of 15, he entered one of England's most famous private schools, Malvern College. In fact, he hated it. Far too clever for boys and teachers alike, poor at games, he was mercilessly bullied. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis barely mentions that he was wounded in the Great War, but spends pages raging against the English boarding school system and his misery at Malvern. Lewis was later to explain his reticence in talking of war by saying that he expected it to be brutal, but that he railed against his schooling because he had believed that it would be a haven of security and the nursery of civilization.

Lewis had lost his childlike faith in God after the death of his mother and under the iron regime of school life. He was, throughout his young adolescence, without faith and convinced intellectually that reason alone was the answer to understanding reality.

But his heart told him something else. Lewis was deeply romantic by temperament and remained so all his life. He loved the ancient romances of Arthur, the Norse Legends, the epic beauty of Beowulf, the allure and charm of fairy stories. He was more at home in the world of ancient literature than he was in the modern world – something that held true for his whole life. His mature conviction was that part of the cure for the maladies and follies of the present age is to step outside contemporaneity and step back imaginatively into older times, where we can gain perspective on the 'chronological snobbism' of our own.

Nowhere was Lewis's romanticism more apparent than in his love of pagan myths. He records in his autobiography that he knew they were lies, but believed them to be 'lies breathed through silver'. He recalls a strange experience that happened to him on hearing the line from Beowulf: 'Balder the beautiful is dead'. It created in him an emotional frisson, a thrill, a longing for the object of that emotion. He called this longing by the German word 'Sehnsucht', which suggests unrequited love, unbearable longing, mystic yearning.

Lewis came to believe that such longing was a desire inspired by true reality and not merely a psychological or subjective experience. Such a belief is both an echo of the old philosophical argument for God based on desire, and a deeply romantic conviction that truth can be intuited through what the 19th century Romantics called the affections.

Lewis was later to divide the acquiring of all knowledge into two modes of perception. Intuition or imagination, he called by the French term 'connaitre'. He believed that imagination was the organ of meaning, and that a 'baptized imagination' was essential for successful Christian mission and nurture. Straight rational knowledge, the faculty of reason, he was to call 'savoir'. For him, reason was the natural organ of truth. In his early days although he was ideologically committed to the superiority of 'savoir', his heart, as we have already seen, was literally given to 'connaitre'.

Lewis, then, was a romantic by disposition before he came a romantic by conviction. His commitment to romance and reason – to 'connaitre' and 'savoir' – can be seen in the subtitle to his first Christian book after his conversion. The book, published in 1933, was entitled The Pilgrim's Regress, and the subtitle is: 'an allegorical apology for Christianity, reason and romanticism'. The Pilgrim's Regress is not one of Lewis's great books, but it points to much of his future work.

John, our pilgrim, is born in Puritania and dreams, or intuits, a beautiful island. He goes in search of this paradise along what Lewis calls the main road – perhaps this reminds us (and it should), of Lewis's great viaduct of 'mere Christianity' towering over the uncertain terrain of marsh and tracks. In the Regress, the main road is bordered by the northern lands of cold but strident reason, which lead to arrogance and atheism. To the south, the siren lands of emotional unreason beckon him. The message is clear: reason and romance when both taken to excess can kill. Stay on the main road, adopt the golden mean, stick to the viaduct of 'mere Christianity', don't let the letter of the law kill, or romantic longing overcome you. If you are an Anglican, like Lewis, you might of course see the main road in terms of the Anglican via media.

Its also worthy of note that in The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis, who spent most of his adult life believing that the doctrine of progress was a poison stemming from the philosophical Enlightenment, asks us to see pilgrimage in terms not of civilisation marching onwards, but a personal return to the garden, a regress to the world of childhood wonder, an inward turn where we find in the stillness of our heart the place to go 'further up and further in'. When pilgrim John eventually finds his paradise, it turns out to be adjacent to home. Home, after all, is where the heart is.

Between the time Lewis left Malvern school and took up his studies at Oxford university, he spent three years with a private tutor, Mr Kirkpatric, at Great Bookham in Surrey, England. A former teacher of his father, the private tutees called him 'the Great Knock'. Under his tutelage – for the great knock was as much a tartar as a tutor – Lewis became precociously proficient at ancient languages. Before his youth was out, he had become not only fluent in Latin and classical Greek, but also New Testament and Attic Greek.

The time with the Knock was an important period of Lewis's life, for the old man was a stickler for logic and a master of Socratic dialogue. Wilson tells the amusing story that when Jack arrived in Great Bookham, he remarked that Surrey was much wilder than expected. 'Stop!' shouted the Knock. 'What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?' He then continued to show Lewis that much of what he had said was unreflective, if not meaningless. Lewis was later to say that the Knock would have been a logical positivist if born at a later date. As it was, he was also a humanist and an unbeliever.

The problem was that Lewis found it harder to reject Christians. Men such as Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and J.R.R. Tolkien were all Christians, and he preferred their company, as well as their aesthetics, to the progressive set he aspired to belong to. To make matters worse for an Ulster Irishman, Tolkien was a Roman Catholic!

Between 1920 and 1925 when Lewis was elected to a fellowship in English language at Magdalene College, Oxford, both his interests and his beliefs tilted away from progressive ideas and towards the 'sapientia', or eternal wisdom, of the ancients on the one hand, and to religious belief on the other hand. Lewis found, despite the Great Knock's predilection for positivism, that he had little sympathy for the new philosophy stemming from Moore, Whitehead, Russell and Wittgenstein.

He found instead that he preferred the idealism of Victorian idealist T.H. Green, the Cambridge Platonism of the 17th century philosopher, Henry More, and perhaps above all he was convinced by the arguments of Bishop Berkeley of the 18th century that spiritual reality is primary and that material life is the appearance, or perception, of the spiritual world. He seems to have been at least half convinced by his friend Owen Barfield that the most primitive animism which saw spirits, elves, and sprites in every brook and tree was in some sense profoundly true.

This philosophical shift was no small matter in Lewis's development, for once he embraced idealism and the strains of Platonism, he was never to abandon them. As we will shortly see, they helped him to embrace Christianity.

By 1929, Lewis had recaptured his childhood love of mythology to such an extent that he had come not merely to revel in them but also to believe that they embodied truth greater than the truths of fact. This high view of myth Lewis later came to see as a gleam of divine light enlightening the human imagination (a view similar to that held by the great Romantic figure, Samuel Coleridge).

Myths were to be seen as refractions of spiritual or divine reality. Lewis was not yet a Christian, but he had become a theist – that is, he had gone beyond monistic deism to belief that a personal God of some kind existed. In his rooms at Oxford, as he later confessed, he got down on his knees a dejected convert, and assented that God was God. In 1929, also, Albert Lewis died at the age of 66. Lewis was full of remorse, and felt guilty at the way he had often ridiculed his father. He did not yet know it, but he was close to conversion.

This happened in 1931 and there were two parts to it. The first part was intellectual conviction, and it was Tolkien, egged on by Dyson, that helped bring it about. Tolkien convinced Lewis that what was original and unique about Jesus Christ is that he was myth become fact. To use a notion of Lewis's later writings, which he gleaned from Bishop Berkeley, higher and spiritual things could be transposed into lower material ones. In the incarnation, myth was grounded and yet still remained myth despite its unique and particular historical embodiment. Divinity and materiality coinhered, to use a patristic formula, and Jesus Christ of Nazareth was not only revealed as Emmanuel (God with us), but as one of us: the God-Man – though, to be honest, I have expressed this in a more theological way than Lewis typically did.

The second phase of Lewis's conversion we might call the existentialist part. On 28th September 1931 Jack went on a trip with friends to Whipsnade Zoo. When the journey began, he was still not a convinced Christian, but by the time he arrived, he was. He had given in to the claims of the gospel, or in the language of Francis Thompson, the 'hound of heaven' had at last caught his prey.

Existentially, however, Lewis had changed from the old man and had begun the long regress to the new one. Once he had turned to Christ he never let go, even though his faith was sorely tested when Joy died. He once said that you should stick to a great idea when it has commanded your attention, and if he ever had considerable intellectual doubts about Christianity he never wrote of them (although in A Grief Observed, he does wonder about the goodness of God).

Even on the level of wish-fulfilment, I think Lewis would have followed Christ, even if he ever wondered whether the myth of the dying king had indeed been grounded as historical fact. Perhaps we remember Puddleglum's defiance of the witch in Lewis's Narnia book, The Silver Chair, when he said: 'That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live like a Narnian even if there isn't any Narnia.'

But of course I am just speculating here. What I think is of religious significance is that once Lewis turned to Christ, the Lord commandeered his attention day and night. Lewis knew he was intellectually arrogant and intimidating and when he embraced the Christian faith he also embraced its disciplines. He attended Anglican liturgy weekly and faithfully took the blessed sacrament. Despite his Ulster Protestantism, his Anglicanism was more High Church than low. He attended confession weekly when he could, and took spiritual direction for his life from the local priest.

Not only did he give virtually all his free time to writing and defending the Christian faith, but he also gave his money to charities and people in need. If A.N. Wilson is correct in his unproven assertion that he had sexual relations when he was a young undergraduate with Mrs Moore, the mother of his wartime friend Paddy, he more than atoned as he looked after her well into her old age, doing the most menial chores cheerfully and without stint.

Looking back now, we can see what a champion of the faith Lewis has been (and remains today through his writings). When the theologians and Christian philosophers fell like a pack of cards before the advance of liberalism in between the two World Wars, it was Lewis who armed himself for the fight. While he was not a professional philosopher, he wrote of the Problem of Pain, upheld the classical moral virtues in the Abolition of Man, defended Miracles, and advanced the cause of historic Christianity with skill and bombastic aplomb.

Speaking of the generation just before and after the Second World War, professor Basil Mitchell, a professional philosopher, said of Lewis that 'he both intellectually and imaginatively made [Christianity] seem credible again.' But it was not only the intellectuals who took heart. By 1942, the 'apostle to the sceptics', as Lewis had become known, published a work of devastating wit and spiritual power, called The Screwtape Letters – ostensibly written by a senior devil to his nephew Wormwood. So brilliant and imaginative was this book, and yet so accessible to the general public, that Lewis became a household name, and his (rather flattering) likeness appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Lewis wrote three science fiction novels, the second of which, Perelandra, is one of his great works, but of course we all know that Lewis went on to pen the seven Narnia chronicles which have now become nothing less than children's classics. Before we draw to an end, we cannot let them pass by without comment. The chronicles are more episodic than epic, more impressionistic than pre-Raphaelite in detail. They are not careful 'sub creations' in the Tolkien mould, and in fact Tolkien did not like them.

The children are white, middle-class English boys and girls with somewhat stilted and 'golly gosh' speech. Except for the spunky Lucy, the girls are not very interesting. What is interesting is that Lewis turned his hand to children's fairy tales after being defeated in a debate on naturalism at the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1948 by the formidable Elizabeth Anscombe. After this debate, Lewis never wrote Christian apologetics again.

What he did do was to regress to his childhood, fall back on his imagination, and let his word pictures and baptized images tumble onto the page with almost reckless abandon. Everything from neo-Platonism, patristic theology, Norse legend – even Father Christmas – is thrown in to the mix. On the one hand, the Narnia stories are careless, incomplete works (the chronology does not fit); on the other hand, they are immediate (like film), magical and emotionally intense. The Narnia stories are 'ripping yarns' because Lewis himself 'lets rip'. Ostensibly written for children, I think they were really written by Lewis for himself (and possibly for Warnie, too).

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is arguably the more accomplished work, but Narnia grabs the attention with its power and numinous quality. Lewis, of course, wrote the Narnia stories not as Christian allegories but as myth. He would have been content, I am sure, if through them children learned of good and evil, the cardinal virtues, and perhaps, at best, even experienced 'Sehnsucht' for themselves.

'I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor, and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were influences. George MacDonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity.

They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representatives of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries – that 'Christianity' is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so.

Measured against the ages, 'mere Christianity' turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive and self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in François de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne.

In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe – Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed 'Paganism' of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queen and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet – after all – so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life: 'an air that kills / From yon far country blows'.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed, also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then.

Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.'

Page © Ship of Fools 1998