From the standpoint of both Catholics and Protestants, C.S. Lewis is undoubtedly one of the greatest teachers of the twentieth century. He used his surpassing gifts as a scholar and an inspired creative writer (along with an obviously deep fund of personal spiritual experience) to communicate real religion.
Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on November 29, 1898. By the time he was sixteen, he had become an inveterate reader, developed into a habitual walker, and turned into an atheist. Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Lewis was wounded in action in the Battle of the Somme. Before enlisting he had attended University College, Oxford, and after the war he returned to complete his studies. In 1925 Lewis became a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. Five years later he was converted to Christianity — in his own view the most important event of his life. He remained at Oxford until 1954 when he was elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a  post he   held   until a few weeks before his death in November 1963.
Lewis wrote in many modes, but perhaps his greatest genius lay in his ability to teach by narrative. Of special interest are the so-called children’s stories, the Chronicles of Narnia. Next, the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). The Screwtape Letters is Lewis’s most popular book, and it stands in a class by itself for good fun and brilliant Christian apologetics. Other superb fiction: Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce, and Of Other Worlds. In the front rank of Lewis’s nonfiction works are: Mere Christianity. Miracles, The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain., The Discarded Image, and The Four Loves. CS Lewis List
“A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way, man has the “shape” or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has.
“What man, in his natural condition, has not got, is spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. The difference between biological life and spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe; but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
“And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”
--Condensed from the Chapter, "Beyond Personality," in Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, (New York, 1960: The Macmillan Company) Mere Christianity
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