An enormous crowd gathers in Westminster Abbey to mark
the addition of a new name to those of the dramatists and scribes
remembered in Poets' Corner.
Among our great national poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
they are commemorating a man who is very well known for his prose,
not so well known for writing verse.
CS Lewis wasn't a great poet,
but his prose guarantees him immortality.
People think of CS Lewis as the author of the Chronicles Of Narnia.
But the Narnia tales were only the smallest fraction
of a vast literary output.
Lewis was an atheist who became a zealous Christian
who dedicated himself a rational basis for the faith.
I'd like to deal with the difficulty some people find
about the whole idea of prayer.
His theological books and broadcasts made him one of
the made most influential Christian thinkers of the modern age.
Almost certainly, God is not in Time.
But theology wasn't his real job.
Lewis was, in fact, a scholar of medieval literature,
and a great teacher.
20 years ago, I wrote a biography of Clive Staples Lewis,
and I suppose what fascinated me about him
was he was a man of contrasts.
He lived through the first part of the 20th century,
but he hated the modern age.
He was a popular theologian, but he had great crisis of faith.
He was an extremely clever person, but a total incompetent.
He failed the driving test 17 times.
He ended his days as a university professor,
but he was always a man who at key moments
was ruled not by his head but by his heart.
Lewis wrote over 60 books and essays for adults,
but is best remembered for the seven stories he wrote for children.
It's said that CS Lewis' Narnia stories
have sold over 100 million copies.
And for those many fans, he is a hero.
The chief characters in the stories are children,
and the formative influence his own childhood.
But was that a happy childhood? Absolutely not.
CS Lewis was born in 1898.
His parents were surprisingly liberal for their time.
He grew up surrounded by books on all subjects,
with no limit to what he could read.
Lewis would make his life and his fame
in the most English of surroundings.
But he was in fact an Ulsterman, from Belfast.
This is the Little Lea, the house which Albert Lewis,
a prosperous Belfast solicitor, had built for his family.
And it's the scene
of all CS Lewis' earliest childhood imaginative experiences.
At the end of an upstairs corridor,
in what they called "the little end room,"
Clive, known as Jack, and his brother Warren,
known as Warnie, created a fantasy world.
In his autobiography, "Surprised By Joy,"
Jack Lewis recalls a moss and twig diorama forest
that Warnie made for him on a biscuit tin lid.
The first sight of it awakened an obsession with the natural world,
but a hyperreal version of it.
Magical, surreal, mythic.
Something more pungent than the real thing.
He called it "Paradise," the first beauty he ever knew.
This was the beginning of Lewis' sense of longing,
an elation felt and immediately lost, like fragrance.
He described it as "An unsatisfied desire
"that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction."
In German, they call it Sehnsucht.
It was a rapture he experienced when reading the poet Longfellow,
on seeing a flowering bush in the garden,
and, most significantly,
when reading of the bushy-tailed superhero
Squirrel Nutkin.
Like most children of his generation,
Lewis had read stories about talking animals.
The mad March Hare in Lewis Carroll,
or the clothed creatures in Beatrix Potter.
So, it's hardly surprising when he started to invent his own stories
as a child, his invented world, Boxen,
was a place full of talking animals.
Jack and Warnie were happy in their imaginative worlds,
but their joy was short-lived.
In 1908, when Jack was only nine, their mother Flora died from cancer.
Poor little Jack, tormented by toothache,
called out for his mother in the dark, and she didn't come.
And he couldn't understand why she didn't come.
And he called again, and his father came to him in tears
and broke the news.
It was always devastating to Lewis
that he'd never had the chance to say goodbye to his mother.
Before the death there was the happy, golden childhood
in Northern Ireland.
After it, there was the dark.
He later wrote, "It was all sea and islands now.
"The great continent had sunk, like Atlantis."
The most recent biographer of CS Lewis is Alister McGrath.
He vividly captures the child who would become the great man.
The death of Flora Lewis
really brought that idyllic period to an end.
It meant that Lewis had lost the lodestar of his life, I think.
It's very clear that Lewis saw his mother as a figure of stability.
His father's decision to send Lewis away to boarding school
in England immediately after his mother's death - I mean,
it may have been well-intentioned, but it was a mistake.
And, I think, led to alienation between Lewis and his father,
but also, I think, led Lewis to really feel lonely,
isolated and wondering, "Why on earth?"
Things were all about, how could he reconnect with a lost family life?
Being sent to school in England so soon after Flora's death
was something the nine-year-old Lewis felt acutely.
He never forgot the horrible experience of sitting on the boat
going over to England for the first time and hearing the English voices.
They made him feel an alien.
And although he spent all his grown-up life in England,
he never quite lost that sense, that sense of alienation
which went, as his strong imagination developed,
with this romantic feeling of yearning and longing
for something that was forever lost.
MUSIC: "Siegfried's Funeral March" by Richard Wagner
Lewis hated his English schools.
He later described his experiences as worse than life in the trenches.
In his utter misery, he retreated into a world of fantasy.
And it was at his English boarding school in 1911
that he made two key discoveries in his emotional and aesthetic journey.
The sight of the mythic creatures in Arthur Rackham's illustration
for Wagner's Ring Cycle stirred romantic urges in Lewis.
And when hearing Wagner's music
of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods itself,
he was transported to what he describes as "pure Northernness,"
a vision of huge, clear spaces
hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight.
Lewis was a sensitive youth,
appalled by the brutality of public school.
He loathed athleticism, he couldn't catch a ball or wield a bat.
He used to say his whole life would have been different
if he'd had different thumbs.
He had these weird thumbs he'd inherited from his father,
that there was no joint in his thumb.
He could wield a pen all right, and always used a dip pen.
Luckily for him, his education was about to pass into the hands
of a man who cared not one jot about sporting prowess.
William Kirkpatrick was a patrician classicist from Northern Ireland
who'd taught Lewis' father.
On realising Jack's unhappiness at boarding school,
Albert Lewis decided to send his son to Kirkpatrick.
And it was Kirkpatrick who finished -
or, perhaps, started - Jack Lewis' education at his home
in the leafy Surrey village of Great Bookham.
Kirkpatrick was waiting to meet the train,
and the shy Lewis happened to remark
that he was surprised to find the countryside of Surrey so wild.
"Stop!" Said Kirkpatrick. "What do you mean by wild?
"And why should you have a presupposition
"about the nature of a countryside you've never seen in your life?"
Over three years, Kirkpatrick re-engineered Lewis intellectually,
making him a hardened dialectician, logician and orator.
By 18 years old, Lewis read the classics in the original languages
and could retain them all.
And there was another transformation.
The Ulster Protestant boy had turned into an Ulster Protestant atheist.
Like Kirkpatrick himself.
At 17 years old, Lewis no longer believed in heaven.
But he was about to step into an earthly hell.
Europe was in the throes of war.
And although Lewis won a place at Oxford to read classics in 1917,
he almost immediately volunteered for active service...
and was sent here to Keble College,
which had been requisitioned for officer training.
The cadets were arranged alphabetically in the dormitory,
and in the next-door bed was Paddy Moore, a young Irish boy,
very charming, with whom Lewis formed a friendship.
With their imminent departure to the front line,
Jack and Paddy made a pact.
If one of them didn't come back,
they'd care for the parents of the other.
Jack's father, Albert Lewis, or Paddy's mother, Janie Moore.
Paddy was sent to France in October 1917,
and Jack arrived a month later on his 19th birthday.
In writing about CS Lewis,
I was interested in the psychological turning points
that made him, and perplexed that the First World War
didn't seem to have been one of them.
He experienced the horror of trench warfare,
took prisoner a whole German platoon, and was wounded by shrapnel
that killed comrades standing next to him.
Fellow-combatants like Sassoon, Graves
and Rupert Brooke were inspired to write great poetry.
Lewis also wrote verse in the trenches,
but the collection, Spirits In Bondage,
was unremarkable.
He seems not to have been much moved by the horror of it all.
He described the experience as "unimportant."
Was he in denial?
In Surprised By Joy, Lewis uses a very interesting phrase,
"a treaty with reality."
What he means by that is, in effect, there is a firewall
he has constructed,
which keeps unsettling thoughts firmly on its other side.
My own feeling is that the reason he does this
is he found it so traumatic
that he even finds remembering it very, very difficult.
The War would, in fact, be a turning point for Jack Lewis.
Not creatively, but emotionally.
Through his friendship with Paddy Moore,
he met the woman with whom he'd spend most of his life.
On the 24th of March 1918, Paddy was indeed killed in action.
And Jack kept his part of the bargain,
to look after Paddy's mother.
With peace came a return to University College, Oxford.
He had rooms in college,
but he was living in the suburbs with Mrs Moore.
He was 20, she was 46.
Today, the CS Lewis industry includes tourism.
Guide Peter Cousin is familiar
with the succession of cheap lodging houses around Oxford
where Lewis and Mrs Moore, or Minto, as he called her,
lived between 1919 and 1930.
We're going to view the first accommodation
where Mrs Moore and Lewis had rooms.
Oh, yes, look - Anstey Villa.
It's quite a modest house.
Yes, it would be two or three-bedroom.
It was much more modest than the house that Lewis was brought up in.
Oh, yes.
They still had old gaslights,
and it definitely wouldn't have had any central heating.
No!
It's very touching to think of them there, isn't it, Peter?
It is, actually. Yes.
All the letters that Lewis wrote to his father Albert
have always got a college address. Yep.
He's trying to hide this relationship with Mrs Moore.
Lewis kept secret his relationship with Minto,
not just because he was adept
at compartmentalising emotional matters -
there were practical reasons for the subterfuge.
As an undergraduate at Oxford,
he was meant to be living in his college.
It's hard for us to imagine just how strict Oxford was in those days.
I had an old friend who was a few years younger than Lewis,
who was sacked in the 1920s from the University
for spending one night with a woman in Reading.
Lewis was living with Mrs Moore,
and he had to keep the relationship secret, too, from his father.
That his father was financing not just one student
but a family of three.
Not only was the 20-year-old Lewis caring for Minto,
but also for her daughter Maureen. He called Minto "Mother,"
and became a de facto stepfather to Maureen,
who was only eight years his junior.
There was clearly some sort of relationship
between Lewis and Mrs Moore
which mingled maternal affection and romantic love.
And I don't think we really understand that relationship
completely.
Mrs Moore, in effect, brought Lewis the stability, the affection,
the family context, that Lewis felt he was missing,
partly through the death of his mother,
but also through the increasing alienation that was building up
between himself and his father.
And living with a woman was a very dangerous thing to do. Oh, yes.
What Lewis did, in effect, was present Mrs Moore as his landlady.
"The reason why I'm spending time in her house
"is that I'm renting a room from her."
And then, as things got more complex, he presented Mrs Moore as his mother.
Kirkpatrick's training paid off, and by 1923,
Lewis had a first in classics to his name,
with another first in English literature for good measure.
He was increasingly steeping himself in his childhood love
of Norse mythology and everything medieval.
And it was with the fellow-medievalist JRR Tolkien
that Lewis formed the fellowship called the Inklings.
They were a handful of chaps who shared an interest
in academic debate, erudition and alcohol.
The Eagle and Child pub, always known as the Bird and Baby,
was their Oxford drinking den.
Lewis and cronies used to assemble here on Tuesdays
between twelve and one.
The general idea was to down as much beer as possible
before they ate lunch in their colleges.
Lewis had no small talk.
One of the friends once arrived with his broken arm in a sling -
Lewis didn't say, "Oh, poor you, you've broken your arm,"
it was straight into,
"What does anybody here think of the Venerable Bede?
"I've been rereading him, awfully good stuff."
Dyson, the loudest member of the group, once said to me,
"Anyone hearing us roar would assume we were talking bawdry.
"In fact, we were discussing literature and theology."
Lewis not only read the great poets, he's always dreamed of becoming one.
He'd tried his hand at war poetry, unsuccessfully,
and in 1926 he tried again,
with what he hoped would be his great work.
Dymer is a long, rambling narrative poem
about the citizen of a totalitarian state who wanders into a forest,
and there he meets a beautiful woman.
Only, it turns out she isn't a woman, she's really a monster.
Dymer and the woman-monster have congress,
and she gives birth to a son,
and when he grows up, he fights Dymer and kills him.
How do I know?
Not, unfortunately, because I've ever got to the end.
When I wrote my own book about Lewis, I found his prose,
whatever subject he addressed, electrifyingly readable.
But his poetry - oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.
And Dymer, I'm afraid, defeated me.
Poor old Lewis, it took him ten years to write,
and when it was published, it was such a flop.
And ever afterwards he felt so resentful of the success
and fame of his contemporary poets.
Lewis was, however, a great success as a medieval scholar.
His academic passion had paid off,
and in 1925 he had been appointed a fellow of Magdalen College
teaching English literature.
The position came with a salary of £500 a year, rooms and dining.
CS Lewis spent hours of his life in this wonderful place,
Duke Humfrey's Library,
reading and reading and reading primary texts.
The great texts of English literature,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton.
That was the stuff that interested him.
We tend to take it for granted that English literature
is one of the main subjects studied in universities,
but this was not the case when Lewis first got his job at Oxford.
Indeed, there were many of the all-male colleges
that didn't teach English at all.
They thought of it as a girl's subject.
Now, Tolkien and Lewis were very much of the opinion that
English literature should have a sound, scholarly
and, above all, historical base.
Laura Ash, fellow of Worcester College Oxford,
is a medievalist with an appreciation
of the Irish man's contribution to the field.
I think people forget how young English literature is as a subject.
Lewis picked it up in a year after he'd done the real
subject of classics.
This was a time when people were staking out the ground.
What's the point? Is this a technical subject
or is it a subject about grand ideas of culture and the human?
I think that is very clearly Lewis' approach.
It's exhilarating reading his work.
When you read something like The Allegory Of Love written in 1936,
what he does is draw us into seeing the world in a new way.
He says, "My own eyes are not enough for me.
"I will see through the eyes of others.
"And reality is not enough for me.
"I will see what other men have invented."
So what was it like having CS Lewis as your tutor?
What was it like being taught by him in these rooms just above me here
in New Buildings, Magdalen College?
His nickname was Heavy Lewis and he could be a bit heavy.
One of his pupils once said he couldn't see
the point of Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum great epic poem.
Lewis was so appalled, that he reached for his old
regimental sword which was lying in the corner of the room
and said, "The sword must settle this."
But it wasn't all confrontation.
When he first encountered his tutor, actor to be, Robert Hardy,
was in uniform as he was when we met.
Robert, I notice you're wearing a Magdalen College tie.
Yes, I put it on for the occasion.
That was presumably where you met CS Lewis. Yes, absolutely.
I vividly remember going through the Porters' Lodge and there on the lawn,
coming towards me, I saw a man and I thought, "Oh, it's a gardener."
But he had a tie on, so I thought, he's the head gardener.
Then immediately behind me, as he passed, he said, "Are you Hardy?"
I admitted and he said,
"Oh, well, there now, it's 11 o'clock
"and I'm going to be five minutes late. I'm Lewis, by the way."
I couldn't believe it.
I was absolutely staggered at his appearance.
From reading all the stuff that my tutor at school had told me
to read, I'd got a picture of Lewis.
It was an El Greco Jesuit.
Thin, insistent, you know and rather frightening.
Probably pale and intense. Pale and intense, absolutely.
But my goodness me, there was this jolly farmer and I was absolutely
in my element because I'm a country bumpkin, so I adored him ever after.
Did he entertain his pupils? Oh, yes, he did.
He gave wonderfully jolly
and extraordinary parties with lots of booze.
I can remember being hopelessly behind with an essay and I said,
"Mr Lewis, I wonder, would it be possible, I'm supposed to be
"reading my essay too tomorrow but I haven't quite finished it.
"I wonder if I could come on Thursday."
And he said, "No, no, no, don't bother about it for a second.
"Come next Wednesday at the usual time
"with an extra specially good essay.
"The great thing about being at university, is to enjoy
"yourself which I hope you are.
"Besides, look at you in uniform,
you'll be off soon and may well get killed.
It's proper that you enjoy yourself."
Which I thought was wonderful.
Lewis was only a little older than his pupils
but to those he took to, he seems to have been fatherly.
His relations with his own father, however, were more difficult.
In 1929, Albert Lewis was taken ill.
His son was at an emotional crossroads.
Lewis came home to Belfast to see his father.
He and Albert had barely been in contact for a decade
even though his father had supported him through his career.
Lewis regarded his treatment of his father as the greatest
sin of his life.
But they were reconciled.
When he realised Albert Lewis was dying,
Jack came back to East Belfast and they had six golden weeks
together in which the two men forged a friendship.
Sadly, the Oxford term was about to begin and Lewis left.
Four days later, after waving goodbye to his son,
Albert Lewis died.
Lewis returned here for his father's funeral
and left this window, behind me, as a memorial to his parents.
His father was, for Lewis, a symbol of a lost childhood.
It wasn't so much his father he liked,
it was much more what his father represented.
One of the most moving parts of Lewis'
correspondence, is his description of how after his father's death,
he and his brother bury all their childhood toys in the ground,
almost saying, let's get closure on this.
This is the end of childhood.
The Lewis boys drew a line and moved on, or did they?
Jack Lewis had replaced his dead mother with a mother substitute.
Albert's passing coincided with what might be
seen as a process of finding a replacement father figure.
Lewis had gone to the Western front, a devout atheist
and returned with his convictions hardened.
It was to be a slow process but at 30, he began to change.
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.
Lewis started to attend his college chapel here.
This is his stall as a fellow of the college.
But, of course, at this stage, he still simply believed in God.
He hadn't advanced to the position of believing in Jesus Christ.
He had not yet completed his journey.
Lewis had been a modern man, someone who believed in the modern
materialist philosophy, that the world is all there is,
that we live in a world of matter and matter alone.
Yet he hated being modern. He felt as though he'd been imprisoned.
This is how he describes it in his autobiography.
The odd thing was that before God closed in on me,
I was in fact offered what now appears a moment
of prolifically choice.
I became aware I was holding something at bay or shutting
something out or if you liked, I was wearing some stiff
clothing like corsets or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster.
He felt he was being given the choice either to keep this
suit of armour on or to discard it.
He made the choice to discard the carapace of modern materialism.
This rather weird experience, this liberation of Lewis' imagination
occurred on the bus going home from Magdalen after a day's work
to Headington and Mrs Moore.
Lewis, the great medievalist and lover of ancient mythology,
could see the attraction of Christianity
but he could not yet believe it,
until one very significant conversation
with his close friend, JRR Tolkien.
On the night of the 19th of September 1931, they were here
with another friend, Hugo Dyson, on Addison's Walk in Magdalen College.
As they walked, Dyson and Tolkien talked to Lewis about religion.
They talked about myth.
"How could it be," Lewis said,
"that there are so many myths in the old world
"in Egypt, Greece, the Nordic mythologies,
"of a young man God dying and coming back to life?"
Baldr, in the Nordic mythology, Adonis in Greece.
How do you distinguish between that
and Jesus Christ in the gospels who surely is a mythological
figure who dies in order to rise and save us from our sins?
Isn't that just a myth too?
"Yes," said Tolkien. "Of course Christianity is a myth.
"It just happens to be the one myth which is true."
Tolkien, in particular, was able to show Lewis that Christianity
was a story, a sense making story that grasped the imagination
but this one was right.
If this one was right, it positioned all other myths
and Lewis suddenly realised this was the missing link, this enabled him to
see how Christianity and literature connected up with each other.
Lewis' central problem -
how could the Christian myth be the only true one - was dealt with.
All religions glimpse the wonder of God,
but Christianity is the big picture.
The moment of enlightenment happened not on the road to Damascus,
but on the B489 to Dunstable.
They were having a family outing to Whipsnade Zoo.
Maureen, Minto, Warnie and Jack.
Lewis tells us that when they set out on that journey,
he didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God.
By the time they'd arrived at Whipsnade, he did.
Still committed to life at home looking after Minto and Maureen,
Lewis was now a full convert to Christianity.
He saw it his duty to explain his new faith
and began to write as a Christian apologist.
The Screwtape Letters, about human temptation,
describe how one senior devil instructs a junior devil.
And The Problem Of Pain written in 1940 tries to explain
how a loving God can allow us to suffer.
EXPLOSION
In summer 1940, France fell, and in September,
the aerial bombardment of Britain's population began.
Lewis' writings chimed with hard times
and his apologetics were inspirational fireside reading.
But radio was the medium of the age,
and the best means of broadcasting Lewis' words of comfort.
'Almost certainly, God is not in Time.
'He has infinity in which to listen to the split-second of prayer
'put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.'
At the beginning of the Second World War, the BBC asked Lewis to
give broadcast talks, a defence of the Christian religion.
They had an immense effect.
Many people regarded Lewis as the greatest broadcaster of the war.
Many placed him above Churchill himself.
'God has infinite attention.
'You're as much alone with him as if you were the only thing
'he'd ever created.'
In 1952, Lewis published a version of his wartime talks.
The book has never been out of print.
Mere Christianity is one of his most popular books.
One of the great strengths of Lewis' wartime talks
is the way in which he's able to use language
which really resonates with his audience.
He tells stories, he uses analogies, he speaks in a very accessible way.
One person was described it as a port wine and plum pudding voice.
But there's an intellectual content to what Lewis is saying as well.
It's not, "Here are very good reasons for believing in God,"
it's much more, "Look, if there were a god,
"doesn't that make a lot of sense of what we experience within us
"and observe around us?"
The wartime broadcasts made him a star at home
and the publication in 1942 of The Screwtape Letters
made him an American celebrity.
But by an irony, his ability to popularise theological ideas
made him hated in the one place that really mattered to him - Oxford.
Seen from the outside, at 44, Lewis was in his prime.
But the Oxford academics weren't so impressed.
What was an English don doing writing popular theology?
Lewis was a spellbinding lecturer.
So popular, they found it difficult to get lecture halls large enough
to accommodate his audiences.
He was by far the most distinguished member
of the Oxford English faculty and yet,
when it came to getting professorships and promotion,
he was always passed over. Why?
Because the mean-spirited Oxford dons resented his popularity.
Also, in post-war Oxford, Christianity was hated
and Lewis was really a martyr for his faith, much to Oxford's shame.
'And when it came to finding relief,
'there wasn't so much at home, either.'
Since 1930, Lewis and his brother had shared this house,
The Kilns, with Minto and Maureen Moore.
Today, the place is a shrine presided over
by acolytes like Deborah Higgins.
Welcome to The Kilns.
Thank you very much indeed. Yes, come into the common room. Wonderful.
This is where Lewis would've received you.
It's also where Lewis did some writing.
There was a desk under the window just like this one.
There he is. Yes.
He did have bookcases on either side of the fireplace. Lovely.
He owned over 3,000 books himself,
and then also have the map here of Narnia.
A very lovely thing to have. Yes, it is. It's beautiful.
This typewriter is our only original artefact from the two brothers
and it's Major Warren Lewis' typewriter.
It was on this very machine that he typed? Yes.
He said in his diary he typed over 12,000
of Lewis' fan mail letters.
Let's take a look upstairs. Certainly. There's three bedrooms.
That was Maureen's room...
this one, which was Mrs Moore's room, and then this one which was
CS Lewis' bedroom, so a very frugal room.
They probably only had about two fires
that were ever lit in the house. One...
Yes, there's often a picture of him wearing a thick dressing gown. Yes.
In CS Lewis' letters, he writes someone and tells them that he
reached out to get a cup of water and the water was frozen.
Conditions were wintry, all right.
By the end of the war, Minto was 73 and her health was deteriorating.
Warnie, now an alcoholic, increasingly depended on Jack.
Lewis' faith might have been holding him together at home,
but his confidence was seriously shaken
one February evening in 1948.
The Socratic Society was a Christian debating club.
CS Lewis often came to debate the philosophical implications of
Christianity or how these religious ideas impacted on society at large.
He must have looked forward to one of his debating evenings
in which the cut and thrust of the famous Lewis
was on display and his opponents were all over the floor.
How wrong he was.
Sir Anthony Kenny was a priest before he became a philosopher.
He knew Lewis' debating opponent well,
an immensely gifted scholar named Elizabeth Anscombe.
As a philosopher, she would become legendary,
as would her encounter with Lewis.
Lewis had published a book called Miracles
in which he maintained that if everything that we say and think
is the result of purely mechanical processes in our brain,
then there can't be any value,
there can't be any truth, nothing can be either true or false.
And Anscombe refuted this with a rather simple argument.
She said, "Suppose I stand on one of those weighing machines
"that say, 'I speak your weight.'
"And it says to me, 'You weigh 15 stone', that is true
"even though it is produced by totally mechanical means."
And this simple argument did really undercut Lewis' position.
It's a paradox, isn't it? Because a lot of people
saw it as a conflict between the Christian Lewis
and this bright, sparky, young woman but in fact she was
fervently Christian as well.
Yes, she was a very devout Roman Catholic.
That was what particularly wounded Lewis,
he felt they should have been allies fighting side-by-side
in the battle against naturalism and secularism.
And here he was, brought down by friendly fire.
After the Anscombe debate, Lewis felt humiliated.
I remember Dyson telling me that he'd come back to the pub,
Lewis, and he put his head in his hands and said,
"I've been utterly crushed, I've been humiliated."
And he wrote afterwards that he'd been obliterated as an apologist.
And it's very striking that after that moment,
Lewis wrote no more Christian apologetics
aimed at converting unbelievers.
He'd already written a highly successful space trilogy
and he'd been dabbling with the idea of children's stories,
but it's surely no accident that after his humiliation
in a philosophical debate in Oxford,
he turned to the world beyond the wardrobe.
Even before they were adapted for television in 1988,
the Narnia books had made CS Lewis a household name all over the world.
The four children in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
go to stay in the house of a Professor Kirke, who bears more than a passing resemblance
to Kirkpatrick, Lewis' old tutor.
They find at top of his house a magic wardrobe,
when they pass through it they've entered the land of Narnia.
When the professor discovers that they've had this experience,
he's amazed that they haven't related it
to reading the philosopher Plato.
Plato who believed that this world
was but the shadow of a real world beyond.
In another way you could say the Narnia stories
were an enactment of that great conversation he had with Tolkien
about a myth which happened to be true.
This magical world of Narnia
was a work of Lewis' imagination,
but it's easy to see the influences of the landscape
that Jack and Warnie grew up in,
of northerness, thin light and remnants of a land beyond.
Almost the first physical contact that Lewis had with the Middle Ages
must have been in the ruined castles of Northern Ireland,
where he had holidays with his mother.
Just up the bay from here, Dunluce Castle,
which many people think is the model for Cair Paravel the castle in Narnia.
At the end of the Narnia stories in The Last Battle,
Cair Paravel is besieged and it seems as though everything is lost
and the children believe
that the forces of good have been defeated.
But they learn that everything they've loved in this life
has actually been preserved for them.
A very potent image by Lewis.
A feeling that all his longings
and all the things he's loved and lost in this life
will, in fact, be kept and preserved.
As with the buried childhood toys in the garden of Little Lea,
Lewis clung onto the hope that the love he had for his lost mother
would in some way be saved, unspoiled by separation.
The Narnia Chronicles come straight from the heart
and it is in these adventures we see most clearly
the combination of Lewis the Christian and Lewis the medievalist.
I think what he was doing with the whole world of Narnia
was developing a world which makes symbolism true.
Whether or not you think our real world is symbolic of a higher reality,
it's very clear that Lewis' invented Narnian world
is symbolic of some higher reality that he was reaching toward.
I mean, when you have for example Aslan the lion giving up his life as he lies on the slab,
it's a symbol of Christ's atoning sacrifice. Right, exactly.
What we suddenly get is an access of really sharp medieval theology,
because we have Aslan explain when he's resurrected...explain to the children
that what he's done is play a trick on the evil queen,
whereby she has been tricked into sacrificing an innocent who had no guilt
in the place of someone else who was guilty and therefore the magic is broken, death is overturned.
Now that is absolutely the theory of Christ's crucifixion in the Middle Ages. Hmm.
And there it is set out in the middle of this children's book.
Lewis had no children of his own.
He'd started his relationship with Mrs Moore
when he was 19 and she was 45,
so even if they'd married they could hardly have had children.
But she had children and she was a very motherly type and, indeed,
adopted in an informal way quite a lot of children over the years.
And when war came this house, The Kilns,
filled up with evacuee children.
Amongst them a Londoner named June Flewett, who in 1942 joined them as an evacuee.
She would grow up to become actress Jill Raymond,
then wife of MP Clement Freud.
She adored Lewis' books,
but at first Jill had no idea who the tweedy owner of The Kilns was.
I'd been there two or three days which he arrived
and I was in the kitchen and Mrs Moore said, "Oh, here's Jack."
I was able to chat him quite happily as a 16-year-old girl
until a few days later when I looked at the book shelves
and saw all these books by CS Lewis.
He was my hero but I had no idea that it was Jack.
Certainly, I should think for nearly a week,
I was unable to look at him, to speak to him.
I felt so shy. HE LAUGHS
I just thought he was wonderful, which he was.
Jack was an extremely kind man to you personally. Oh...
he was...the kindest person.
I mean, when I left, he paid my fees
at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two years.
I could never have had that training without him.
He changed my life, because he allowed me to become a professional actress.
Jill is possibly the only person surviving who knew Minto
and who witnessed the relationship between her and Jack.
It was the most loving...gentle,
kind relationship between the two of them.
More visibly from his side, because she was...she was a feisty lady
and I don't think she showed her emotions very easily.
When I got there, I found
that she had open varicose ulcers on her legs.
But Jack was so gentle with her and so kind and so loving and always...
looking after her and trying to do the best for her that he could.
Lewis was a man with a strong desire to change lives for the better,
but there was one person he couldn't much help.
Minto, his first love, had been there for Jack for 33 years,
but she was suffering from dementia and he was fretted by two worries,
the illness itself and having to find £500 a year
to pay for her care.
And then in January 1951,
the worry was taken from him, dear old Minto died.
The death of the second woman he had so loved must have reminded him of the first,
of his mother whom he lost at the tender age of nine.
A time when he felt so terribly alone.
In 1954, the University of Cambridge
offered its first chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature to Lewis.
It was a post tailor-made and designed with him in mind.
His Allegory of Love
was the standard text on courtly love and he'd just completed
his impressive volume on 16th-century literature.
It's astonishing then that when Cambridge offered him the job, he declined it...twice.
His reasons were entirely emotional.
Lewis believed when Cambridge offered him this job
that he'd have to come for the whole term, eight weeks and more,
so be away from Oxford for the best part of two or three months.
And this was something he felt he just couldn't do.
Partly he loved the pubs and his friends at Oxford,
but the real reason was Warnie.
He was the only person who'd really care for Warnie when Warnie was in the grip of alcoholism.
Obviously, Jack couldn't explain that to Cambridge,
but Professor Tolkien was the hero of the hour,
he told Cambridge that Lewis was frightened of leaving Oxford for such a long time
and they said, "Of course, you can commute."
After he learnt that, Lewis accepted the job.
Lewis immediately liked Cambridge
and, unlike Oxford, Cambridge liked him.
Lewis decided the fenland town was smaller, softer
and more old-fashioned.
Jack gave his first lecture on his 56th birthday,
29th of November. 1954.
The move to a new university made the headlines,
the BBC even considered doing a live broadcast
of a lecture which promised to be an absolute corker.
Lewis presented to an appreciative audience
not an argument but a man, himself.
The Old World from classical times to the 19th century
was all essentially the same, then came machines and atheism.
Lewis wasn't part of the modern, unbelieving, technologically advancing world.
He was prehistoric and glad of it.
He ended his lecture by telling his Cambridge audience
that what they'd hired was an example of "Old Western Man".
He was selling himself as a kind of intellectual dinosaur
It was rather an absurd claim since he belonged
to the same generation as the people to whom he was speaking.
What I suppose he meant was he was a modern man who simply hated being modern.
But it made wonderful theatre.
'Speaking not for myself but for all other western men,
'old western men whom you may meet,
'I would say use your specimens while you can...
'there aren't going to be very many more dinosaurs.'
Despite Lewis' insistence that he firmly belonged in the past,
it looked as though he would last for ever.
He had 13 more books in him and more than 40 articles and papers.
The Four Loves in 1960, was the mature reflections
of a man who could look back on a lifetime of relationships.
With the wartime publication in the United States of The Screwtape Letters,
Lewis had become internationally famous.
With that fame came a vast correspondence,
particularly American.
Lewis made a point of replying to everyone.
He had hundreds of pen friends.
And one August day in 1952 found him in this hotel, The Eastgate,
awaiting a meeting with one of those pen friends.
He'd never met her, she was an American woman,
and they'd agreed to meet here for a cup of tea and a chat.
Joy Davidman was a former Communist and aspiring writer,
married but very unhappily with two sons.
She was 16 years younger than Jack Lewis and fell in love with him
or with the idea of him.
Douglas Gresham was the younger of Joy's two sons,
he and his brother David would eventually become Jack's stepsons.
He had never before met a mind quite so active and quite so broadly educated as hers.
Really? Absolutely. She was actually more widely read than he was.
Jack had read everything in Europe,
but my mother had read everything in Europe and everything in America as well.
Do you think at that stage they were friends really rather than...? Very good friends indeed.
And, of course, she'd been communicating with Jack by mail for some years. Oh, she had?
Yes, indeed. And, of course, she was divorced? Yes.
The Foreign Office had said that they were not going to renew her visitor's visa.
Jack very charitably said,
"Well, look, the answer to this if you're so insistent you really, really want to stay in England,
I'd rather you did, why don't we have a civil marriage ceremony?" It was his idea.
But it wasn't the marriage of love at that stage? No, it wasn't.
I think that didn't happen till quite sometime later.
Lewis called his autobiography Surprised By Joy
and now he really was surprised by a person called Joy
and so were his friends.
Bachelor Lewis had now become the stepfather of two little boys
and the fusty old Kilns was being knocked into shape
by an energetic American woman.
But it wasn't to be long before everything turned to catastrophe.
The telephone rang. And she'd been in pain
with what was diagnosed as sciatica and things like that for some time.
Quite a large amount of pain and she went to answer the telephone,
tripped and snapped her thigh bone.
She was taken off to hospital and found to be suffering from
what they thought was going to be very shortly terminal cancer.
I was taken to the hospital having come back from school
to be told that my mother was dying.
And I was ten years old and I knew no other human being in the world
really to relate to other than my mother.
She was expected to die within days or weeks and not to live any longer than that.
Jack had been here before.
Both women closest to him he had loved and lost
and memories must have rushed back,
but with them...something new.
The agonies of a woman he'd married as a favour seem to have inspired something deeper.
He wrote to his friend Dorothy L Sayers, "We soon learn to love what we know we must lose."
Joy might not have long and he needed to act fast.
He asked a pupil of his now a priest named Peter Bide
for a bedside marriage, this time with a Christian ceremony.
Peter Bide said, "What else could I do? The woman was dying! Lewis clearly loved her."
Peter Bide had had a history of...healing.
I think Lewis felt that that actually happened,
because Joy went into remission shortly afterwards.
And Lewis and Joy seemed to have enjoyed at least some time of relative happiness
before, unfortunately, the cancer came back.
In July 1960, Joy Lewis died at home with her husband at her bedside.
He was plunged into despair, left doubting the very God
he'd spent so many years explaining, championing, defending, believing.
He had held on to his faith when Minto died,
now Lewis felt abandoned.
His crisis of faith would be the last great turmoil of his life.
"No-one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
They're the opening words of A Grief Observed.
And the manuscript is preserved here in the Bodleian library.
It's an intensely moving thing looking at this manuscript.
It's written almost without correction, only 34 pages,
every one of which is so raw, so grief-stricken,
so full of pain, so honest.
And I think that's why it made such an enormous impact on so many different readers.
Whether you're contemplating your own death,
or whether you're in the hideous agony of grieving for somebody you love,
this is a book which speaks to you.
Do you think he lost his faith after she died?
I don't think Lewis lost his faith,
I think it went through a period of recalibration.
I think that Lewis began to realise that simplistic rationalisations of faith
actually had their limits,
and there were certain things that couldn't quite be put in those simple categories
he'd used earlier in this career.
Many would say that A Grief Observed is a much more mature and wise and raw book
than the simple rationalist argument of A Problem Of Pain.
BIRDSONG
Jack joined Joy and Minto just three years later,
dying from prostate cancer only seven days short of his 65th birthday
on the 22nd November, 1963.
On that bleak, raw November day
almost nobody came to the burial.
Warnie had taken to his bed,
too drunk to tell anybody the time of the funeral.
And in the world at large, in the newspaper, on the wireless,
Jack's death was overshadowed
by the news of President Kennedy's assassination on the very same day
and the passing of Aldous Huxley.
So his death like so much in CS Lewis' life...
was almost a secret.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
ALL: Amen.
Lewis set himself up as an intellectual at war with his own times,
but he wasn't really an intellectual,
he was always a man guided by his heart rather than by his head.
In fact, he had the temperament of a poet even though he couldn't write poetry
And although he was a man who lived his life in an exclusive male world of colleges,
that life was punctuated by the loss of the three women he loved.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd