Nothing predisposed the British writer Clive Staples Lewis, born in Belfast in 1898, to one day be able to guide his readers on the path of a peaceful and deep interiority. For the beginning of his relationship with God and faith was among the stormiest. The story of The Chronicles of Narnia, the children’s book saga that made him famous, begins when four brothers and sisters, separated from their parents by the Second World War, are sent to the manor of old Professor Kirke. During a game of hide-and-seek, they discover a magical wardrobe, a door to another world, Narnia, where winter has lasted a hundred years. A dark kingdom without Christmas, under the evil yoke of a terrible witch, a situation that resonates in many ways with the desperate youth of C. S. Lewis.

After a happy childhood, inspired and fascinated by the myths of Ireland told by their nanny, Flora, the beloved mother of Clive Staples and his older brother, Warren, falls ill with cancer in the winter of 1908. The young boy’s intense prayers do not prevent death from taking her the following summer. His grandfather, rector of the Anglican Church, died the same year. The childhood home becomes a place of sorrow. “Everything that was calm and reliable has disappeared from my life. A great continent had sunk, like Atlantis,” he wrote in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. His father, Albert, now unpredictable, sends his children to boarding school three weeks after her death. The experience would be traumatic. “I spent seven years in three different boarding schools, two of them horrible. I have never hated anything more.” Faced with his suicide threats, his father withdrew him to place him in the care of a kind tutor who, like the old professor, restored his taste for studies and enabled him to enter, on scholarship, Oxford in 1917.

Sent to the front in France in 1918, he returned from the war, having lost three dear friends, placing the reality of evil at the center of his reflection. “The deadliest evil is the one that passes itself off as something good. Wars are started by men in white collars who sincerely believe in the rightness of what they’re doing.” It also reinforced his rejection of God, already begun by earlier trials. “I was certain that God didn’t exist, but I was angry at him for not existing and even more so for having created this threatening, hostile world.”

Why we did this

C. S. Lewis is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, a fantasy novel saga for children that has sold more than 100 million copies and translated into over 50 languages. Considered one of the most popular British writers of the 20th century, he also owes his renown in the English-speaking world to his many apologetic works, which made him one of the major defenders of Christianity.

In his books, like The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, or The Four Loves, he skillfully blends cases from daily life, philosophical reflections, theological explanations, and ethical discourse to make a unique “honey,” always tinged with subtle humor, intended for his readers and listeners. He, a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford, was a brilliant jack-of-all-trades, always writing with fountain pen essays, theological satires, literary criticism, and talks for the famous BBC… But what a road to get there.

Marked by many trials, the writer’s life was not a smooth-flowing river. Lewis made use of it all, rejecting neither his anger nor his incomprehension in the face of evil and suffering, to draw from it the principles of an interior life attuned to the light of a rediscovered adult Christianity, thanks to encounters, friendship, and love found along the way. “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body,” he would write, in a reversal resembling tracing his own path.

It is this path that he invites us to share behind the exploits of his heroes, first and foremost the talking lion Aslan, the divine and Christlike figure of Narnia. Desire and joy, friendship and love, charity and hope… Nothing very exceptional, nothing comparable to magical spells and legendary creatures. But a path so discreet, sneaking even through the shadows, that perhaps it took an author of legends to point to its source.

The path of friendship In the early 1930s, the brilliant student, but by his own admission “a bit snobbish,” becomes a much-appreciated professor of classical literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. His life shifts once again. “I quickly noticed that many of my colleagues whom I admired had one strange thing in common: they were all Christians. Really, a young atheist has a hard time keeping his faith. There are traps everywhere.” One of these colleagues is J. R. R. Tolkien, the future author of The Lord of the Rings. The two professors quickly grow fond of one another, brought together by their love of myths and fairy tales. “Friendship is born when one person says to another, ‘What! You too?’”

Lewis decisively encouraged Tolkien to continue the vast work of The Lord of the Rings. In return, Tolkien convinced his friend to stop being an atheist, defending the idea that Christianity is an exceptional myth and become reality with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This connection between rejected faith and his childhood passion for the imagination sparks something. “I was plunged back into the land of longing. I was again a child on the hills near my home, gazing at the distant Mourne Mountains.” It is the joyful return to the landscapes of his native Northern Ireland. “The search for this unfulfilled desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it joy.” For Lewis, this movement of joy is the key to the development of interior life. “Joy is a kind of longing, a desire for something we have never known but know to be real,” he writes in The Problem of Pain.

Lewis then returns to the Anglican Church, though Tolkien urges him to become Catholic, and begins writing Narnia, with the talking lion Aslan as the hero, a divine and Christlike figure. Finding the fight between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland absurd, he asserts—knowing the risks—that loving one’s enemies is the key to the Christian life: “To love is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. The greatest revelation of Aslan’s love in Narnia is not his generosity toward the creatures he protects, but the suffering he is willing to endure for them.”

Introspection, prayer, and contemplation

He draws from his experiences a progressive method, both instinctive and intellectual, to orient his life. It begins with introspection. “The first step in drawing closer to God is to try to know yourself as you really are: not to try to be some pleasant imaginary character, but to recognize and accept exactly the complex creatures we are.” A quest marked by opening the heart through that friendship and love which made him reconsider the essential things.

Lewis then invites us to take the time to withdraw from the noise and bustle of the world to turn inward and listen to the voice of God. He recommends the practice of prayer, both personal and communal, like that of his little church, to which he remained faithful to the end. Far from being a retreat, this focus leads to contemplation of the world. “To see the beauty of nature, you need total surrender. Shut your mouth, open your eyes and ears. That’s why I never learned to drive. The happiest hours of my life were spent walking the countryside with old friends before heading to a small pub or inn.”

This simple joy finds its full meaning in sharing, first with friends. But according to him, this friendship only takes on meaning when it is submitted to charity, the highest form of love. “Charity is the love of God. It is giving, not receiving.” He would, moreover, give more than two-thirds of his income to charity anonymously. “True charity makes it possible to love what one does not find likable by nature. Only this love, coming from the human body, can truly transform our world's pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance.” In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis makes a seasoned demon, Screwtape, speak, giving—with much humor—advice to his young nephew to capture the souls of humans and undermine their interiority. One of them is to empty the concern for the fraternity of its object, to keep only a worldly charity in appearance: “There will always be a mix of goodwill and ill will in your patient’s soul. The essential thing is to direct all his ill will against his closest neighbors, those he meets every day, and to lead him to show goodwill to people who live on the other side of the world and whom he hardly knows.”

But succeeding in interior life is not only a question of willpower. It is also a matter of letting go in order to allow oneself to be transformed by grace in a voluntary surrender. This is a call to live fully and humbly, a virtue embodied by a small talking mouse, Reepicheep, in the Narnia saga.

Hope as a shield in the face of trials In 1950, two events once again changed the course of his life. First, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first volume of The Chronicles of Narnia, is published. It is a huge success. Then, he meets Joy Davidman, a Jewish divorcée sixteen years younger than him with two children. “Her presence in my life was going to throw into the fire everything I believed.” Lewis married her just as a new deadly cancer was diagnosed. A remission, considered “miraculous” by Lewis, saves Joy. The couple becomes inseparable. “Over those years, we feasted on love,” he reported. Joy died in 1960. “Once the tears dried, only hope remained.” Hope in living life toward that other world to be reached. “The beauty of Aslan’s country will be different from anything we’ve ever felt or imagined. We will drink it in and be completely transformed.” At the end of Narnia, a clear metaphor of the soul’s inner journey toward God, the exiled children ally with Aslan to free the kingdom, finally passing “from winter to summer.” The sun shines. With C. S. Lewis, it is time to dare turn the page and set out on the adventure.