Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 65, No. 2 - Spring 2023
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Harry Lee Poe. Wheaton: Crossway, 2022, 1128pp., $89.99
Nearly 60 years after his death, C. S. Lewis is still one of Christianity’s most influential voices. Biographical accounts of his life are common, written by friends such as George Sayer, critics such as A.N. Wilson, and most recently, admirers such as Alister McGrath. However, none of these have produced a detailed and coherent account of Lewis’s life as Harry Lee Poe in his Becoming C. S. Lewis trilogy, the final volume of which was released this past October. Sparked by a curiosity about what Lewis liked to eat (p. 11), Poe set out to give an account of Lewis’s childhood, eventually leading him to study Lewis’s life in its entirety to understand better the man who has influenced so much of Poe’s writing.
Poe is a fitting author to produce such a work. As the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University, he has taught a course on Lewis for decades. Before this trilogy, he authored two previous books related to Lewis, The Inklings of Oxford and C. S. Lewis Remembered, along with numerous articles and essays. He travels the country speaking at conferences and retreats related to Lewis and the Inklings. He is also the founder of the Inklings Fellowship, an academic society that seeks to model itself after the Inklings to transform the academic world through teaching and writing. It is clear that Lewis profoundly influenced Poe, and his respect and admiration are evident in this three-volume biography.
The trilogy begins with Becoming C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1908-1918). It was initially the only book Poe intended to write, focusing on Lewis’s childhood. As such, it provides the newest insight of the trilogy, giving the most detailed treatment of Lewis’s childhood since Lewis discussed it in Surprised by Joy.
Both scholars and fans alike will be especially interested in Poe’s detailing of Lewis’s rocky relationship with his father, Albert. Poe illustrates how the relationship between Lewis and his father, particularly after the death of his mother, continually deteriorated as he matured. Nevertheless, while his relationship with his father was complicated and non-existent for long periods, his father also gave Lewis perhaps the most crucial teacher of his childhood, the tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick, known as “The Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick would push, mold, and unlock the vast potential of young Lewis’s mind. Poe seizes the opportunity to introduce the reader to many of the assigned books of young Lewis by Kirkpatrick that provide crucial context for how Lewis viewed the world in his days before becoming a Christian.
As the reader moves through the first book, sympathy will grow continually toward the young Lewis. Though Kirkpatrick may have given Lewis confidence in his worldview, Poe shows that Lewis’s fall into atheism was no mere rebellion of youth but the result of a childhood wrought with pain and loss. First, he loses his mother at age nine, with whom he was very close. Shortly after, he is sent to England to attend a school Poe describes as a “concentration camp” led by an abusive headmaster (p. 27). His troubled childhood concludes with Lewis leaving college to fight in the deadliest war the world had known up to that point. He spends two years on the Western Front, witnessing the unimaginable horrors of war, only to return injured in both body and spirit.
The second book, The Making of C. S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918-1945), shows that although Europe was done with war, Lewis was not. He returned from the Great War, the trauma of which solidified his atheistic worldview. However, upon his return, he enters another kind of war within his heart and mind. Lewis resumes his studies at Oxford with a very different mindset, and as he would write later in Surprised by Joy, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” Stealth attacks on his imagination from his favorite fantasy stories and long debates with friends such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson prove fatal to the fortress Lewis had built in his mind toward the God he did not want to exist. When Lewis finally surrenders a self-described “reluctant” defeat in this inner war, he discovers his purpose and role in the next war.
With his rediscovered faith firmly established, Lewis finds his purpose for the next war in his life and the life of Europe. He becomes a sort of special forces soldier, in the same vein as Tolkien and Dyson were for him. Tasked with the mission of clearly and winsomely presenting the Christian faith, he addresses the entire nation through his Wartime Broadcasts, which later became his well-known apologetic work Mere Christianity. Add to this his other works during the war, such as The Screwtape Letters, and Lewis quickly produced writings that would one day garner him the reputation as the most significant Christian apologist of the twentieth century.
The second volume concludes by showing how the conversion of C. S. Lewis impacted the world. The third and final volume, The Completion of C. S. Lewis: From War to Joy (1945-1963), shows how his conversion changed the man. To use Paul’s analogy in 2 Timothy, the final book shows how Lewis finished his race.
Keeping with the theme of war, Lewis finally enters a time of peace emotionally, relationally, and spiritually, though this final season was not without grief. In fact, it contained the greatest sorrow of his life with the passing of his wife, Joy. However, Poe shows that even this event helped Lewis learn to finally experience peace by not only trusting Christ but making Christ his greatest treasure. Friends begin to pass away and his health declines, yet through it all, Lewis maintains what has become most valuable to him – his faith. This peace left Lewis feeling that he had done what God had called him to, dying at the relatively young age of 64. Regarding the completion of his life, Poe closes with a beautiful observation, “Some will say that it was a tragedy for Lewis to have died so young. I think it remarkable that he became complete so young” (p. 352).
From the beginning, Poe’s narrative and analytical abilities leap off the page. Moreover, he writes in a style that would make Lewis beam with approval. Lewis said his writing goal was to communicate Christianity’s complex ideas in clear terms that anyone could understand, often by telling a story. In the same way, Poe beautifully narrates the life of Lewis while simultaneously communicating Lewis’s thoughts clearly, which will appeal to both scholars and fans.
Poe blends biography with analysis seamlessly. The reader feels as if Poe has entered the very mind of Lewis, guiding them through his thoughts while providing the often-missed contextual details of Lewis’s writing as the events of his life are displayed. The reader quickly realizes how much his experience, not just his education, influenced Lewis’s writing. Poe does not stop at simply sharing a connected series of events; he analyzes the thoughts of Lewis as he goes, pointing out both philosophical and theological implications. In this way, the series has a slightly devotional element, providing a personal and experiential aspect to many of Lewis’s ideas that have been so formative for generations. The Christian reader will be encouraged by the lessons from Poe’s insights, and the non-Christian reader will be presented with much to consider.
As mentioned, Poe’s most significant contribution in this trilogy is his detailed account of Lewis’s childhood. He shows how Lewis, raised by Christian parents, had a childhood that produced the conditions that would eventually send him into atheism. However, it also imparted skills and ideas that would take him on his journey out of atheism and firmly into Christianity. Poe offering a complete work devoted to Jack’s childhood is groundbreaking and will almost certainly open the door for further research in this gap of Lewis studies.
Nonetheless, the final two volumes of Poe’s trilogy also contain stories and details that many fans of Lewis may be unfamiliar with and find interesting. Most often, these stories revolve around the creation of Lewis’s works or the people in Lewis’s life. For example, some readers may be familiar with the BBC radio talks that would become Mere Christianity, but perhaps not familiar with another set of talks that would become The Four Loves. Regarding people in his life, Poe writes in great detail about Lewis’s brother Warnie, a military officer, alcoholic, and best friend of Lewis.
In the second volume, the reader also finds Poe’s most unique claim of the trilogy. Poe asserts that The Allegory of Love was the only book Lewis ever wrote. Poe writes, “All other books flow from it like a stream. In it can be found the synthesis of all the ideas that had been swirling in his head for years” (p. 151). He believes this book gives the foundation for the thoughts expressed throughout Lewis’s more popular works. Where the first volume could spark new interest in a lesser period of Lewis’s life, this observation from Poe could cause further investigation into a lesser-known work of Lewis and its connection to his later work.
Many authors have written biographies of Lewis before, and there will almost certainly be more to come. Numerous others have written about Lewis’s philosophy, theology, apologetics, and historical context. However, no writer has combined all of these aspects so accessibly. This blend makes the trilogy a valuable asset to any Christian philosophy, apologetics, or church history student, as Lewis is an influential figure in all of these disciplines. Also, it serves as a great introduction to both primary and secondary sources on Lewis, as Poe shows extensive knowledge of both.
Simply put, Poe has given Lewis studies what could be considered its most important work to date. Anyone wishing to be a serious scholar of Lewis’s life and writings ought to engage with Poe’s comprehensive work, and any admirer of Lewis wanting to understand the man better should look no further than this trilogy.
