His children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, awash in biblical imagery, has been translated into more than 47 languages. His works of apologetics, such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, have never gone out of print. He went on to become the 20th century’s most celebrated Christian author. “There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.”įifteen years later, however, Lewis - by then an Oxford scholar in English literature - abandoned his atheism and embraced historic Christianity. “The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness,” Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents. Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, viewed religious feeling as an expression of the childhood need for a father’s protection. The new discipline of psychology would do much the same. Just so with Christianity: The story of the resurrection was a sublime retelling of ancient pagan myths about gods and goddesses who, by initiating the cycle of the seasons, represented the pattern of death and rebirth.īy the beginning of the 20th century, it seemed that science had consigned the doctrine of the resurrection to the realm of wish fulfillment. All religion, he wrote, was an attempt by primitive man to cope with the terrors of the natural world. Lewis chided his friend for not accepting “the recognized scientific account of the growth of religions.” The miraculous stories of the life of Jesus were “on exactly the same footing” as that of Adonis, Dionysius, Isis, and Loki. It has found many allies over the last century. His letters on the topic during this period reveal the spirit of the age: a disposition against religious belief. Lewis, a recent convert to atheism, got into an argument with a friend about Christianity and its supernatural elements. S hortly before he was admitted to Oxford University in 1916 to study English literature, C.
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