Resources
- Resources and Works by TopicThe entire library of resources in the C.S. Lewis Institute is broken down here by tagged topic. Each topic is then broken down in order by most recent publication at the top of the list.
Works
The World's Last Night
"We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it." In these seven witty, lucid, and tough-minded essays, the famous, infamous Screwtape makes a special appearance, proposing a toast that brilliantly explores the many opportunities for exploiting evil in the world. Lewis also considers the evidence for whether and how prayer works, plays with the meaning of the words "I believe," and asks what happens to our concept of God when we send rockets into outer space. And, in a moving final piece, he forces us to wonder how we should live if any day might bring the world's last night. Anyone who ever appreciated his unique blend of humor, paradox, and searing insight will find these further thoughts from C.S. Lewis richly illuminating and remember that he is, as ever, one of the greatest writers and challengers of living faith. "[Lewis] addresses himself to the task of disputing belief with energy, humor, and intense conviction." --Los Angeles Times "Reveals the expected wit, the Chestertonian ability to make Christian orthodoxy exciting and fit for the brave rebel, and an abundance of offbeat insights into the human scene." --New York Times Book Review C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898-1963), one of the great writers of the twentieth century, also continues to be one of our most influential Christian thinkers. He wrote more than thirty books, both popular and scholarly, including The Chronicles of Narnia series,The Screwtape Letters,The Four Loves,Mere Christianity, andSurprised by Joy.
Out of the Silent Planet
Written during the dark hours immediately before and during the Second World War, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, of which Out of the Silent Planet is the first volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus's The Plague and George Orwell's 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of the moral concerns. For the trilogy's central figure, C. S. Lewis created perhaps the most memorable character of his career, the brilliant, clear-eyed, and fiercely brave philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom. Appropriately, Lewis modeled Dr. Ransom after his dear friend J. R. R. Tolkien, for in the scope of its imaginative achievement and the totality of its vision of not one but two imaginary worlds, the Space Trilogy is rivaled in this century only by Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Readers who fall in love with Lewis's fantasy series The Chronicles of Namia as children unfailingly cherish his Space Trilogy as adults; it, too, brings to life strange and magical realms in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. But in the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language's most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time. Out of the Silent Planet introduces Dr. Ransom and chronicles his abduction by a megalomaniacal physicist and his accomplice via space ship to the planet Malacandra. The two men are in need of a human sacrifice and Dr. Ransom would seem to fit the bill. Dr. Ransom escapes upon landing, though, and goes on the run, a stranger in a land that, like Jonathan Swift's Lilliput, is enchanting in its difference from Earth and instructive in its similarity.
Of Other Worlds
"The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand." As the creator of one of the most famous "other worlds" of all time, C.S. Lewis was uniquely qualified to discuss their literary merit. As both a writer and a critic, Lewis explores the importance of story and wonder, elements often ignored or even frowned upon by critics of the day. His discussions of his favorite kinds of stories--children's stories and fantasies--includes his thoughts on his most famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. "A must for any collection of C. S. Lewis." --Choice
Till We Have Faces
"I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer . . . Why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" Haunted by the myth of Cupid and Psyche throughout his life, C.S. Lewis wrote this, his last, extraordinary novel, to retell their story through the gaze of Psyche's sister, Orual. Disfigured and embittered, Orual loves her younger sister to a fault and suffers deeply when she is sent away to Cupid, the God of the Mountain. Psyche is forbidden to look upon the god's face, but is persuaded by her sister to do so; she is banished for her betrayal. Orual is left alone to grow in power but never in love, to wonder at the silence of the gods. Only at the end of her life, in visions of her lost beloved sister, will she hear an answer. "Till We Have Faces succeeds in presenting with imaginative directness what its author has described elsewhere as 'the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live' . . . [It] deepens for adults that sense of wonder and strange truth which delights children inThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,Prince Caspian, and other legends of Narnia." --New York Times "The most significant and triumphant work that Lewis has . . . produced." --New York Herald Tribune
Compelling Reason: Essays on Ethics and Theology
Why I am not a Pacifist -- Bulverism -- First and second things -- Equality -- Three kinds of men -- 'Horrid red things' -- Democratic education -- A dream -- Is English doomed? -- Meditation in a toolshed -- Hedonics -- Christian apologetics -- The decline of religion -- Religion withou dogma? -- Vivisection -- Modern translations of the Bible -- On living in an atomic age -- The humanitarian theory of punishment -- The pains of animals -- Is theism important? -- Xmas and Christmas -- Prudery and philology -- Is history bunk? -- Willing slaves of the welfare state.
The Allegory of Love
The Allegory of Love is a landmark study of a powerful and influential medieval conception. C. S. Lewis explores the sentiment called 'courtly love' and the allegorical method within which it developed in literature and thought, from its first flowering in eleventh-century Languedoc through to its transformation and gradual demise at the end of the sixteenth century. Lewis devotes particular attention to the major poems The Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene, and to poets including Chaucer, Gower and Thomas Usk.
Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics
First published work of poetry. Originally published under the pseudonym of Clive Staples.
Letters of C. S. Lewis
An important revision and expansion of the earlier collection of Lewis’s letters. Entries from Lewis’s diary are included, as is Warnie Lewis’s memoir of his brother’s life. Edited by Walter Hooper and W. H. Lewis; Introduction by Hooper; Index.
The Discarded Image
C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the middle ages and renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later ages as 'the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organisation of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe'. This, Lewis's last book, was hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.