Clive Staples Lewis biography. But his childhood was far from cloudless ...

Clive Staples Lewis(Eng. Clive Staples Lewis; November 29, 1898, Belfast, Northern Ireland, British Empire - November 22, 1963, Oxford, England) - British Irish writer, poet, teacher, scholar and theologian. He is best known for his fantasy works, including The Letters of the Balamut, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, as well as books on Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracle, Suffering. Lewis was a close friend of another famous writer - J. R. R. Tolkien. They were both educated at Oxford in the English Language and Literature Department and were active members of the literary group known as the Inklings. Lewis was baptized at birth in the Anglican Church in Ireland, but adolescence lost interest in religion. Thanks to his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis returns to the Anglican Church at the age of 32 (he, being a Catholic, hoped that his friend would convert to Catholicism). The faith had a strong influence on his literary work, and Christian-themed radio broadcasts during World War II brought Lewis worldwide recognition.

In 1956 he married the American writer Joy Davidman. She died of cancer four years later at the age of 45. Lewis died on November 22, 1963 of kidney failure, one week short of his 65th birthday. There was little mention of his death in the media, as he and fellow British author Aldous Huxley died on the same day that US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, a memorial was erected in his honor at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Lewis's work has been translated into over 30 languages ​​and has sold millions of copies. The books that make up the Chronicles of Narnia cycle are best known and popularized by the media, formed the basis of several feature films. His work has entered the public domain in countries where copyright is removed after 50 years of the author's death, such as Canada.

Childhood

Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863-1929), a lawyer whose father, Richard, came to Ireland from Wales in mid-nineteenth century. His mother, Florence Augusta Lewis (nee Hamilton) known as Flora, was the daughter of an Anglican priest in Ireland. He also had an older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis. When Lewis was four years old, his dog, Jexie, was hit by a car and claimed that his name was now Jexie. He stopped responding to any other names, although he later came to terms with the name Jack, which was what his friends and family called him for the rest of his life. When he was seven years old, his family moved to Little Lea, his childhood family home in Strandtown, East Belfast.

As a boy, Lewis was fascinated by descriptions of humanoid animals; he loved the stories of Beatrix Potter and often wrote and illustrated his own animal stories. He and his brother Warney created the world of Boxen, which was inhabited by animals. Lewis loved to read. His father's house was full of books and it was easy for him to find new book for reading, as if, walking across the field, "to find a new blade of grass."

Lewis received his first lessons from private tutors. But after his mother died of cancer in 1908, he was sent to Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire. Lewis's brother had entered there three years earlier. Soon the school was closed due to lack of students. School principal Robert "Old Man" Capron ended up in a psychiatric hospital after that. Lewis began attending Campbell College in east Belfast, about a mile from his home, but stopped attending after a few months due to breathing problems. He was sent to the resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the House of Cherbourg Preparatory School, which Lewis referred to in his autobiography as Chartres. It was at this time that he lost his childhood faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult. In September 1913 Lewis entered Malvern College, where he remained until the following June. After leaving Malvern, he took private lessons with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's tutor, former director Lurgan College.

As a teenager, Lewis was fascinated by the songs and legends he called "Nordic" ancient literature Scandinavia, preserved in the sagas of Iceland. These legends awakened something in him that he later called "joy". He also loved nature. What he writes in adolescence gradually begins to go beyond Boxwood, he begins to try himself in various genres, including epic poetry and opera, to try to embody the northern mythology and natural world that interests him. The lessons that Kirkpatrick taught him instilled in him a love of Greek literature and mythology, honed his skills in rhetoric and thinking. In 1916 Lewis was awarded a scholarship to Oxford College. After a few months of study at Oxford, he is drafted into the British army as a junior officer. He goes to France to participate in the First World War. The horrors of the war he experienced confirmed him in atheism.

"My Irish Life"

Lewis experienced culture shock when he first arrived in the UK: "My first impression of England would certainly be incomprehensible to an Englishman," Lewis wrote in Overtaken by Joy. “The strange English pronunciation turned the voices of people into cries of demons, but the most terrible thing was the landscape between Fleetwood and Eustop ... Later I came to terms with all this, but it took many years to get rid of the hatred of England that flared up at that moment.”

As a teenager, Lewis became interested in Scandinavian and Greek mythology, a little later - Irish mythology and literature. He also had a pronounced interest in the Irish language, although there is much evidence that speaks of the difficulties he experienced in learning it. He developed a special fondness for W. B. Yeats, partly because Yeats used Irish folklore in his poetry. In letters to a friend of his, Lewis wrote:

Here I discovered an author so close to my heart. I'm sure it will bring you pleasure too. This is W. B. Yeats. He writes plays and poems about our old Irish mythology and does so in the spirit of ancient beauty.

In 1921 Lewis meets Yeats twice when he comes to Oxford. He was struck by the indifference of his peers towards Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement. Lewis wrote, "I am continually amazed at the insistence on ignoring Yeats by the people I meet: perhaps his appeals are too Irish—if that is the case, thank the gods I am Irish." After converting to Christianity, he became interested in Christian theology and moved away from the pagan mysticism of the Celts.

Lewis occasionally experienced some derisive chauvinism towards England. Describing a meeting with a friend from Ireland, he wrote: “Like all the Irish who can be met in England, we agreed that the Anglo-Saxon race is impossibly frivolous and stupid. Besides, there is no doubt ami that although the Irish are only human, with all their faults, I would not be content to live or die among another people." Throughout his life he sought out the company of other Irish people living in England and visited Northern Ireland regularly. He even spent his Honeymoon in 1958 at Crawfordsburn. He called it "my Irish life".

World War I and Oxford University

Shortly after entering Oxford, in the summer of 1917, he joined the Officers' Training Corps at the university. From there he was drafted into the Cadets Battalion for training. After that, he, as a second lieutenant, went to the third battalion of light infantry in the British army. On his 19th birthday, he arrives at the front line in the Somme Valley in France, where he begins testing trenches. April 15, 1918 he was wounded, two of his comrades were killed.

During treatment, he suffered from depression and melancholy. After his recovery, he is assigned to serve in Andover, England. In December 1918 he was demobilized and soon he resumed his studies.

In 1919, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (born Clive Hamilton), he published a collection of poems, Spirits in Bondage.

In 1923 he received a bachelor's degree, later - a master's degree.

In 1924 he began teaching philosophy at the university's college. In 1925 he was elected a member of the scientific community and began teaching English literature at Magdalen College, where he remained for 29 years, until 1954.

In 1926, under the same pseudonym, Clive Hamilton published a collection of poems, Dymer.

Jane Moore

When Lewis served in the army, he shared a room with another cadet - Edward Courtney Francis "Paddy" Moore (1898-1918). Maureen Moore, Paddy's sister, said the two made up mutual agreement that if one of them dies in the war, the survivor will take care of both families. Paddy was killed in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had previously introduced Lewis to his mother, Jane King Moore, and the two immediately developed a friendship. Lewis was eighteen at the time, and Jane was forty-five. The friendship with Moore was especially important to Lewis while he was recovering from his injury in the hospital, as his father did not visit him.

Lewis lived and cared for Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s. He constantly introduced her to everyone as his mother and called her that in letters. Lewis's birth mother died when he was still a child, and his father was rude and eccentric, so he developed a deep affection for Moore.

Rumors about their relationship surfaced in the 1990s in the publications of E. N. Wilson about the biography of Lewis. Wilson (who had never met Lewis) tried to make it look like he and Moore were in a love relationship. Wilson's book was not the first attempt to sort out Lewis and Jane's relationship. George Sawyer knew Lewis for 29 years and also tried to shed light on his relationships during the fourteen years prior to his conversion to Christianity. In his biography, The Life of C. S. Lewis, he writes:

Were they lovers? Owen Barfield, who knew Lewis well in the 1920s, once said there was a "fifty-fifty" chance of this. Although she was 26 years older than Jack, she was attractive woman and he was definitely infatuated with her. But it would be strange if they turned out to be lovers, because he called her mother. It is also known that they did not live in the same room. It seems more plausible that he was attached to her because of a promise he made to Paddy, and this promise ignited love for her as a second mother.

Sawyer later changed his mind. In the introduction to the 1997 edition of Lewis's biography, he writes:

I've changed my mind about Lewis and Mrs. Moore's relationship. In the eighth chapter of this book, I wrote that I was not sure that they were lovers. Now, after talking to Maureen, Mrs. Moore's daughter, and getting to know the location of their bedrooms in the Kilns, I'm sure they were.

Lewis spoke highly of Mrs. Moore throughout his life. Once he told his friend George Sawyer: "She was generous and taught me the same generosity." In December 1917, Lewis wrote a letter to his childhood friend, Arthur Greaves, stating that Jane and Greaves were "the two most important people in the world to me."

In 1930, Lewis travels to Kilns (a house in the Headington area, on the outskirts of Oxford. Nowadays part of Risinghurst) with his brother Warney, Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen. They all invested in the purchase of the house, which subsequently passed to Maureen, who, after the death of her mother in 1973, was known as Dame Maureen Dunber.

In the last years of her life, Jane Moore suffered from dementia and was eventually institutionalized, where she died in 1951. Lewis visited her every day until her death.

Conversion to Christianity

Lewis grew up in a religious family that attended the Church of Ireland. At fifteen, he became an atheist, although he later described his youth as a state of paradoxical "anger at God for not existing." His departure from Christianity began when he began to consider his religiosity as a duty. Reading authors such as Wells and Ball, Robert, established in Lewis's mind a sense of the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of man, and the world at that moment seemed to him cold, dangerous and unfriendly. By his own admission, Lewis, even before reading the poem "De rerum natura", he was deeply in tune with the thought of Lucretius, which he considered the strongest of the arguments in favor of atheism:

... not for us and by no means created by divine will
the whole existing world: there are so many vices in it.

original text(lat.)
Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam,
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa

- Lucretius. About the nature of things. (Translated by F. A. Petrovsky)

At the same time, Lewis began to show interest in the occult, which was in no way connected with his atheism - in young Lewis, they were united only by opposition to Christianity.

Lewis's interest in the work of George MacDonald was one of the reasons for his departure from atheism. This can be seen in the ninth chapter of his book Divorce, in which main character, which can be called semi-autobiographical, meets Macdonald in heaven:

Trembling greatly, I began to explain to him what he means to me. I tried to tell how once winter evening I bought his book at the station (I was then sixteen years old), and she did to me what Beatrice did to the boy Dante - a new life began for me. I confusedly explained how long this life was only mental, did not touch the heart, until I finally realized that his Christianity was not accidental. I talked about how stubbornly I refused to see that the name of his charm was holiness.

Lewis eventually returned to Christianity, influenced by the arguments of his colleague and friend J.R.R. Tolkien, whom he first met on May 11, 1926, and also by Chesterton's book Eternal Man". Lewis strongly resisted conversion, noting that he returned to Christianity as the prodigal son "with a fight, pushing back with all his might, looking around for an escape route." He described his last struggle in Overtaken by Joy:

And so, night after night, I sit at my place, at Magdalen College. As soon as I take a break from work even for a moment, I feel that the One is gradually, inevitably approaching, the meeting with Whom I so wanted to avoid. And yet, what I feared so much, finally happened. On Trinity Term 1929, I gave in and acknowledged that the Lord is God, knelt down and said a prayer. That night, it is true, I was the most gloomy and gloomy of all the neophytes in England.

In 1931, Lewis, by his own admission, became a Christian. One September evening, Lewis had a long conversation about Christianity with Tolkien (a zealous Catholic) and Hugo Dyson (the conversation is recounted by Arthur Greaves under the title "They Stand Together"). This evening's discussion was important to the next day's event, which Lewis describes in "Overtaken by Joy":

When we (Warney and Jack) went (on a motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo), I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but when we arrived at the zoo, I believed.

Lewis became a member of the Anglican Church, which slightly disappointed Tolkien, who hoped that he would become a Catholic.

Lewis was an adherent of the Anglicans, who supported traditional Anglican theology in many ways, although he tends to avoid supporting any particular denomination in his writings on apologetics. According to some, in later works he adheres to the idea of ​​the cleansing of sins after death in purgatory (Dissolution of Marriage and Letters to Malcolm), which refers to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, although it is also widespread in Anglicanism (mainly in the circles of the Anglo-Catholic Church). Despite this, Lewis considered himself a completely traditional Anglican for the rest of his life. He noted that he initially attended church only for the sake of the sacrament and did not perceive the hymns and sermons, which were not very good. Later, he considered it an honor to worship with the faithful, who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses and hymns.

Various critics suggest that what ultimately drove him to convert to Christianity was fear of religious conflict in his native Belfast. As one critic put it, Lewis "repeatedly extolled the virtues of all branches of the Christian faith, emphasizing the need for Christian unity around what the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton called 'mere Christianity', the core tenets and beliefs shared by all denominations." On the other hand, Paul Stevens of the University of Toronto wrote that "Lewis's mere Christianity concealed much of the old-fashioned Protestant political prejudice of Belfast's middle class."

The Second World War

After war broke out in 1939, the Lewises took in children evacuated from London and other cities in the Kilns.

Lewis was 40 years old when the Second World War. He tried to return to the military ranks, offering himself as a recruit instructor, but his offer was not accepted. He also turned down an offer from a recruiting company to write a press column for the Ministry of Information. Lewis later served in the local militia at Oxford.

From 1941 to 1943, Lewis broadcast religious radio broadcasts from the BBC from London, while regular air raids were carried out on the city. At that stage, these broadcasts were highly appreciated by the civilian population and the military. For example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman wrote:

War, life, everything seems meaningless. Many of us needed to find the meaning of life. Lewis gave it to us.

From 1941, in his spare time, he visited RAF posts at the invitation of Chief Chaplain Maurice Edwards, and spoke about his faith there.

In December 1952, Lewis was inducted into the MBE by George VI, but withdrew to avoid association with any political issues.

Also during this war period he was asked to become the first head of the Socrates Club at Oxford (January 1942). He remained in this position until he moved to the University of Cambridge in 1954.

"Inklings". Cambridge university.

From 1933 to 1949, a circle of friends gathered around Lewis, which became the basis of the Inklings literary discussion group, whose members were John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Warren Lewis, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Haward, Owen Barfield, Weville Coghill and others.

In 1950-1956, the Chronicles of Narnia cycle was published, which brought Lewis world fame. For the book "The Last Battle" from this series, Lewis received the Carnegie Award.

In 1954 Lewis became chairman of the newly created chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalen College, Cambridge. He retained a strong attachment to Oxford, where he had a house which he visited on weekends until his death in 1963.

In 1955 he became a member of the British Academy.

Joy Davidman

In later life, Lewis corresponded with Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer Jewish origin, a former communist who converted from atheism to Christianity. She broke up with her drinking, abusive husband, writer William Gresham, and came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas. Lewis valued her as a talented and intelligent companion and personal friend. The fact that Lewis agreed to live with her in a civil marriage was what gave her the opportunity to stay in the UK. The civil marriage took place at the registration center at 24 St. Giles Boulevard, Oxford, on April 23, 1956. Lewis's brother Warren wrote: “Jack was primarily attracted to intellect. Of all the women, only Joy had a mind that matched him in flexibility, open-mindedness, tenacity and, above all, a sense of humor. After complaining of hip pain, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Their relationship with Lewis developed so much that it led to a Christian marriage. This caused some difficulties in terms of the church, since Joy was divorced, but their friend Rev. Peter Bide, March 25, 1957 held a ceremony right at her bedside in Churchhill Hospital.

The Greshams later went into remission and lived together as a family with Warren Lewis until 1960, in which a relapse of cancer led to Joy's death on July 13. Earlier that year, they spent a short weekend in Greece by the Aegean, during which they visited Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes, Heracleion and Knossos. Lewis liked walking, but not traveling. This was evident from the fact that after 1918 his travels were limited to crossing the English Channel. Lewis' book, Exploring Grief, described the experience of his bereavement in such a specific manner that he first published it under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk to prevent readers from associating the book with him.

After Gresham's death, Lewis continued to raise her two sons. Douglas Gresham was a Christian, as were Lewis and his mother, while David Gresham returned to the faith in which his mother was born and became an Orthodox Jew in his beliefs. In a 2005 interview, Douglas Gresham confirmed that he and his brother were not close, but said they did communicate via e-mail. Douglas remained involved in the management of Lewis' estate.

Illness and death

Grave of C. S. Lewis near Holy Trinity Church, Headington.

In early June 1961, Lewis developed inflammation of the kidneys, which led to blood poisoning. Illness forced him to temporarily leave teaching at Cambridge. By 1962 his health gradually improved and he returned to work in April. Lewis's health continued to improve and, according to his friend George Sawyer, he made a full recovery by early 1963. On July 15 of that year, he began to feel unwell and was hospitalized. The next day at five o'clock in the afternoon he had a heart attack. He fell into a coma, waking suddenly the next day at two o'clock. After being released from the hospital, Lewis returns to the Kilns, even though he was too ill to work. As a result of illness, in August he finally resigned his post at Cambridge. His health continued to deteriorate, and in mid-November, exactly one week before his 65th birthday, he collapses in his bedroom at 5:30 pm and dies a few minutes later. Lewis was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. His brother Warren Hamilton "Warney" Lewis, who died April 9, 1973, was later buried in a nearby grave. Media coverage of Lewis's death was almost invisible amid reports of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated on the same day (about 55 minutes after Lewis's death), as was news of the death English writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. This coincidence inspired Peter Craft to write Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialogue Somewhere Beyond Death Between J.F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and O. Huxley. Lewis is commemorated on November 22 at church calendar episcopal church.

• Lewis's ancestors on his mother's side were a noble Scottish family of Hamiltons: great-grandfather - a bishop, grandfather - a priest, besides a fierce enemy of Catholics, served as a chaplain in the Crimean War.
• On the father's side, the family descended from Welsh farmers, the last of whom was a great-grandfather (great-grandfather is a Methodist pastor, a good preacher; grandfather is a shipbuilding engineer, co-owner of the company; father is a well-known lawyer).
• In Lewis, however, there was not a drop of English and, although he was born in Ireland, Irish blood. The Hamiltons are Scottish, the Lewises are from Wales.
• Lewis's mother, Flora Hamilton, was a talented mathematician. She rejected Albert Lewis for seven years, believing that she did not love him enough. In addition, she was afraid that she would not be able to lead household. On August 29, 1894, the father of the bride married them. The marriage turned out to be happy.
• Flora and Albert read every afternoon, sitting side by side in deep armchairs. Although, oddly enough, it was not they who read to their sons Warren and Clive, but Nanny Lisey.
• Little Lewis saw the height of perfection in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
• As children, Lewis and his brother had: Tim the terrier, a spotted (white and black) cat whose name has not been preserved in history, Tommy the mouse and Peter the canary.
• The asteroid 7644 Xluys is named after the writer.

Bibliography

fantasy

• "Until we found faces" ( Till We Have Faces, 1956)

The Chronicles of Narnia series:

• Lion, Witch and wardrobe(eng. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950)
• Prince Caspian (Eng. Prince Caspian: The return to Narnia, 1951)
• The Voyage of the Dawn, or Swimming to the End of the World (Eng. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952)
• The Silver Chair (1953)
• The Horse and His Boy (eng. The Horse and His Boy, 1954)
• The Magician's Nephew (1955)
• The Last Battle (eng. The Last Battle, 1956)

Science fiction

Cycle "Space Trilogy":

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
• Perelandra (English Perelandra, 1943)
• That Hideous Strength (1946)

Religious works

• Roundabout, or Pilgrim's Wanderings (Eng. The Pilgrim's Regress, 1933)
• "Suffering" ( The Problem of Pain, 1940)
• "Letters of Balamut" ( The Screwtape Letters, 1942)
• "Divorce" ( Great Divorce, 1945)
• "Miracle" ( Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1947)
• "Just Christianity" Mere Christianity, 1952, based on radio broadcasts of 1941-1944)
• "Reflections on the Psalms" Reflections on the Psalms, 1958)
• "Four Loves" ( The Four Loves, 1960, about the types of love and its Christian understanding)
• "Exploring Sorrow" A Grief Observed, 1961)
• "Troublemaker proposes a toast" ( Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 1961)

Works in the field of literary history

• "Foreword to Paradise Lost" ( A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942)
• "English Literature of the Sixteenth Century" ( English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 1955)

Works in the field of philology

• "Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition" ( The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, 1936)

Collections of poetry published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton

• "Depressed Spirit" Spirits in Bondage, 1919)
• "Dymer" ( Dymer, 1926)

Lewis's work has been translated into over 30 languages ​​and has sold millions of copies. The books that make up the Chronicles of Narnia cycle are best known and popularized by the media, and have formed the basis of several feature films. His work has entered the public domain in countries where copyright is removed after 50 years of the author's death, such as Canada.

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✪ Has Science Discovered God?

Subtitles

- [David] My name is David Aikman, I am a writer and former journalist for Time magazine. Does God exist? Does the cosmos have an omnipotent, infinitely intelligent creator? For centuries, scientists and philosophers have debated this fundamental question without success. But now, in this reality show about reality itself, a team of renowned researchers will make a historic breakthrough. Their search will lead us from the fiery birth of the cosmos to the inexplicable genesis of life on planet Earth and, finally, to the sudden appearance of a thinking, language-using Homo sapiens. Each participant is a luminary in his field. Everyone has their own unique look. They are certainly the world's leading experts at the intersection of science and religion. The highlight of the show will be a series of amazing statements by the most famous academic atheist of the last 50 years, Professor Anthony Flew from England. Over the decades, he has published more than 30 books, attacking faith in God and debating believers of all faiths, starting with Clive Staples Lewis at Oxford. In our show, Flue will make a stunning U-turn. In 1950, Professor Flew set the agenda for atheism in his paper "Theology and Falsification"; the content of which was first presented during the controversy with K.S. Lewis. According to some reports, this article has become the most republished philosophical publication of the second half of the century. Professor Flew's more than 30 books include The Presumption of Atheism, Atheistic Humanism, and The Rational Animal. - [Anthony] For a reason that I think Dr. Warren expected. So let's look again at what that reason is. First of all, this is a question of methodology, and it consists in the assertion that the correct starting point, as it is formulated somewhere, is the so-called presumption of Stratonia, or the presumption of atheism. - [David] Flue's main counterarguments. First, the universe is eternal. - Well, of course, I am inclined to believe that the universe has no beginning and no end. I really do not have sufficient grounds to dispute such a proposal. - [David] Second, life is random process. - I certainly believe that living organisms evolved over an immeasurably long period of time from non-living things. - [David] And third, the concept of god contains mutually exclusive elements. - I know there is no God. Secondly, it must be said that people, and not only Dr. Warren, believe that, in fact, I have not substantiated why I am an atheist. Although I think I did. You may consider my arguments not convincing enough, but I nevertheless provided them. The first of the two things I was talking about, talking about the first step of any systemic apology, is that if everything said about this proposed being is contradictory, then to say that there is such a being, given such a description, is like saying that there is round square or single husband. And if so, that is a very good reason for saying that there is no such thing. That's why we say it doesn't exist, married bachelor, and so on. - [David] The theme of our show is what can be called the new history of science. Launch pad - New York University. Professor Flue will be joined by Dr. Gerald Schroeder from Israel and Dr. John Haldane from Scotland. Dr. Schroeder, who studied at MIT and attended MIT and Boston, the Weizmann Institute, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the best-selling author of The Science of God. His latest work- "The hidden face of God. How science reveals elementary truth." Haldane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the author of numerous publications on science, philosophy and religion. He has delivered the Stanton Lectures at the University of Cambridge and is set to deliver the famous Gifford Lectures in 2005. His highly publicized discussion on the existence of God with John J. C. Smart was published by Oxford University Press under the title Atheism and Theism. The theme of our show is space in general. The air date is May 7, 2004. Our explorers are the thinkers who will join us in the studio as our journey takes us to the origins of the universe, life and humanity. Where did the universe come from, the longest-running reality show? How did life, reproduction and consciousness originate? What gave birth to our minds, our abilities to form concepts and understand and use language? Are we outsiders in the universe to be laid off or fired? Or is our place here? And what does modern science tell us about all this? Our reality show is really about reality. In fact, about true or ideal reality, another name for god. Our starting point will be a new history of science. The discovery of the progressive growth of the IQ of the universe. The IQ of the universe has become higher. On this chart, from the beginning of time to today, time is displayed on the horizontal axis. Growth in IQ, in giant steps, is on the vertical axis. Today we know that the history of the universe is the history of quantum leaps in intelligence. The sudden but systematic emergence of essentially intelligent systems, arranged in ascending order. In relatively quick succession, we see the emergence material world, then life, then consciousness, and finally mind. The IQ of the universe is showing up everywhere. Genetic code , periodic table of Mendeleev, theory of relativity and quantum physics. Photosynthesis and symbiosis, as well as countless laws, systems and constants, form the infrastructure of intelligence that supports our everyday world. Dr. Schroeder explains the conclusion that information is the most basic and immutable fact of the universe. - At the same time, we see that the universe can, in fact, consist of information. This means that the basic material of the universe is information. - [David] The universe had a high IQ from the very beginning. A huge number of ingenious laws and precise mathematical constants appeared even before the birth of the universe. Then, about 14 billion years ago, the energy field mysteriously exploded, generating hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars. - The fact is that if we look at the expansion of the universe, we will see that the universe is getting bigger day by day, and the data obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Keck Observatory, as I said, indicate an expanding and stretching universe . So, if the universe is getting bigger and bigger every day, then it is more correct to talk about the scale of the universe, and even if we rewind time back, we will not be able to return to the past physically, although mathematically, of course, this is possible. Ultimately, the space between the original particles is practically reduced to zero, which is the creation of the world. The Big Bang, the creation of the universe. The moment when our world was born. So the data shows that our universe had a beginning. The question is what we don't see outside or before the universe, and also whether it was a deliberate act or not? - [David] After about nine billion years, the planet Earth formed. At this stage, the mystery lies in the sudden appearance of life. Dr. Schroeder finds this amazing. - Life has begun. And not in billions of years, but immediately, from the point of view of geology. There has been a lull for several million years, but the oldest rocks containing fossilized remains contain the remains of already fully formed, single-celled creatures. Nature almost immediately invents photosynthesis, and begins to saturate the atmosphere with oxygen. The urgency is what is amazing. - [David] Many of us have been taught that, according to scientists, life originated from some kind of primordial biological soup. Can life arise as a result of random reactions? The late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and a self-described agnostic with atheistic leanings, argued very clearly that the chances of long polymeric molecules of sustained life being randomly assembled from the chemical units of which they are composed are very clear. Moreover, according to geological concepts, life appeared immediately after the Earth cooled down. To explain this sudden appearance living organisms, the agnostic Creek suggested that the Earth was deliberately chosen for settlement. Of course, in his explanation, Crick skilfully sidesteps the topic of who or what. Schroeder only argues that the idea that life is the product of random reactions is no longer taken seriously by most scientists. - Harold Morowitz, in his book Energy Flow in Biology, calculated that it would take more time to create just one bacterium than the world could exist if random combinations of molecules were the only driving force. Life could not begin by chance. Starting in 1979, you would have to do an extensive search to find in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, in an authoritative peer-reviewed scientific journal, an article that reduced the origin of life to nothing more than random reactions. - [David] Some thinkers, including Stephen Hawking, argue that if a lot of monkeys type long enough on a computer, they can reproduce one of Shakespeare's sonnets. They give this analogy, arguing that life could have arisen as a result of random reactions, given enough time. - New Yorker magazine in Christmas and New Year's issue 2002-2003 was so impressed with the possibility that this could happen that it even dedicated its cover to the monkeys making one of Shakespeare's sonnets. On it are monkeys tapping on the keyboard tuk-tuk, this monkey is not too happy, but that one is completely unhappy. But there, in the corner, is a really happy monkey. She did it. It turned out to be a sonnet. It's interesting to look at the numbers to see how it works, but the idea was so widespread that within a year or so, the Times magazine in London, on Friday, May 9, 2003, printed the article "So much noise, and the monkeys failed Shakespeare's test". The monkeys failed, so what? The National Arts Council agreed to give £2,000 to sponsor the project when the computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. Okay, you should see this. And they did it, put the keyboard there. I don't think they put the whole computer in because that would have been too dangerous, most likely just the keyboard, and led the shielded wires out of the cage to where the monitor was. The computer stood in the cage for a month, the monkeys scribbled about 50 pages. But the article turned out to be very interesting. Because the person, the woman who was responsible for the article, interview time, said that it was interesting, but also rather unpleasant, to watch the experiment. The first thing the monkeys tried to do was eat the computer. When that didn't work out, they started using it as a toilet. According to her, it was a real problem because she was in charge of cleaning up this mess. But they produced 50 pages where there was not a single word. Not a single word from everything that was printed. How could it be? How can this even be? Most short word in English it consists of one letter. They certainly hit the letters A and I, even if they printed them with a small letter at times. But this, of course, cannot be considered a word, right? Assuming Z, Q, W, A, V, W were typed, then A is not a word. In order for a word to be reproduced, albeit arbitrarily, it must be printed like this: space, A, space. And even a word of one letter requires three consecutive actions: space, A, space. To separate A from other printed gibberish. If you think there are, say, 30, probably around 30-35 keyboard characters, maybe more, but even assuming there are 30, that's 26 languages, plus spaces, plus the @ symbol, more numbers, say , 30, or perhaps closer to 40. Then the probability of getting this letter is 30 times 30, and another 30. 30 times 30 is 900, and another 30 is 27,000. The probability of getting a one-letter word by a random set - 1 in 27,000. What is the probability of getting a Shakespeare sonnet? I wouldn't use it as a parallel to life, but that's what we find in the best-selling science book, A Brief History of Time. What is the probability of getting a Shakespearean sonnet just by slapping the keys? I went to MIT and I shouldn't know much about sonnets, I don't. But I knew where to look for them. IN full assembly writings of Shakespeare. All sonnets are the same length, they are by definition 14 lines long. I chose the one whose first line I knew. “Will I compare your features with a summer day?” Or with a summer evening, I don’t even really know. In any case, I counted the number of letters in this sonnet. It turned out 488. 488 letters. And what is the probability, if you don’t count the spaces, what is the probability that a random set of 488 letters will line up in the exact sequence - “Will I compare your features with a summer day?” What happens with this. Well, take, say, the word S-H-A-L-L. If you have a bag with 26 letters and you put your hand in there and you want to draw an S, chances are one in 26. If you have two bags with 26 letters each, but I want to get S-H because I'm putting together the word S-H-A-L-L , then one letter out of 26 in the first bag, and one out of 26 letters in the second, then 26 times 26, then A, one out of 26, keep adding and adding, then you end up with 26 times 488. Or, in other words In other words, 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 in the 690th. The number of particles in the universe, not grains of sand, I mean particles - protons, neutrons, electrons, neurons, is 10 to the 80th power. We are talking about 10 to the 600th power. That is, 10 in the 80th is a one with 80 zeros after it. 10 in the 690th is a one with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to record the results of all attempts. If you were to work with a multiplier of 10 to the 600th power. If you take the entire universe and turn it into computer chips, its weight would be about 10 to the 55th power of grams, the energy of the mass, which is 10 to the 55th or 56th power. It would take 100 universes, a thousand universes, 10 to the 60th power, a huge mass of the universe that does not exist and which "would cause the immediate collapse of the universe itself, and turn it all, not only the Earth, but the entire universe, forget the monkeys, into computer chips, each of which would weigh a millionth of a gram Each computer would issue 488 attempts, say a million times per second, which is close to the speed "at which you eventually have the problem of transmitting information to extract it. If you use the whole computer chip, the universe of all the chips, and the chips run at a million sonnets per second, sonnet, sonnet, and another sonnet, but with random letters. The number of attempts since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th power. With a multiplier of 10 to the power of 600-1, it turns out that it is impossible to accidentally reproduce a sonnet. The universe cannot be more than 10 to the 600th power. It's a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion... up to the 600th power. or older by 10 billion billion billion years, which is impossible. However, the world thinks, "Well, what's the problem? Take the universe, take the monkeys, and they can do this all the time. - [David] Schroeder emphasizes that we know when life began, but we do not know how. - The universe is designed for life, but not for beginning of life, this is not at all clear. At present, we have no idea how life appeared, we assume, yes, but how an inert substance turned into a living one, we have absolutely no idea yet. However, once life has begun, from the fundamental constants of the universe it is quite clear to us that, in essence, it is intended for life. - [David] Every living being, from the very first bacteria to the largest dinosaur, is an independent entity that generates energy, reproduces and processes information using an incredibly intelligent symbolic information processing system, DNA. Life is a manifestation of intelligence, written in the language of DNA. DNA is the computer program that makes cells and keeps them alive. It determines the sequence of amino acids in each protein and contains genetic information passed on to future generations. DNA is transcribed into RNA. RNA is embodied in proteins. Proteins are as amazing as DNA. They have an amazing ability to unite without outside interference. Each cell of the body, except for germ cells and elements of blood cells, produces 2000 proteins every second from hundreds of amino acids. Again, this happens every second. But the process is so complicated, Scientific American says that it would take a supercomputer, programmed with the rules of folding, or protein folding, 10 to the 127th power of years to create the complete form of a single protein from only 100 amino acids. Meanwhile, what would take a computer trillions of years to do now happens in seconds in real proteins. Keep in mind that the living organism that emerged was already fully formed, with all the basic properties, from DNA and proteins for replication. What about the origin of species? - For three billion years, life remained single-celled, and then, out of the blue, what was called the Cambrian Explosion happened. Or, in the terminology of Time and Scientific American magazines, the Big Bang in the evolution of the animal world. This Big Bang is quite amazing. All of the phyla that exist today, very briefly described in Scientific American, appeared at the same time. There are approximately 34 animal phyla today, and all of these 34 phyla are found in the fossil record and in the formation called the Cambrian Explosion. Simply put, in our type are the chordates that make up the first formation. These are the first insects, trilobites, and mollusks, and together all 34 types appear from nothing 3.8 billion years ago, 3.6, 3.7 and about 3.8 billion years ago. Life begins. For three billion years, living organisms remained single-celled, after which the Cambrian explosion suddenly occurs, giving rise to the animal world. - [David] It's not just the simultaneous appearance of amazingly diverse living organisms. All of the major forms of consciousness, vision, and visual memory appear all of a sudden. - Then, already our eyes. Every phylum that has eyes today first appeared in the fossil record with eyes. - [David] Vision involves converting a mechanical stimulus into a neural signal that is sent to the brain and then converted into a conscious state. Despite decades of scientific research, the transition between these two worlds, the external stimulus and the corresponding sensory perception, remains the same mystery today. The philosopher Karl Popper noted that the emergence of consciousness in the animal kingdom is probably as much a mystery as the origin of life. The main secret of the origin of life is the origins of reproduction or reproduction. In his book What's Still to Be Discovered, Sir John Royden Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature, noted that the fundamental question is when and how generative reproduction evolved. Despite decades of reflection, we still don't know. And yet, reproduction is almost always overlooked in discussions. But in our show, it will become one of the main topics. - Because our task is to try to explain how the diversity of life that we now have came out of an inanimate lifeless substance that is incapable of reproduction. Because reproduction has led to the appearance of something that did not exist before. What they are going to do is to claim that the previous reproduction was quite sufficient to support reproduction, but not sufficient to reproduce itself, because if it were, we would constantly return to the previous stage, that is, move backwards. We are trying to explain the origins of reproduction, and cannot do so, in terms of the things we are already reproducing. Therefore, it seems to me that people will say, here's the thing, maybe we had a proto-reproduction. That is, certain chemical and physical reactions that, in themselves, are non-reproductive, but they become so. But this is not an explanation, this is a deception. The bottom line is that reproduction is either there or it isn't. If it is, we don't seem to be able to explain it by something that is no longer being reproduced. And if the reproduction is already there, then we haven't explained it yet. - The very first life form, preserved to this day, already had the ability to reproduce. The reproduction has a clear purpose. It is not accidental, the idea of ​​targeted reproduction is to preserve species and ensure their development. Even today's life forms have a purpose that points to something really important, so why couldn't early forms take into account reproduction? If you didn't know you were going to die, what would you be worried about reproducing? People are destined to know that at the end of the chapter is what is called death. It may not be the end of life, but it is the end of a chapter of this aspect of life. What would the first lifeforms think of this? Did they know they were going to die? Did the bacterium know about death? - [David] Finally, our journey brings us back to ourselves. new race thinking native speakers. The next question of origin is so deeply rooted in our daily lives that we don't even think about it. Think about what you have been up to now. You watched the program, listened to the participants and evaluated their arguments. They spoke to you in certain codes we call "language" and you decoded their linguistic symbols to understand what they were trying to say. So our question is: how did language come about and how did we acquire the ability to use it? Evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins candidly says: “It seems that there is nothing like syntax in non-human animals, and it is difficult to imagine its evolutionary precursors. This applies equally to the origin of semantics, words and their meanings. Now we ask who understands what is said Are you talking to someone? Your brain cells or you? And where are you? In a part of your brain or in some other part of your body? Steven Pinker, a brain researcher at Harvard University, in his book How the Brain Works writes: "I - it's not just a combination of body parts, or a state of the brain, or pieces of information. This is the unity of self-consciousness for a certain time, the only organ that does not have a specific place. How did language and conceptual thought originate? Language is a system of codes that convey meaning through symbols. The activity of encoding and decoding meaning is invariably intellectual. Only humans have a syntactic language. He was even in ancient civilizations, and is instinctively acquired by children at a very early age. But scientists cannot explain the origin of language or the transition from primitive to syntactic language. - The nature of language as a way of expressing conceptual thought requires an explanation, which, in the end, can be given if there is an internal understanding, and each emerging person is endowed with the ability, intellectual ability or competence to communicate with his own kind. - [David] So how do we determine the IQ of the universe? Many of the greatest scientists of all time from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg considered it impossible that only a material matrix, formless and disordered, could create indisputable intelligence. From their point of view, the intellect of the universe, its laws, indicate that the intellect has no boundaries. It is defined by an outstanding mind, such as Einstein's. - [Reader] "Undoubtedly, this belief, which is akin to a religious feeling, about the rationality or orderliness of the world lies at the basis of all scientific works of a higher order ... This belief is associated with a deep belief in a Supreme Intelligence that shows itself in the world of experience, represents my concept of God. - [David] They believed that only infinitely high mind, the mind of god, able to serve source of energy, life, consciousness, rationality and laws of nature. The fundamental IQ of the universe is the matrix of God. For them, it was the highest point of scientific discovery. In other words, of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest is God. Today, of course, this belief is not shared by all scientists and philosophers. And, of course, such a hypothesis of God has flaws. The existence of evil and imperfection, for example. Many people assume that intelligence in the universe somehow evolved from non-intelligence. Given the opportunity and a sufficient amount of time, and in the case of living beings by natural selection and random mutation. But even in the most sober and materialistic scenario, the mind and system of mind emerged fully formed from the start. Matter, mass, energy appeared simultaneously with ingenious, mathematically precise laws. Life emerged fully formed with an amazingly intelligent symbol processing system, DNA. Amazing Phenomenon protein stacking and the miracle of replication at first sight. Language, the embodiment of conceptual thought, with its unimaginable structure of syntax, symbols, and semantics, emerged from nowhere. And again, with the core infrastructure "as is" from day one. The available evidence unmistakably shows that there is a constant progressive evolution of non-mind into mind, into other fundamental categories of energy, life or consciousness. Each of these three categories had internal intellectual structures as soon as they appeared. Each seems to come from an infinitely evolved consciousness in exact sequence. The circumstances of the origin of the world lead to such a conclusion. - Three things worthy of attention. First of all, the transition from inanimate matter, inanimate matter, to life. Secondly, the movement of life as such, to the level of intelligent or conscious life, a type of state of being that is inherent in both animals and people, and, thirdly, more high level being, the intellectual existence that people demonstrate when, for example, they do such things when they talk about philosophy and science. - [David] In an attempt to avoid the obvious answer that the source of life, consciousness and thought must be a living, intelligent and thinking being, some philosophers simply point to mysterious phenomenon called the process of emergence. But in this attempt there is no essence. - [John] A lot of people would like to say, "Well, the whole history of the universe is that when matter has reached a certain difficulty level, the next level has appeared. Then the matter was organized in a certain way, which led to the emergence of life, life arose as it is. Then, when life or biological properties reached a certain level of complexity, consciousness arose. And again, at a certain level of complexity, consciousness gave birth to intelligence. But these metamorphoses of appearance, emergence, birth, etc., are not a valid explanation. This is just a description of what needs to be explained. - [David] So what does Anthony Flue think about new history Sciences? This is what we will learn in the next part of the program. Let's get back to Flue's main counterarguments. First, the universe is eternal, second, life is a random process, and third, the very concept of God is contradictory. “My point is that all questions about the justice of Dr. Warren's system, and all questions about the justice of any of the myriad contending theories about possibilities and purposes beyond the universe, must begin with the presumption of atheism. And the presumption of atheism, like the presumption of innocence in British customary law, requires proof. This is not an assumption that something is happening, this is a thesis that requires proof. It is the assertion that if we are intelligent enough to go further, beyond the universe, to a story about the supernatural and transcendent, then we need a good reason to believe in such a story. If we go beyond what unites all reasonable people of any religion or non-believers, then we need a solid foundation to put forward any bold hypothesis. - [David] What does he think today about the origin of the universe? - The theory is related to this big bang about the existence of an ordered mind in the world. - Then I and my like-minded people differ from the rest in that we reject the very idea of ​​any transcendental reality outside the universe. We begin and end with what is common to all people, believers and non-believers. That is, from the universe itself, the everyday world common sense and general experience. And from those hidden mechanisms of such a world, which gradually appear as science develops, and we reject all transcendent supernatural systems, not because we have explored or could explore each, but because they do not seem to us a convincing enough reason to postulate something beyond natural universe. - When I first learned about the Big Bang theory, as a non-believer, it seemed to me something completely new, because, at least, it assumed that the universe had a beginning. After all, even the first sentence in Genesis tells of a similar event in the universe. If there were no reason to think that the universe had a beginning, there would be no need to postulate something else that produced it all. But since the universe has a beginning, the question of what caused it to come into existence becomes perfectly reasonable, almost inevitable. It completely changed the situation I faced in the 30s last century or in the 40s and 50s. - [David] What happened before the Big Bang? Today, some cosmologists believe that our universe may be one of many others. But that doesn't solve the problem Flue pointed out. “Because if the existence of one universe requires an explanation, then many universes require it even more. The problem has been exacerbated by the number of universes, whatever it may be. - [David] What does Flue think about the origin of life? - In fact, yes, I do believe that living organisms developed from non-living organisms over an immeasurably long period of time. Let's take a few examples. Let's look at the very complex structure of the human eye. Now tell me who did all this? If you only look at the most obvious evidence, the answer is "Nobody". He formed. As for the reproductive system, I'm a little surprised that Dr. Warren said about the human reproductive system. I realize this is a little out of place in this discussion, but it's wrong to refer to the human reproductive system if you want to say that a human couldn't come into being without a special process of creation. That is, we all know how people appear, and if some special process took place, then it was a long time ago. But immediately after that, people began to appear in the well-known way, which we describe as facts of everyday life. - [Gerald] Professor Flue, in your opinion, does modern science indicate the existence of the activity of otherworldly intelligence in our universe? Yes, I think so now. Almost convinced. Through the study of DNA. I think that the existence of the DNA material demonstrates the almost incredible complexity of the formations that led to the emergence of such a creature, and that there was some intelligence that was supposed to make completely different elements work together. The complexity of a number of elements is incredible, but the subtlety with which they work is also amazing. The very likelihood that the two parts will meet at the right time is negligible. And I can hardly explain it better in a short form. That's all and the question is not the complexity with which the results were achieved, and which I perceive as the work of the intellect. - [David] Professor Flew agrees that reproduction is a problem. “I don't know of anyone suggesting any theory. An almost unsolvable problem, which, of course, can be used to argue for such a construction. - [David] Those who argue that life arose as a result of random reactions sometimes use the analogy of monkeys typing on a computer. Flue is not impressed by this argument. - It seems to me that you have very, very convincingly proved that the thesis, which we could call the monkey theorem, is complete nonsense. I mean, it works especially well with just one sonnet. And if it is an absolute absurdity, then it takes a lot of courage to even just offer it. - [David] The sudden appearance of various life forms is also a mystery. - [Gerald] Of the many articles in Science, one from 1995 by Robert Kerr stands out: Did Darwin Get It Right? I never thought I'd see this in a highly respected peer-reviewed journal, Science, with a "No" subtitle, essentially, not to the point. He argues that species emerged at a high non-Darwinian rate. And it's in Science, a peer-reviewed journal. That's the main problem, isn't it, Professor Flue? That there were sudden bursts of life, and they arose, literally, from nothing. - [David] Flew agrees that questions of origin lead to the idea of ​​mind working in the universe. - Given what is known and studied by science, thought is moving in this direction. Okay, let's say there are two views: we just can not explain, there is no explanation. Or there is an explanation - this is a purposeful action. I don't know what Anthony thinks about this. - Yes, I think it's very difficult not to come to that conclusion. - [David] Number three. We have come to the question of the nature of God. Flue had previously argued that the idea of ​​a god as an omnipresent spirit made no sense. - Now someone says they believe there is a being, omnipotent and so on, personified and so on. And, of course, this being is immeasurably larger than a human, and certainly incorporeal. Here you go. So why do we define, why do we choose, as a topic for discourse, an object that has these characteristics? One reason, of course, could be called the very characteristics, infinite power, and so on, not belonging to any particular being or object in the universe, we do not say that something like this has always been, it would be funny, of course, we we don't speak. Then what, we are talking about the entire universe? But then, such a statement is completely unacceptable for Christians, since it is pantheism. Okay, let someone say that, but we're not talking about anyone specific in the universe or the universe as a whole. We are talking about something outside the universe. Yes, I understand what is being said, but it is difficult for me to understand to what or to whom it should be attributed, to what or to whom it is being said. It's not hard for me to say, okay, it's about God. Everyone knows this. But how do you choose what indicates who all these different things are being said about? - [David] What Flue thinks now is that the concept of god contains mutually exclusive elements. - I think that perhaps we need to think about what we mean when we say that someone has power? For example, one can imagine a large American corporation whose influence extends throughout the world. - Yes. - Then, I think, it would be naive to assume that there are those who literally spread their tentacles from the headquarters in New York or somewhere else. When we talk about global influence, we mean that those people in the New York office, let's say, can spread their power to the entire world. They can, for example, through equity investment or equity divestment, influence economies in distant parts of the world. This is what we mean by their presence and influence. Not about their actual location, but about their impact or power. - Yes. - This is how, I think, the concept of the omnipresence of God can be explained. That is, to say that God is omnipresent in nature does not mean that he is spatially present everywhere, but that there is no such part of the cosmos that would be outside of his influence. God's influence is all over the universe. I don't know if this analogy is correct. - I think it's very, yes, I think so -- - [John] Well, at least we've made some progress here. - Exactly. - [David] Flew makes the significant assumption that the existence of evil does not disprove the existence of a god. “I'm not sure either side should make the existence of a god contingent on unreasonable evil. - [David] According to Schroeder, in nature, in fact, there are signs that we are interesting to God. Author Roy Varges joins the discussion. - Then God is interested in the whole universe, curtailing the energy forces, and then reviving them. So it's one step further, of course, we're also part of this creativity, except for the Big Bang. You can say that for the last 15 billion years we have been using the energy of one cotton called the "Big Bang", that's right. But only if we consider this type of origin of the world. - Yes. - For a drawing to appear, you need slate and paper, so there is something in the universe that goes beyond creation, and perhaps complicates the concept of an uninterested god. Because first comes the idea that God can simply run the universe online. And then suddenly we find this huge problem of the emergence of life and reproduction. So he says, okay, god was interested in the beginning of the universe, and now, for some reason, he is interested in the beginning of life in the universe, and now our god is somewhere far away in the universe. - [Anthony] Yes. - [Roy] And even busier. Now it's harder to deduce this concept, of a god actively participating in the life he created, because god, if you look at life as independent property, could not be predicted by looking at the properties of protons, neutrons, and electrons. You get one mixture, a grain of sand, another gives you a mixture, identical protons and neutrons give you an Einstein grain of sand, and another gives you a whole pile of sand. Thus, it is obvious how it happens in reality. So now you've got a god so intimately connected to the universe in which, let's say, life originated. common bacterium. However, it's hard to see how she goes beyond that. The simplest life. Well, now we know that God's interest in the universe is not to curtail the process. And there is clear evidence for this. Does this mean that it is almost necessary to accept that God is really interested in the life he creates? It is obvious that what we call god has had quite a lot of interest in the universe to bring it to life. Is this already the end, or can we take a step that demonstrates an interest in more than just the creation of the universe, which almost forces us to say that, having begun life, God still has an interest in it? I mean, was god or some power sufficiently interested in getting reproductive organisms that you could never have predicted from protons, neutrons and electrons? Not to mention light beams? But that's what happened. So can we always understand what will be the next step in which God will be interested. Is the origin of life a form of revelation? Yes, this is a powerful argument. I see no way to agree with him at the present time. - [David] Science can't tell us about faith in God. But the purpose of our show is the IQ of the universe and what it tells us about its origins. With this, our journey almost approached the destination. The stars of our show have reached agreement with the pioneers of modern science. Our smart universe manifests limitless intelligence and ultimate reality. In fact, the most important discovery of modern science is God. This is David Aikman. Does Roy Abraham Varges' Miracle of the Universe, Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God, pair with Science That Discovered God? An amazing dialogue between an atheist scientist and a theologian about existence of god, endorsed by Nobel laureates and other famous scientists, including Professor Anthony Flew, who remarked: "I was very impressed and puzzled by this book, in which you will find a comprehensive analysis of questions about the origin of the universe. The scientific-religious views of great scientists and the thesis that that the equation of god is at the heart of modern science.Varges was previously co-editor of "Cosmos, bios, theos", named by Time magazine quote "This year's most exciting god book", end quote

Biography

Childhood

Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863-1929), a lawyer whose father, Richard, came to Ireland from Wales in the mid-19th century. His mother, Florence Augusta Lewis (nee Hamilton) known as Flora, was the daughter of an Anglican priest in Ireland. He also had an older brother - Warren Hamilton Lewis. When Lewis was four years old, his dog, Jexie, was hit by a car and claimed that his name was now Jexie. He stopped responding to any other names, although he later came to terms with the name Jack, which was what his friends and family called him for the rest of his life. When he was seven years old, his family moved to Little Lea, his childhood family home in Strandtown, East Belfast.

As a boy, Lewis was fascinated by descriptions of humanoid animals; he loved the stories of Beatrice Potter and often wrote and illustrated his own animal stories. He and his brother Warney created the world of Boxen, which was inhabited by animals. Lewis loved to read. His father's house was full of books, and it was easy for him to find a new book to read, as if walking in a field "find a new blade of grass."

Lewis received his first lessons from private tutors. But after his mother died of cancer in 1908, he was sent to Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire. Lewis's brother had entered there three years earlier. Soon the school was closed due to lack of students. School principal Robert "Old Man" Capron ended up in a psychiatric hospital after that. Lewis began attending Campbell College in east Belfast, about a mile from his home, but stopped attending after a few months due to breathing problems. He was sent to the resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the Sherbourg House Preparatory School, referred to by Lewis in his autobiography as Chartres. It was during this time that he lost his childhood faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult. In September 1913 Lewis entered Malvern College, where he remained until the following June. After leaving Malvern, he took private lessons with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College.

As a teenager, Lewis was fascinated by the songs and legends he called "Nordic", the ancient literature of Scandinavia, preserved in the Icelandic sagas. These legends awakened something in him that he later called "joy". He also loved nature. What he writes as a teenager gradually begins to go beyond Boxwood, he begins to try his hand at various genres, including epic poetry and opera, to try to embody the northern mythology and natural world that interests him. The lessons that Kirkpatrick taught him instilled in him a love of Greek literature and mythology, honed his skills in rhetoric and thinking. In 1916 Lewis was awarded a scholarship to Oxford College. After a few months of study at Oxford, he is drafted into the British Army as a junior officer. He goes to France to fight in the First World War. The horrors of the war he experienced confirmed him in atheism.

"My Irish Life"

Lewis experienced culture shock when he first arrived in the UK: "My first impression of England will certainly be incomprehensible to an Englishman," Lewis wrote in Overtaken by Joy. “The strange English pronunciation turned the voices of people into cries of demons, but the most terrible thing was the landscape between Fleetwood and Eustop ... Later I came to terms with all this, but it took many years to get rid of the hatred of England that flared up at that moment.”

As a teenager, Lewis became interested in Norse and Greek mythology, and a little later - Irish mythology and literature. He also had a pronounced interest in the Irish language, although there is much evidence that speaks of the difficulties he experienced in learning it. He developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats, partly because Yeats used Irish folklore in his poetry. In letters to a friend of his, Lewis wrote:

In 1921 Lewis meets Yeats twice when he comes to Oxford. He was struck by the indifference of his peers towards Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement. Lewis wrote, "I am continually amazed at the insistence on ignoring Yeats by the people I meet: perhaps his appeals are too Irish—if that is the case, thank the gods I am Irish." After converting to Christianity, he became interested in Christian theology and moved away from the pagan mysticism of the Celts.

Lewis occasionally experienced some derisive chauvinism towards England. Describing a meeting with a friend from Ireland, he wrote: “Like all the Irish who can be met in England, we agreed that the Anglo-Saxon race is impossibly frivolous and stupid. Besides, there is no doubt ami that although the Irish are only human, with all their faults, I would not be content to live or die among another people." Throughout his life he sought out the company of other Irish people living in England and visited Northern Ireland regularly. He even spent his honeymoon there in 1958 in Crawfordsburn. He called it "my Irish life".

World War I and Oxford University

Shortly after entering Oxford, in the summer of 1917, he joined the Officers' Training Corps at the university. From there he was drafted into the Cadets Battalion for training. After that, he, as a second lieutenant, went to the third battalion of light infantry in the British army. On his 19th birthday, he arrives at the front line in the Somme Valley in France, where he begins testing trenches. April 15, 1918 he was wounded, two of his comrades were killed.

During treatment, he suffered from depression and melancholy. After his recovery, he is assigned to serve in Andover, in England. In December 1918 he was demobilized and soon he resumed his studies.

In 1919, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (born Clive Hamilton), he published a collection of poems, Spirits in Bondage.

Sawyer later changed his mind. In the introduction to the 1997 edition of Lewis's biography, he writes:

I've changed my mind about Lewis and Mrs. Moore's relationship. In the eighth chapter of this book, I wrote that I was not sure that they were lovers. Now, after talking to Maureen, Mrs. Moore's daughter, and getting to know the location of their bedrooms in the Kilns, I'm sure they were.

Lewis spoke highly of Mrs. Moore throughout his life. Once he told his friend George Sawyer: "She was generous and taught me the same generosity." In December 1917, Lewis wrote a letter to his childhood friend, Arthur Greaves, stating that Jane and Greaves were "the two most important people in the world to me."

In 1930, Lewis travels to Kilns (a house in the Headington area, on the outskirts of Oxford. Nowadays part of Risinghurst) with his brother Warney, Missy Moore and her daughter Maureen. They all invested in the purchase of the house, which subsequently passed to Maureen, who, after the death of her mother in 1973, was known as Dame Maureen Dunber.

In the last years of her life, Jane Moore suffered from dementia and was eventually institutionalized, where she died in 1951. Lewis visited her every day until her death.

Conversion to Christianity

Lewis grew up in a religious family that attended the Church of Ireland. At 15, he became an atheist, although he later described his youth as a state of paradoxical "anger at God for not existing". His departure from Christianity began when he began to view religion as a chore and duty. At the same time, he began to take an interest in the occult. Lewis quoted Lucretius (De rerum natura, 5.198-9) as one of the strongest arguments in favor of atheism:

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam, naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa

What is not for us and by no means created by the divine will, this nature of things: there are so many vices in it

Lewis's interest in the work of George MacDonald was one of the reasons for his departure from atheism. This can be seen in the ninth chapter of his book Divorce, in which the main character, who can be called semi-autobiographical, meets Macdonald in heaven:

Trembling greatly, I began to explain to him what he means to me. I tried to tell how one winter evening I bought his book at the station (I was sixteen years old then), and she did to me what Beatrice did to the boy Dante - a new life began for me. I confusedly explained how long this life was only mental, did not touch the heart, until I finally realized that his Christianity was not accidental. I talked about how stubbornly I refused to see that the name of his charm was holiness.

He eventually returns to Christianity, influenced by the arguments of his colleague and friend Tolkien, whom he first met on May 11, 1926, and also because of Chesterton's book The Eternal Man. Lewis strongly resisted conversion, noting that he returned to Christianity as the prodigal son "with a fight, pushing back with all his might, looking around for an escape route." He described his last struggle in Overtaken by Joy:

And so, night after night, I sit at my place, at Magdalen College. As soon as I take a break from work even for a moment, I feel that the One is gradually, inevitably approaching, the meeting with Whom I so wanted to avoid. And yet, what I feared so much, finally happened. On Trinity Term 1929, I gave in and acknowledged that the Lord is God, knelt down and said a prayer. That night, it is true, I was the most gloomy and gloomy of all the neophytes in England.

In 1931, Lewis, by his own admission, became a Christian. One September evening, Lewis has a long conversation about Christianity with J. R. R. Tolkien (a zealous Catholic) and Hugo Dyson (the conversation is recounted by Arthur Greaves under the title "They Stand Together"). This evening's discussion was important to the next day's event, which Lewis describes in "Overtaken by Joy":

When we (Warney and Jack) went (on a motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo), I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but when we arrived at the zoo, I believed.

Lewis became a member of the Anglican Church, which slightly disappointed Tolkien, who hoped that he would become a Catholic.

Lewis was an adherent of the Anglicans who espoused traditional Anglican theology in many ways, although he tends to avoid supporting any particular denomination in his writings on apologetics. According to some, in his later writings, he adheres to the idea of ​​​​purgation of sins after death in purgatory (“Divorce of Marriage” and “Letters to Malcolm”), which refers to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, although it is also widespread in Anglicanism (mainly in circles of the Anglo-Catholic Church). Despite this, Lewis considered himself a completely traditional Anglican for the rest of his life. He noted that he initially attended church only for the sake of the sacrament and did not perceive the hymns and sermons, which were not very good. Later, he considered it an honor to worship with the faithful, who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses and hymns.

Various critics suggest that what ultimately drove him to convert to Christianity was fear of religious conflict in his native Belfast. As one critic put it, Lewis "repeatedly extolled the virtues of all branches of the Christian faith, emphasizing the need for Christian unity around what the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton called 'mere Christianity', the core tenets and beliefs shared by all denominations." On the other hand, Paul Stephens of the University of Toronto wrote that "Lewis's mere Christianity masked much of the political prejudice of the old-fashioned Protestants that belonged to Belfast's middle class."

The Second World War

After war broke out in 1939, the Lewises took in children evacuated from London and other cities in the Kilns.

Lewis was 40 years old when World War II began. He tried to return to the military ranks, offering himself as a recruit instructor, but his offer was not accepted. He also turned down an offer from a recruiting company to write a press column for the Ministry of Information. Lewis later served in the local militia at Oxford.

From 1941 to 1943, Lewis broadcast religious radio broadcasts from the BBC from London, while regular air raids were carried out on the city. At that stage, these broadcasts were highly appreciated by the civilian population and the military. For example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman wrote:

War, life, everything seems meaningless. Many of us needed to find the meaning of life. Lewis gave it to us.

From 1941, in his spare time, he visited RAF posts at the invitation of Chief Chaplain Maurice Edwards, and spoke about his faith there.

In December 1952, Lewis was inducted by George VI into the list of recipients of the Order of the British Empire, but refused it to avoid association with any political issues.

Also during this war period he was asked to become the first head of the Socrates Club at Oxford (January 1942). He remained in this position until he moved to the University of Cambridge in 1954.

"Inklings". Cambridge university.

From 1933 to 1949, a circle of friends gathered around Lewis, which became the basis of the Inklings literary discussion group, whose members were John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Warren Lewis, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Haward, Owen Barfield, Weville Coghill and others.

Joy Davidman

In later life, Lewis corresponded with Joy Davidman Graham, a Jewish-American writer and former communist who converted from atheism to Christianity. She broke up with her drinking, abusive husband, writer William Graham, and came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas. Lewis valued her as a talented and intelligent companion and personal friend. The fact that Lewis agreed to live with her in a civil marriage was what made it possible for her to remain in the UK. The civil marriage took place at the registration center at 24 St. Giles Boulevard, Oxford, on April 23, 1956. Lewis's brother Warren wrote: “Jack was primarily attracted to intellect. Of all the women, only Joy had a mind that matched him in flexibility, open-mindedness, tenacity and, above all, a sense of humor. After complaining of hip pain, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Their relationship with Lewis developed so much that it led to a Christian marriage. This caused some difficulties in terms of the church, since Joy was divorced, but their friend Rev. Peter Bide, March 25, 1957 held a ceremony right at her bedside in Churchhill Hospital.

A little later, Graham went into remission and lived together as a family with Warren Lewis until 1960, in which a relapse of cancer led to Joy's death on July 13. Earlier that year, they spent a short weekend in Greece by the Aegean, during which they visited Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes, Heracleion and Knossos. Lewis liked walking, but not traveling. This was evident from the fact that after 1918 his travels were limited to crossing the English Channel. Lewis' book, Exploring Grief, described the experience of his bereavement in such a specific manner that he first published it under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk to prevent readers from associating the book with him.

After Graham's death, Lewis continued to raise her two sons. Douglas Graham was a Christian, as were Lewis and his mother, while David Graham returned to the faith in which his mother was born and became an Orthodox Jew in his beliefs. In a 2005 interview, Douglas Graham confirmed that he and his brother were not close, but said they communicated by email. Douglas remained involved in the management of Lewis' estate.

Illness and death

In early June 1961, Lewis developed inflammation of the kidneys, which led to blood poisoning. Illness forced him to temporarily leave teaching at Cambridge. By 1962 his health gradually improved and he returned to work in April. Lewis's health continued to improve and, according to his friend George Sawyer, he made a full recovery by early 1963. On July 15 of that year, he began to feel unwell and was hospitalized. The next day at five o'clock in the afternoon he had a heart attack. He fell into a coma, waking suddenly the next day at two o'clock. After being released from the hospital, Lewis returns to the Kilns, even though he was too ill to work. As a result of illness, in August he finally resigned his post at Cambridge. His health continued to deteriorate, and in mid-November, exactly one week before his 65th birthday, he collapses in his bedroom at 5:30 pm and dies a few minutes later. Lewis was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. His brother Warren Hamilton "Warney" Lewis, who died April 9, 1973, was later buried in a nearby grave. Media coverage of Lewis's death was almost invisible against the backdrop of reports of the assassination of John Kennedy, who was assassinated on the same day (about 55 minutes after Lewis's death), as well as news of the death of the English writer Aldous Huxley, author of the book Brave New World. . This coincidence inspired Peter Kreift to write Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialogue Somewhere Beyond Death Between J.F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and O. Huxley. Lewis is commemorated on November 22 in the church calendar of the Episcopal Church.

• Lewis's ancestors on his mother's side were a noble Scottish family of Hamiltons: great-grandfather - a bishop, grandfather - a priest, besides a fierce enemy of Catholics, served as a chaplain in the Crimean War.
• On the father's side, the family descended from Welsh farmers, the last of whom was a great-grandfather (great-grandfather is a Methodist pastor, a good preacher; grandfather is a shipbuilding engineer, co-owner of the company; father is a well-known lawyer).
• In Lewis, however, there was not a drop of English and, although he was born in Ireland, Irish blood. The Hamiltons are of Scottish descent, the Lewises are from Wales.
• Lewis's mother, Flora Hamilton, was a talented mathematician. She rejected Albert Lewis for seven years, believing that she did not love him enough. In addition, she was afraid that she would not be able to manage the household. On August 29, 1894, the father of the bride married them. The marriage turned out to be happy.
• Flora and Albert read every afternoon, sitting side by side in deep armchairs. Although, oddly enough, it was not they who read to their sons Warren and Clive, but Nanny Lisey.
• Little Lewis saw the height of perfection in Beatrice Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
• As children, Lewis and his brother had: Tim the terrier, a spotted (white and black) cat whose name has not been preserved in history, Tommy the mouse and Peter the canary.
• The asteroid 7644 Xluys is named after the writer.

Bibliography

fantasy

1. "Until we face have found" ( Till We Have Faces, )

The books of the English writer Clive Lewis are known and loved by both adult readers and children. And there is hardly a person who would not read the world-famous book "The Chronicles of Narnia".

short biography

Clive Lewis was born in Northern Ireland on November 29, 1898. His father was a lawyer, his mother was the daughter of a priest. There were a lot of books in their house; from childhood, Lewis liked to read. Brought up in Christian faith, a boy after training in private school House of Cherbourg loses faith. As a teenager, Lewis is fascinated by Scandinavian legends and loves nature very much.

Trying to embody his hobbies, he tries himself in various genres - opera and epic poetry. The private lessons that he took as a child from William Kirpatrick instilled a love for Greek literature and honed thinking and rhetoric in a teenager. In 1916, Clive Staples Lewis received a scholarship at Oxford, but he was soon drafted into the army. Lewis served in France, taking part in the First World War.

After being wounded in 1918, Lewis was demobilized from the army and resumed his studies at Oxford. In 1919 he published his first collection of poems. After receiving his master's degree in 1923, Lewis taught philosophy at Oxford College. From 1925 to 1954 he worked as a teacher of English literature at Magdalen College. In 1926, the second collection of his poems was published.

Return to Faith

One September evening in 1931, Lewis is having a long conversation about Christianity with J. Tolkien. This discussion is becoming important event in Clive's later life. After it, faith in Jesus Christ, lost at the age of fifteen, flared up in him with renewed vigor.

During World War II, Clive Lewis conducted religious broadcasts on the radio. In 1952 he was awarded the MBE and offered a position as head of the Socrates Club at Oxford. He remained in this position until 1954, when he became chairman of the newly created Chair of Medieval Literature at Cambridge.

But Lewis had a strong attachment to Oxford, where he had a home that he visited every weekend until his death in 1963.

The work of Clive Lewis

Lewis's literary path begins with the writing of books on Christian themes. His first work, written in 1932, a few months after his conversion, is called The Roundabout, or The Return of the Pilgrim. This book is an allusion to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

In his second book, Suffering, published in 1940, Lewis shares his thoughts on suffering. In it, he raises questions about heaven and hell, about kindness and virtue. He discusses how suffering is possible if the Lord is loving and all-good. Can you be kind? Are you ready to share your happiness with the world? The book will be useful not only for Christians. It provides answers to questions that every person asks himself.

"Letters of Balamut" is a kind of novel in letters that the old demon Balamut writes to his nephew. Clive Lewis in this work shows the "wrong side of the world", raises the topic of serious things that deserve attention. The old demon teaches the young the science of temptation. Every reader will learn a lesson from this book.

This work was written by Lewis in 1941, but fame came to the writer after the reprint of the book in 1943 in America. The continuation of the Letters is the story "Troublemaker Proposes a Toast", which was written in 1958 by Clive Lewis.

Christian books

"Dissolution of Marriage" is a story on the eternal themes about the existence of heaven and hell. Here the author shows how faceless and oppressive the city of ghosts, which is the prototype of hell in the book. And Lewis brings the reader to a comparison with a boundless and glorious heaven, which can be entered through repentance.

"Miracle", a work created by Lewis in 1947, tells the reader that there is a miracle, but people, with their disbelief, pride, do not notice it, and it passes them by. "Simply Christianity" is a book that has long become a desktop for many Christians, regardless of denomination. In it, Clive Lewis reveals the essence of Christianity and answers questions related to faith.

In "Reflections on the Psalms" the author reveals the essence and essence of the psalms. The book "Four loves" tells about the types of love and its understanding by Christians. The essay "Exploring Grief" was written when Lewis's wife died. Here he talks about despair, denial of faith, misunderstanding of God's providence, fear, pain.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Space Trilogy is a series of novels in which the author combines Christianity and fantasy. Here and communication with other civilizations, and flights to other planets, and unusual higher beings, and A New Look on angels and the fall, the battle of good and evil.

The fantastic novel "Until We Have Found Faces" in the fantasy genre retells and originally interprets the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid.

And, of course, the famous fantasy cycle of seven books that brought Lewis worldwide fame - The Chronicles of Narnia. The series of books is still very popular today. Based on the works, theatrical performances and radio shows, films and computer games are created.

Narnia is a magical, amazing country. A world that boggles the imagination. The world that Clive Lewis created. "The Chronicles of Narnia" tells the adventures of four children who find themselves in the country where they live unusual creatures, witches and fairies. There, where the birds and animals talk, and the Lion King rules the magical land.

The adventures of the guys take readers into the world of magic. The author describes the events so vividly and vividly that a feeling of the reality of this world is created. Of course, first of all, "Chronicles" is a kind fairy tale, a world where you can get through a wardrobe. Lewis so subtly and accurately thought through all the images, invested in amazing fairy tale their feelings and thoughts that the Christian subtext of the story is almost invisible.

Nevertheless, in the "Chronicles" Christian parallels are clearly visible: the conversion of the "daughter of Eve" at the beginning of the book, the resurrection of the lion Aslan. The author himself writes that initially he did not plan anything related to Christianity. But everything worked out by itself. And he decided that this was the best way to teach children about religion.

Lewis's books teach you to believe in yourself and your ideals, to stand firmly on your feet, to free your thoughts from evil and betrayal. Otherwise, the prison, created from their own thoughts, will not release until death. Clive Lewis created a world to live in.

Clive Staples Lewis(Clive Staples Lewis) - English writer and philologist.

1917 - enters the University College of Oxford University, but soon drops out, deciding to be a junior officer in the army.

1918 - after being wounded, he is demobilized.

1919 - Under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (Clive Hamilton) publishes a collection of poems "The Oppressed Spirit" (Spirits in Bondage).

Returns to studies at Oxford.

1923 - receives a bachelor's degree, later - a master's degree.

1925-1954 - teaches English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford.

1926 - Under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (Clive Hamilton) publishes a collection of poems "Daymer" (Dymer).

1931 - Lewis becomes a Christian. One September evening, Lewis has a long conversation about Christianity with J. R. R. Tolkien (a zealous Catholic) and Hugo Deason. (The conversation is recounted by Arthur Greaves under the title "They Stand Together"). This evening's discussion was important to the next day's event, which Lewis describes in "Overtaken by Joy": came to the zoo, I believed.”

1933-1949 - A circle of friends gathers around Lewis, called the Inklings. The circle includes J. R. R. Tolkien, Warren Lewis, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Haward, Owen Barfield, Weville Coghill, and others.

1936 - philological work "The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition" (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition).

1938 - the novel Out of the Silent Planet is the first part of a kind of "interplanetary" trilogy dedicated to the cosmic struggle between good and evil.

1942 - literary work "Preface to Paradise Lost" (A Preface to Paradise Lost).

1943 - the novel "Perelandra" (Perelandra), the second part of the "interplanetary" trilogy.

1945 - "Divorce" (Great Divorce) - a modern analogue "Divine Comedy" Dante.

The novel "The Hideous Power" (That Hideous Strength) is the third part of the "interplanetary" trilogy.

1950-1955 - The Chronicles of Narnia is published. Seven volumes, among other things, contain a story about Christianity in a fairy-tale form accessible to children. The most striking works of this cycle are The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe, The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle.

1952 - Lewis first meets Joy Davidman, fifteen years his junior (1915-1960).

1954 - Begins teaching English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Cambridge.

1955 - English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is published; it becomes a classic and is included in the multi-volume Oxford History of English Literature.

1956 - the novel "Until We Have Faces" (Till We Have Faces) - an arrangement of the story of Cupid and Psyche.

At the hospital, Lewis registers his marriage to Joy Davidman, who is dying of cancer. Joy's death is thought to be inevitable.

1957 - Joy miraculously and unexpectedly recovers.

1960 - Lewis and Joy travel with friends to Greece, visiting Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes, Heracleion and Knossos. Joy died on July 13, shortly after returning from Greece.

November 22, 1963 - Lewis died the same day President Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley died. Until his death, he remained in his position at Cambridge and was elected an honorary fellow of Magdalen College. Lewis' grave is in the courtyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

The religious writings of Lewis are widely known (a number of his works are devoted to special theological and philosophical problems) and radio appearances.

Prominent English and Irish writer, scholar and theologian. Known for his work on medieval literature and Christian apologetics, and works of art in the fantasy genre. One of the prominent representatives of the Oxford literary group "Inklings".

Born November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the family of a lawyer, but most lived his life in England.

After leaving school in 1917, he entered University College Oxford, but soon dropped out and was drafted into the British army as a junior officer. After being wounded in the First World War in 1918, he is demobilized and returns to the university, where he completes his studies.

In 1919, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (Clive Hamilton) publishes a collection of poems "The Oppressed Spirit" (Spirits in Bondage).

In 1923 he received a bachelor's degree, later - a master's degree and became a teacher of philology.

From 1925-1954 he taught English and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford.

In 1926, under the same pseudonym, Clive Hamilton published a collection of poems, Dymer.

In 1931, Lewis, by his own admission, becomes a Christian. One September evening, Lewis has a long conversation about Christianity with J. R. R. Tolkien (a zealous Catholic) and Hugo Deason. (The conversation is recounted by Arthur Greaves under the title "They Stand Together"). This evening's discussion was important to the next day's event, which Lewis describes in "Overtaken by Joy": came to the zoo, I believed.”

From 1933 to 1949, a circle of friends gathered around Lewis, which became the basis of the Inklings literary discussion group, whose members were John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Warren Lewis, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Haward, Owen Barfield, Weville Coghill and others.

The Chronicles of Narnia were published between 1950 and 1955. The most striking works of this cycle are The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew and The Magician’s Nephew.

Ice battle "(The Last Battle).

In 1954 he moved to Cambridge, where he taught English language and literature at Magdalen College, and in 1955 became a member of the British Academy.

In 1956, Lewis marries American Joy Davidman (1915-1960).

In 1960, Lewis and Joy travel to Greece with friends, visiting Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes, Heracleion and Knossos. Joy died on July 13, shortly after returning from Greece.

In 1963, Clive Lewis stops teaching activities due to heart problems and kidney disease.

He died on November 22 of the same year, not having lived a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. Until his death, he remained in his position at Cambridge and was elected an honorary fellow of Magdalen College. He was buried in the yard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford.