C.S. Lewis at Holy Trinity Church

In Oxford, C.S. Lewis visits Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, an Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Oxford. The church is about one mile from his home, The Kilns. The church is designed by George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), an architect who also designed the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford and the chapel for Exeter College. The church is designed in the fourteenth-century Gothic style and built of local Headington stone. The foundation stone is laid in 1848, and the building is dedicated by Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873), bishop of Oxford, on 22 November 1849. The east-window glass, depicting Christ in glory, is designed by the Scottish architect Sir John Ninian Comper (1864–1960) and installed in 1951 as a memorial to those in the parish who fell in the Second World War. The Lady Chapel is dedicated in 1993 in memory of Canon Ronald Head (1919–1991), the Vicar from 1956 to 1990 and a good friend of C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren. In the north aisle of the church is a brass plate marking where C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren always sat. They sit always in the same pew, nestled away in the north isle of the church, next to the column of St George. A few feet away from here is the Narnia Window. It is decorated with personages, scenes, and attributes from Lewis’s stories of Narnia, etched on glass by artist and sculptural glass engraver Sally Scott. The window, dedicated on 2 July 1991, is placed at the bequest of George and Kathleen Howe in memory of their son William and daughter Gillian, who died in childhood.

The Screwtape Letters

On Sunday 21 July 1940, at Holy Trinity Church, C.S. Lewis dreams up the concept and outline for The Screwtape Letters. He is struck by an idea for a book that consists of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work. The idea is to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view, the perspective of hell. Lewis starts writing, and beginning on 2 May 1941, the letters appear first in thirty-one weekly instalments in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian. Then, they are published as a book in February 1942. The book consists of letters written by a senior devil, Screwtape, to Wormwood, a younger devil whose job is to steer people away from God. The book is an instant success. It is reprinted multiple times and published in the United States the following year. Despite this success, Lewis feels corrupted by writing the letters. It makes him conscious of his need for spiritual support and comfort. In October 1940, he asks the Cowley Fathers, Church of England priests of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Oxford, to appoint a spiritual director to hear his confessions and give him advice. He is assigned Father Walter Adams (1869–1952), and they become close friends. After Father Adams’s death on 3 March 1952, Lewis feels like an orphan because his confessor and most loving father in Christ has died.

At the invitation of The Saturday Evening Post, C.S. Lewis writes a piece for the newspaper on 19 December 1959 called ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’. Like The Screwtape Letters, it is written from the perspective of hell. In this piece, Screwtape speaks at the Tempters’ Training College for young devils. He proposes a toast to the dignitaries assembled for the dinner, in which he purports to encourage in their infernal work the young devils who have just graduated from college. The toast itself is a relentless attack on the errors of public schools in the United States. Lewis targets public education’s failure to instil passion and virtue in people. He also attacks extreme egalitarianism in education and democracy, pointing out that such egalitarianism leads not to excellence but to mediocrity. Along with Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, the newspaper piece presents Lewis’s view of the profound dangers in the methods and goals of modern education.

Funeral

C.S. Lewis dies on 22 November 1963. On 26 November, his funeral is held at Holy Trinity Church. Lewis is buried in the same grave with his brother Warren. On their tombstone are the words from Edgar in King Lear, a tragedy written by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), that read: “Men must endure their going hence”. Mother Flora Lewis had a calendar with a quotation from Shakespeare for each day of the year, and that was the one on the day she died, 23 August 1908. The full quotation reads: “Men must endure / their going hence, even as their coming hither / ripeness is all.”


Sources

Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis. Companion & Guide
Jeffrey Schultz & John West, The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia