Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British literary scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist whose work shaped twentieth-century imagination across academic, literary, and theological registers. Born in Belfast, educated at Oxford, and later Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, Lewis combined philological rigor with a gift for popular exposition that few peers matched.
His academic contributions, including The Allegory of Love (1936) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), established him as a leading medievalist. But his wider influence came through fiction and apologetics: The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1952), The Problem of Pain (1940), The Great Divorce (1945), and the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). A member of the Inklings alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis moved from youthful atheism to a self-described “reluctant” Christian conversion in 1931, an arc he traced in Surprised by Joy (1955).
Lewis’s legacy resonates with Mormon transhumanist themes more deeply than his Anglican context might suggest. His doctrine of theosis—that the purpose of Christian life is to become “little Christs,” that God intends to make “the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature”—is among the most striking modern Protestant articulations of divinization, and it sits comfortably alongside Joseph Smith’s teaching that humanity’s destiny is to inherit the divine nature. His ecumenical instinct, expressed in the parable of Emeth in The Last Battle, suggests that sincerity and virtue can be received by Christ even when offered under other names—a posture friendly to syncretism and pluralism.
Lewis was no technologist, and his suspicion of scientism in The Abolition of Man (1943) cautions against any easy equation of progress with goodness. Yet his moral seriousness, his confidence that human beings are unfinished creatures undergoing a long and sometimes painful transformation, and his insistence that the universe itself may have been created for the purpose of drawing creatures into divine life all converge with the central Mormon transhumanist conviction: that becoming gods, by grace and through participation, is the actual point.