Study Guides by
C.S. Lewis
7 discussion guides available
The Great Divorce
C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce is one of the most imaginative and theologically rich works of the twentieth century. Written as an allegorical dream-vision, it follows a nameless narrator who boards a bus from a grey, drizzly, dreary city (which turns out to be Hell, or at least its outermost rim) and travels to the bright, solid, almost painfully real foothills of Heaven. Along the way, the narrator watches as a series of "Ghosts" — pale, insubstantial souls — are met by radiant "Solid People" who were once known to them on earth. Each encounter is an invitation: the Ghost may choose to stay, to let go of whatever it is clinging to, and to begin the journey further into the mountains and into joy. Most do not. Lewis's central thesis — borrowed and transformed from George MacDonald, who appears in the book as the narrator's guide — is that there is no ultimate compromise between Heaven and Hell, no "divorce" that lets us keep our cherished sins and also have God. The title itself is a deliberate counter to William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": Lewis insists the two cannot be married; one must choose.
View Discussion GuideA Grief Observed
A Grief Observed is not a book about grief in the abstract — it is grief itself, written in real time. When C. S. Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer in 1960, Lewis found several blank notebooks in his house and began writing in them — not to publish, not to teach, but simply to survive. What emerged was a raw, unsettling, and ultimately redemptive record of a man's soul being unmade and remade by loss. Lewis — the great Christian apologist who had written so confidently about pain in The Problem of Pain — found himself on the other side of the argument, not as a thinker but as a sufferer. The result is one of the most honest documents of faith under pressure ever written.
View Discussion GuideThe Four Loves
C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves is one of the most illuminating explorations of love ever written by a Christian thinker. Drawing on the Greek language's four distinct words for love — Storge (affection), Philia (friendship), Eros (romantic love), and Agape (the love of God) — Lewis examines each with the clarity of a philosopher, the warmth of a pastor, and the honesty of a man who has himself known love's joys and its costs. His central argument is that the "natural loves" (affection, friendship, and eros) are genuine goods, but they are not self-sufficient. Left to themselves, they can curdle into possessiveness, exclusivity, or idolatry. Only when they are ordered beneath and permeated by Agape — God's own love poured out in Christ — do they become fully themselves and truly life-giving. As Lewis memorably writes, "To love at all is to be vulnerable," and it is precisely by accepting that vulnerability, not armoring against it, that we draw closer to God.
View Discussion GuideThe Weight of Glory
The Weight of Glory is a collection of nine wartime addresses delivered by C. S. Lewis, most of them to university students and church congregations in England during the darkest years of World War II. The title essay — perhaps Lewis's most beloved piece of short prose — argues that the deepest longings of human beings are not distractions from the spiritual life but signposts pointing toward it. Glory, Lewis insists, is not a vague religious abstraction but a specific, almost unbearable promise: that we might one day hear from God the words "Well done," and that we are, each of us, potential vessels of a weight of splendor we can scarcely imagine. The remaining essays address the life of the mind in wartime, the nature of friendship and community, forgiveness, membership in the Body of Christ, and the costly demands that Christian belief places on ordinary life. Together they form an urgent, intellectually serious, and deeply pastoral summons to take Christianity at its full weight — not as a comfort, but as a reality that transforms everything.
View Discussion GuideThe Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is one of the most original and penetrating works of Christian apologetics ever written. Cast as a series of letters from the senior demon Screwtape to his bumbling nephew Wormwood, the book turns the usual perspective on temptation inside out: we see humanity not through the eyes of a saint or a pastor, but through the eyes of hell. The result is both darkly comic and deeply convicting. Lewis's central argument is that the Enemy (God, from hell's perspective) is relentlessly pursuing the love and free will of every human soul, while the demons work not through dramatic supernatural horror but through the quiet, corrosive power of distraction, self-deception, and spiritual complacency. Written against the backdrop of World War II, the letters expose how ordinary life — marriage, friendship, politics, pleasure, and even church attendance — becomes the battlefield for the soul.
View Discussion GuideThe Problem of Pain
C. S. Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940 at the request of Ashley Sampson, who wanted a layman's defense of Christian faith in the face of suffering. Lewis — who had once been an atheist and cited pain as his chief argument against God — brings remarkable intellectual honesty to his task. The book's central thesis is that a world without pain would not be a world of unchallenged comfort, but a world incapable of producing genuine virtue, love, or knowledge of God. Far from being evidence against God's goodness, suffering is reframed as the instrument through which an omnipotent and loving God pursues our deepest good — our surrender, our humility, and ultimately our joy in Him. Lewis does not offer cheap comfort; he offers a rigorous and compassionate argument that invites the reader to reconsider what "good" and "love" really mean when predicated of God.
View Discussion GuideMere Christianity
Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC radio talks delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, when the nation desperately needed a clear, confident articulation of the Christian faith. Lewis — a former atheist and Oxford don — was uniquely suited for the task. His goal was not to argue for any particular denomination, but to lay out the common hall of Christian belief that all major traditions share: the "mere Christianity" of his title. The book moves in four parts, from the universal moral law as evidence for God, to the nature of God and humanity's problem, to the person and work of Christ, and finally to the practical challenge of becoming the kind of person God designed you to be.
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