Why Today’s Christians Should Care about C. S. Lewis’s Adulterous Affair
In Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C. S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, Joshua Herring discusses the prevalence of the themes of gender and sexuality in Lewis’s work, arguing that Lewis offers clarity for Christians seeking to combat transgender ideology. While I agree, I would argue that Lewis’s life and writings also offer hope to those seeking to live out the Christian sexual ethic in the wake of both the sexual revolution and purity culture.
The sexual revolution was a utopian project that promised freedom from moral constraints as if natural consequences were human constructs. Purity culture was a reaction that promised a kind of marital nirvana for those who followed the right steps. Both belief systems created unrealistic expectations for relationship potential in a world of complexity and brokenness. C. S. Lewis’s life offers a picture of a man seeking to live out his faith in the rubble of his poor moral choices and shows how God used this struggle, not Lewis’s perfection, to draw countless souls to himself.
Many Christians are unaware that, prior to C. S. Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman at age fifty-eight, Janie Moore was his companion of over thirty years. Moore was the mother of Lewis’s friend Paddy, with whom he served in the army. It has long been claimed, based on the testimony of Paddy’s sister, that the two young men made a pact when they were sent to the front of the Great War: if one died, the other would take care of his family. Lewis was the one who survived, and for the next thirty years, he did just that.
While the nature of their relationship has been debated, recent biographers have come to the conclusion that Lewis and Moore shared a romantic attachment (Jacobs, McGrath, Wilson, and Zaleski). At the very least, their arrangement was complicated. Moore was more than twenty-five years Lewis’s senior and still married, although estranged from her husband. Lewis was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate when the two began living in what was essentially a common-law marriage.
Those closest to Lewis were confused about their shadowy and peculiar relationship and expressed fears that it was exploitative. Lewis’s brother, Warren, hated Janie Moore and was estranged from Lewis for a time until he finally accepted the eccentric arrangement. Perhaps the most telling episode in this saga is the renovation Lewis made to his home when he converted to Christianity. He barred the door between their bedrooms and constructed a metal staircase outside by which he entered his room. Trevin Wax captures this image perfectly: “Yes, for more than 20 years, C. S. Lewis had to walk out of the house and around to the side to enter his bedroom.”
Christian scholars have speculated that Moore may have inspired minor characters—domineering mother figures—in Lewis’s novels The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. However, it seems to me that we miss something if we don’t at least entertain the idea that the thirty years spent in a complicated relationship with this increasingly difficult woman may have influenced the shaping of one of Lewis’s most well-known villains: The White Witch. Leaving aside the fact that the witch’s actual name, “Jadis,” is not that far from “Janie,” there are too many parallels in their stories to be completely ignored.
In The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, four children are sent to a country estate during World War II. The youngest, Lucy, discovers a portal to a magical land which can be accessed through a wardrobe in an unused room. Lucy, the picture of innocence, learns that the realm has long been ruled by a witch whose power ensures that it is always winter but never Christmas. After Lucy returns, her siblings don’t believe her story and her brother Edmund—whose self-centeredness is on full display through most of the novel—scoffs at her. However, Edmund follows Lucy into the magical realm and falls under the spell of the White Witch, who convinces him she is the rightful queen. Despite the witch’s obvious cruelty from the beginning, Edmund is enchanted by her flattery and addictive Turkish Delights. With the motive of killing all four children so that they will be unable to fulfill the prophecy of overthrowing her, the witch instructs Edmund to bring his siblings to her castle between two hills where there are rooms filled with Turkish Delight.
In short, a complicated young boy is lured in by a beautiful and worldly-wise older woman who provides him with addictive sensual pleasures, alienates him from his siblings, and turns her victims to stone, making life always a dreary season but never allowing for the celebration in which that season usually culminates. It is the lion, Aslan (the Christ figure), who rescues Edmund with his slow and mysterious journeying into the heart of Narnia. Aslan’s self-sacrifice invokes the deeper magic which breaks the witch’s power, warms the weather, and brings Edmund to contrition and redemption under the rule of Narnia’s rightful king.
Like Narnia, C. S. Lewis was, for thirty years, in a kind of frozen relational state due to his connection with Janie Moore. For the first ten years, they were likely romantically linked in an adulterous affair. For the next twenty years, Lewis essentially lived in limbo, caring for an aging former lover rather than abandoning her. Like the winter that never led to Christmas in Narnia, their affair never led to marriage and indeed kept him from pursuing any relationship that could.
Lewis began writing the Narnia series in 1948, when Moore’s dependence due to health issues became nearly all-encompassing. He cared for her every need until her death in 1951. Not only were these years difficult because of Janie’s infirmity and her constant warring with the housemaids, they were years in which Lewis’s brother, Warren, battled alcoholism. In his work, Lewis was doing more than writing a children’s book; he was mentally escaping to Narnia himself, likely after trudging up the creaking, metal stairs to his own out-of-the-way, wardrobe-like room.
In C. S. Lewis: A Life, secular writer, Michael White, takes a more sympathetic tone toward Janie Moore than many Christian scholars. Rather than painting her as a predatory figure, he points out the strangeness of the times as well as the circumstances of Lewis’s life: the shock of the war, the mass deaths associated with the Spanish Flu, the cultural and moral upheaval of the day, Lewis’s strained relationship with his father, and the fact that Lewis was not yet a Christian.
Lewis could have abandoned Moore after his conversion, citing moral reasons for doing so. Apparently, though, he felt an obligation to care for this woman who he had treated as a wife, even if she did not share his newfound convictions. He seems to have sought a way to both follow the Christian sexual ethic while living up to the obligations he took on before conversion. In God’s providence, this situation created a spiritual and emotional wrestling that resulted in one of the most well-known children’s classics ever written.
In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis expresses the folly of searching for identity, power, and selfish gratification by giving into the cheap pleasures offered by a counterfeit ruler, but he doesn’t portray Edmund as an innocent victim. Edmund willingly joins the enchantress, putting his siblings and all of Narnia at risk because of his insistence on returning to her. However, Lewis also portrays the slow, methodical footsteps of a lion who never stops pursuing those who belong to him, even when his presence seems only to be a distant memory. Just as Old Testament prophets lived out allegorical pictures of God’s messages to Israel, Lewis lived the kinds of struggles he captured in his allegorical children’s tales. In writing Narnia, Lewis fulfilled the calling of Christians spelled out in 1 Peter 2:9 “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” In all of Lewis’ writing, there is the sense that the Platonic ideal of God’s love is ever before us—the only true key to joy. Yet, this love is always mocked by its substitutes, which can only ever leave us wanting.
Having a greater appreciation for Lewis’s long relationship with Janie Moore not only gives more context for understanding Narnia, it also sheds light on how unexpected and life-giving his marriage was. To be granted a second chance at love, and one in which he felt he could enter as a Christian (however controversial this union), was no doubt more magical than the escape he had previously found in his fiction writing. This makes it all the more heartbreaking that Lewis lost Davidman to cancer after only four years of marriage. However, even that loss providentially produced a work that has offered solace to several generations of readers with its authentic representations of grief.
Our generation of Christians, many reared on the false promises of purity culture and ultimately disillusioned by revelations of hypocrisy by many of the same leaders who preached its merit, are hungry for authentic examples of a true Christian sexual ethic—one that allows believers to wrestle with the realities of how to live out their calling in a fallen world. In pondering Lewis’s complicated relationships, we can perhaps gain an appreciation for the complexity of his own conversion and the possibility of both radical redemption and relational faithfulness in a confusing moral landscape.