You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.
—Surprised by Joy, chapter 14
Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity
The story of how Jack became an Oxford don begins with a look backward.
Both Jack and Warnie inherited a defect in their thumb from their father, making them unable to perform well in most sports. This lack of aptitude in games was one of the reasons Jack found Malvern so difficult. Early in Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains: “The upper joint (that furthest from the nail) is visible, but it is a mere sham; we cannot bend it” (12). But in this adversity was something good, as Lewis also reports: “It was this that forced me to write.” Of course, Lewis notes, when he was a boy frustrated by this misfortune, he had no idea of the “world of happiness” his defect was actually admitting him to. (We might say driving or guiding him to.)
Similarly, Lewis maintains that his two years at Wynyard, miserable though they were, also had a positive effect: “Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. Even, in a sense, by faith” (36).
Lewis writes that as the end of his undergraduate days began to grow closer, the problem of finding a university teaching post afterward began to loom not only larger but also grimmer. In fact, the problem proved too large and too grim, at least initially, for when Jack finished with his two firsts in Mods and Greats and received his BA in 1922, he was unable to secure any job in philosophy, the field he was now trained in.
Warnie tells us in his memoir that even for a scholar of his brother’s ability and achievement, it was neither a swift nor an easy matter to obtain an academic post. He describes the difficult process Jack went through in launching his academic career.
Immediately after taking Greats, he sat for a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen: before this he had looked into the possibility of a classical lectureship at Reading: later on, he applied for Fellowships at Trinity and St. John’s. For all these posts, Jack saw other men chosen; and there were times during this period of uncertainty when he tended towards despair of any academic or literary success. (31)
With no job in philosophy—a fact which certainly must have seemed like another great adversity at the time—Jack decided, as noted previously, to spend the next year getting a degree in English.
In the English School, Jack met and quickly became friends with a fellow student named Nevill Coghill, who was not only the best-informed and most intelligent student in their class but also a thoroughgoing supernaturalist and a Christian.
An entry from Lewis’s diary at the time records one of their typical hammer-and-tongs discussions.
Coghill did most of the talking, except when contradicted by me. He said that Mozart had remained like a boy of six all his life. I said nothing could be more delightful: he replied (and quite right) that he could imagine many things more delightful. . . . He said that Blake was really inspired: I was beginning to say “In a sense—” when he said “In the same sense as Joan of Arc.” I said, “I agree. In exactly the same sense. But we may mean different things.” He: “If you are a materialist.” (190)
Studying English literature brought Jack into contact with not only the Christian influence of Coghill, someone who could certainly hold his own in their lively debates, but another factor which threatened his naturalistic outlook. “All the books were beginning to turn against me,” Lewis reports (213).
In this delightful passage from Surprised by Joy, Lewis recounts his feelings about the Christian authors he encountered at this time when he was desperately trying to remain a nonbeliever:
George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. . . . But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I would still have called “the Christian mythology.” (213–14)
Lewis concludes that he must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen the contradiction between his philosophical worldview and his actual experience as a reader.
And what about those authors whose worldview aligned with Jack’s New Look—writers he should have embraced, such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and John Stuart Mill? Lewis comments that he found them entertaining but too simple and lacking in depth.
In looking back at this time in his life, Lewis explains that the normal step would have been to look more closely into the claims of the Christian writers to see whether they were, after all, wrong. But he did not take this step. Somehow Jack thought he could explain their superiority without ever considering the hypothesis that they were actually right.
But how was Jack’s inability to obtain a position in philosophy a sweet adversity—an event Sayer refers to as a fortunate failure? Because Jack could not get a philosophy position, he went back for a degree in English. Then after a year with an interim post, he was selected to be a fellow of Magdalen College (pronounced, as it has been for centuries, as maudlin) in English language and literature. He would remain in English for the rest of his career. This shift from philosophy to English turned out not merely to suit Jack; it was vital to the shape of the rest of his life. Had he gotten the post in philosophy he so desperately desired immediately after finishing Greats in 1922, he arguably would never have written the celebrated works he is now known for.
Here we must turn to two letters Jack wrote to Albert.
In the first, dated May 26, 1925, Jack—having just received the news of his appointment at Magdalen—expresses his gratitude for his father’s financial support over the long, at times arduous, period that lasted from 1919 to 1925.
First let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on till this. In the long course I have seen men at least my equals in ability and qualifications fall out for the lack of it. . . . You have waited, not only without complaint but full of encouragement, while chance after chance slipped away and when the goal receded furthest from sight. Thank you again and again. (CLI, 642)
Even more touching is Albert’s diary entry for May 20, 1925, when he first received Jack’s telegraph conveying the good news: “I went up to his room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers had been heard and answered” (LP, 8:290).
In the second letter, written just three months later, Jack can already see that the move from philosophy to English, initially taken out of necessity, was truly for the best. He writes to Albert: “I am rather glad of the change. I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted . . . is this the best life for temperaments such as ours?” (CLI, 648).
A. N. Wilson—who at the time he wrote his biography on Lewis did not share Lewis’s faith and so in many ways saw the world quite differently—rightly points out that without Jack’s pivotal shift to English, the story which followed might have been very different.
Rich as his imagination was, it had not yet seen its truest modes of expression; brilliantly workable as his mind was, he had not yet discovered . . . the precise nature of what he was good at. . . . Without [the change to English], Lewis would not have been the man he became. . . . Classical Mods had confirmed his knowledge of and love for the great texts of Rome and Greece which were always to form so large a part of the furniture of Lewis’s mind. Greats had sharpened his wits to the point where he thought not only that he was a philosopher, but that life and its problems could be adequately explained by purely cerebral means. English was to restore to him with inescapable force the message which he had been hearing . . . ever since he became addicted to reading as a small child in Northern Ireland. This was the knowledge that human life is best understood by the exercise of not only the wit, but also of the imagination. (75–77)
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the Duke, who years earlier was deposed and exiled by his villainous brother, describes the truth he has come to see.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. (2.1.12–14)
Just as the ugly toad, which, legend reports, had a precious jewel with healing qualities embedded in its temple, Jack’s own unpleasant, adverse circumstances also contained a precious gem hidden among them. Had there been an immediate opening in philosophy, Jack would never have gone into English and might never have written his fictional works such as The Screwtape Letters and the Chronicles of Narnia. But had he gone into English first, he would have lacked the training that enabled him to write such apologetic works such as Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity.
Jack was formally admitted as an English fellow at Magdalen on June 25, 1925. In yet one more fortunate turn, one of the reasons he was hired was his ability to tutor in both English and philosophy. Jack was twenty-six.
“It is a formidable ceremony,” he wrote to his father, “and not entirely to my taste” (CLI, 647). Being one of the largest colleges at Oxford, Magdalen had a sizable faculty. As part of the admissions ritual, Jack was required to stand in front of them all while the college vice president addressed him for five minutes in Latin. At the end of this exhortation, Jack, as required, responded Do fidem, which means “I swear.” Then he was told, in English, to kneel on a red cushion which had been specially provided for the event. That done, the vice president took Jack by the hand and raised him to his feet with the words “I wish you joy.” Jack tripped a little on his gown while rising, but he thought that at least the ceremony was over. Instead, he was sent around the room, where each of his fellow dons shook his hand and repeated the same phrase.
“I wish you joy.”
“I wish you joy.”
“I wish you joy.”
What Jack did not foresee at the time—could not have foreseen—was how this wish was soon to come true.
“My external surroundings are beautiful beyond expectation,” Jack wrote his father on October 21, 1925, from his new rooms at Magdalen (CLI, 650). He had a big sitting room which looked north over the college’s deer park. It was here that he would write, prepare lectures, and hold student tutorials for the next thirty years. He had a smaller room which served as his bedroom that looked south across the broad, manicured lawn to the college’s main buildings. Magdalen—the College of St. Mary Magdalen—was founded in 1458. Its famous tower was completed in 1503. Jack’s rooms were located in the college’s New Building (or New Buildings, as the structure is sometimes called), so named following completion around 1733.
George Sayer, who as a student at Magdalen and one of Lewis’s pupils would have spent many hours in tutorials in his rooms, offers this summary of Jack’s new situation:
At Magdalen he was looked after by a scout, a manservant whose duties included waking him up in the morning; bringing hot water for washing and shaving, for the rooms in New Buildings were without modern conveniences; clearing out the grates and lighting fires in one or both sitting rooms (there was no central heating); making the bed; and cleaning and tidying the rooms. In many other colleges, the scout would have also brought breakfast and lunch, but this was not the custom at Magdalen. . . . On all ordinary occasions, the fellows of the college ate in the dining room of the Senior Common Room, or for dinner, in hall. . . . Jack liked to eat breakfast early, because he would then have more time to complete his daily work. He arrived at eight or, when he had become a Christian, at a quarter past eight, after the fifteen-minute service in the college chapel. (187)
Lewis would later provide this answer to an American correspondent’s question of what exactly an Oxford don does (his final statement about standing in queues, or lines, refers to the rationing in Britain after the war): “Like a woman, his work is never done. Taking ‘tutorial’ occupies the best part of his day, i.e., pupils come in pairs, read essays to him, then follows criticism, discussion, etc. Then he gives public lectures in his own subject; takes his share in the business of managing the College; prepares his lectures and writes books; and in his spare time stands in queues” (CLII, 855).
And so in the fall of 1925 we find Jack moved into his rooms at Magdalen to begin a thirty-year routine that would in many ways remain unchanged until 1955, when he would take up residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge (also pronounced like maudlin but spelled with an e at the end), after accepting the position of professor of medieval and Renaissance English literature. He would be at Cambridge until he resigned his position there in August 1963, just a few months before his death.
The New Look Crumbles and Jack Moves to Idealism
In The Most Reluctant Convert, David Downing offers this insight about the critical role Jack’s atheism played in his later becoming such an effective Christian writer:
A careful look at Lewis’s early years reveals that he did not become an effective defender of the faith despite the fact that he spent so many years as an unbeliever. Rather, his Christian books are compelling precisely because he spent so many years as an unbeliever. He understood atheism. . . . He weighed all these worldviews himself, and eventually found them wanting. (15)
Here, in examining Lewis’s journey of faith, we must briefly turn back to his days as an Oxford undergraduate—to the time when he tried very hard to fully embrace his New Look, the belief that the only reality is the universe as revealed by the senses. Like many of his fellow students, Jack took the position that what we can see, smell, touch, hear, or taste—on our own or aided by scientific instruments—is all there is. Gradually, through his own sometimes painful personal experience, he came to see the inconsistencies in this position.
As his undergrad days were drawing to a close, Lewis tells us in his autobiography, a “really dreadful thing” happened (205). Suddenly Jack’s two best friends, Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood, deserted the naturalistic position they had all proudly and defiantly held previously and became ardent believers in the supernatural, in a world beyond the physical world. Barfield and Harwood did not become Christians; they became followers of a religious system called anthroposophy, which at the time had a number of adherents among European intellectuals. Lewis reports that he was shocked by their change, claiming that everything he had labored so hard to expel from his own life seemed to have abruptly flared up and met him in his best friends.
Jack’s two closest friends now embraced all that the New Look had been designed to exclude. Jack’s main opposition to their belief in gods, spirits, and the afterlife was that it all was so, well, medieval. Lewis reports that Barfield was never able to convince him to be an anthroposophist, but Barfield quickly demolished the “chronological snobbery” which Jack was guilty of—the assumption that “whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (207).
Losing this bias against old beliefs would be an essential step in Jack’s conversion.
We find Lewis’s most potent description of chronological snobbery in The Screwtape Letters. In the opening letter, Screwtape tells Wormwood that he needs to keep his patient thinking in terms not of whether something is true or false but of whether it is “outworn” or “contemporary” (1). “Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true!” Screwtape advises. Instead Wormwood is to get him to think that it is “strong or stark or courageous”—that it is “the philosophy of the future” (2).
Screwtape revisits this topic later in discussing the “Historical Point of View,” another term Lewis uses for chronological snobbery. In this devilishly delightful passage, Screwtape explains how this viewpoint works.
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present state of the question.” To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. (150–51)
Lewis was able to provide such a penetrating critique of chronological snobbery because he himself was guilty of it in his earlier years.
The one question he never asks is whether it is true. When Jack argued that Barfield’s belief in the supernatural was medieval, Barfield rightly pointed out that even if that label applied, this fact alone did not mean his belief was false.
If the Historical Point of View is not an answer to a position held in the past but merely a statement of prejudice, in Surprised by Joy Lewis outlines what a valid argument against something which has gone out of date would look like, perhaps here giving words to what Barfield said to him: “You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood” (207–8).
With his chronological snobbery pointed out and its defect made plain, Jack was now ready to consider naturalism and supernaturalism on their own merits rather than simply to dismiss supernaturalism as being out of date. And when he did consider the two positions, he found naturalism to be inconsistent in several ways.
In examining his own naturalism—he also calls it realism, popular realism, or materialism—Lewis tells us that he encountered three problems.
The first had to do with reason. Jack was unable to abandon the claim that abstract thought done rigorously and logically would lead to truth. This concept was something the Great Knock had knocked into Jack so thoroughly that we could say he was infused or permeated with it. At the same time, Jack came to the conclusion that naturalism could not support this belief.
Lewis titles the second chapter of Miracles “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism,” and this difficulty he refers to is the problem that if our thoughts are merely the product of random accidents, then there is no reason to trust them. Lewis argues here that naturalism “discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself” (15).
In his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” Lewis outlines this first problem he had with materialism.
Long before I believed theology to be true, I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. . . . Unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one. (135)
Jack’s second problem with naturalism had to do with morality or ethics. Jack was unable to abandon the idea that certain moral judgments could be labeled as valid, or at least as more valid than certain others—and with Barfield’s help, he came to the conclusion that naturalism could not support this belief. In Mere Christianity, Lewis presents the problem this way:
The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a Real Right, independent of what people think. (13)
But where did this “Real Morality” come from in a universe where humankind was just the product of random accident? This was Jack’s second problem with naturalism.
The third problem had to do with aesthetics. Jack was unable to abandon the idea that our experience of the beautiful is more than merely an encounter with something pleasing to the senses. Once again, he found naturalism was unable to sustain this position. As Lewis states in chapter 11 of Surprised by Joy, materialism, if followed to its logical conclusion, meant that “one had to look out on a meaningless dance of atoms” and to realize that “all the apparent beauty was a subjective phosphorescence, and to relegate everything one valued to the world of mirage” (172–73). In his essay “De Futilitate,” he argues, “There is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial, to something that is really there” (71).
Lewis reports in his autobiography that he found he could no more disbelieve or abandon these three positions on reason, ethics, and aesthetics—or, we might say, on truth, goodness, and beauty—than he could scratch his ear with his big toe. “I was therefore compelled to give up Realism,” he concludes (209).
And so Jack became a philosophical idealist, a position not talked about much today but quite popular at Oxford at the time. And though he did not know it, this idealism was not going to be a final destination but only the next stop on his journey.
Idealism Soon Crumbles and Jack Moves to an Impersonal Theism
When Jack abandoned realism, the belief that the physical world is all there is, and embraced idealism, the belief that there was some sort of Absolute that transcended the physical world, things started off well, initially. “This was a religion that cost nothing,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy. “We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us” (210).
Lewis notes the influence of three idealists—the English Hegelians—T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. Perhaps a closer look at just one of them will be sufficient to indicate the general position taken by idealist thinkers at the time. In The Most Reluctant Convert, David Downing offers this summary of the thesis in Bradley’s influential work Appearance and Reality:
Bradley envisioned an all-embracing Absolute in which the contradictions and illusions of the sensory world are transcended and resolved. This Absolute should not be confused with the God of religion, because it is not a Person apart from the universe; rather it is immanent in the universe, transforming the physical into the metaphysical. Just as each human body has a “soul,” the Absolute is the “soul” of the cosmos. (128)
Looking back at the idealism which he embraced at this time, Lewis writes in his autobiography that it was astonishing that he could view this position as something distinct from theism and concludes: “I suspect there was some willful blindness” (209). In addition to his own willful blindness, Jack had help from the idealist philosophers, who provided him with a number of useful “blankets, insulators, and insurances” which allowed him to get all the “conveniences” of theism without having to actually believe in God.
Writing in 1943 in the afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis traces his faith journey this way: “On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity” (200). These stages are perhaps worth unpacking a bit. Jack’s idealism held that there was a vague Absolute—but its nature, location, and other attributes were left largely undefined. Jack’s pantheism then saw this Absolute as immanent in and part of the universe. Finally, his theism placed this Absolute above and apart from the physical universe. There were two stages to Jack’s theism, as he first came to believe in an impersonal Spirit and then later in a personal God. After his move to theism, Jack still had a final move to Christianity.
Lewis goes on to say in the afterword that while he believes his path to belief to be a very natural road, at the same time he confesses that he had come to see his own particular sequence of steps to faith as a road very rarely trodden. In fact, very few Christians today have followed Lewis’s intellectual path. One reason for this, Lewis goes on to note, is that idealism soon ceased to have the appeal it had when he was one of its adherents. “The dynasty of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet fell,” Lewis observes, “and the world inhabited by philosophical students of my own generation became as alien to our successors as if not years but centuries had intervened” (200).
Lewis concludes that in looking back on The Pilgrim’s Regress ten years after its release, he finds in it a good deal of needless obscurity. Had he known his faith journey was so unfamiliar to the vast majority of his readers, he admits that he would have tried to describe it with more consideration for their difficulties. “I committed the same sort of blunder as one who should narrate his travels through the Gobi Desert on the assumption that this route was as familiar to the British public as the line from Euston to Crewe,” Lewis confesses (200).
A decade later, writing of this same journey from idealism to theism in Surprised by Joy, Lewis again at times becomes obscure and, to use his own comparison, may leave some readers feeling like they have been abandoned in the Gobi. Biographer Alan Jacobs throws up his hands at this point in Lewis’s narrative, asking, “But how, then, did he get from his vague Hegelian Absolute Spirit to a personal God?” His conclusion is that Lewis’s account is “hard to understand” (129).
The progression in Lewis’s faith journey from idealism to theism as described in his autobiography is hard to understand—particularly when looked at in its individual parts. But it is easier to follow when viewed as a whole—if we look at how each of these steps was connected to Joy, the central story of Lewis’s life, and how Joy now for the very first time became integrated into his worldview.
Lewis titles chapter 14 of Surprised by Joy “Checkmate.” There will be only one more chapter to follow. Five pages into chapter 14, Lewis tells us, “My Adversary began to make His final moves” (216).
Exactly how many of these final moves there were is hard to determine. Using phrases like “the first Move” and “the next Move”—each time, the word move is capitalized, presumably to suggest its divine origin—Lewis goes on to describe four specific steps. But along with these, he also mentions several other events that played a role in his acceptance of theism. Did Lewis consider these other events as moves made by his adversary? It’s impossible to say.
Even the exact dates for this transition are hard to pinpoint. Jack’s final step to fully embrace theism—the night when he finally accepted that God was God—took place during Trinity term (which runs from April through June) of 1929. We know this because Lewis tells us so in the last paragraph of chapter 14. (That said, evidence from an earlier manuscript version of Surprised by Joy suggests that this year may have been 1930 rather than 1929. So this may be another place—like the age he reports going off to school in 1911 and the month he reports having discovered Phantastes—where Lewis is slightly off.)
When did this step begin? Just before launching into his account of these final moves, Lewis mentions two events which can be dated. First, he mentions his father’s death—simply to note it and claim that it does not come into the story which he is telling. The problem is that Albert’s death took place on September 25, 1929, three months after the end of Trinity term—making it unclear what this date has to do with the checkmate Jack undergoes. After mentioning his father’s death, Lewis then goes backward to mention his election as a fellow at Magdalen in 1925, possibly suggesting this as a starting date. So perhaps we might bookend his journey from idealism to personal theism with the years 1925 and 1929.
On May 26, 1926, seven months after moving into his rooms in the New Building, Jack wrote in his diary: “I took my walk over the fields to the row of firs on the way to Forest Hill, and sat down at the foot of one where there was a pleasant breeze. The place is smothered in daisies and buttercups and hedged with hawthorn. I thought a little—all my ideas are in a crumbling state at present” (401). During this time, each step in Lewis’s spiritual journey will be marked by a crumbling of one stage, that door closing, and a door to the next stage opening.
Lewis reports that his adversary’s first move came because he reread Hippolytus by Euripides, and this triggered the return of Joy which had been long absent. How did Jack happen to pick up this particular text at this particular time? Besides calling this a move on the part of his adversary, Lewis makes a point to tell us in his autobiography that he was suddenly “impelled” to reread this work (217). What drove him to reread this work we are not told. It was not something he needed to read at the time. Lewis states that Hippolytus was “certainly no business of mine at the moment,” further suggesting that in both the rereading and the Joy that accompanied it, his adversary was at work.
Lewis reports that in one moment all the play’s imagery of the world’s end rose before him, presumably a reference to this moving passage:
Oh God, bring me to the end of the seas
To the Hesperides, sisters of evening,
Who sing alone in their islands
Where the golden apples grow,
And the Lord of Oceans guards the way
From all who would sail
Into their night-blue harbors—
Let me escape to the rim of the world
Where the tremendous firmament meets
The earth, and Atlas holds the universe
In his palms.
For there, in the palace of Zeus,
Wells of ambrosia pour through the chambers,
While the sacred earth lavishes life
And Time adds his years
Only to heaven’s happiness. (98)
Lewis says that at once he was transported to the land of longing, where his heart was both broken and exalted as it had not been since his days at Great Bookham with the Kirkpatricks. Finally the long inhibition was over. The dry desert where Joy was forbidden by the realism of the New Look was suddenly behind him, never to be returned to.
Bring me to the end of the seas. Let me escape to the rim of the world where the tremendous firmament meets the earth. Lewis would never forget the deep longing the imagery in these lines evoked. Years later, in the climactic final chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he would create his own equally moving version of the world’s end. Modern readers, who find it difficult to share Jack’s experience of Joy from reading Hippolytus, often find Reepicheep’s longing for Aslan’s Country, where sky and water meet, to be one of the most beautiful and moving elements in the entire Narnia series.
If the first step in Jack’s embrace of theism was the return of Joy to his life, the second step was also related to Joy. In what Lewis calls the next move by his adversary, we are offered a convoluted, four-page discussion of the effect that Samuel Alexander’s distinction between enjoyment and contemplation had on his conception of Joy. (These two terms are defined by Alexander in Space, Time, and Deity in a highly technical way that has nothing to do with either pleasure or the contemplative life.)
Whether it is possible to fully make sense of the threefold division Lewis proposes in this part of Surprised by Joy between the unconscious, the enjoyed, and the contemplated is debatable. What is clear is that because of reading Space, Time, and Deity, Jack came to see that his experience of Joy was really just a footprint of something greater, not the wave but the imprint of the wave on the sand, a pointer to something else.
Noted Lewis scholar Clyde Kilby offers this explanation of what Jack came to understand from reading Alexander’s work:
A thought is not simply a thing inside one’s own head and isolated from its object. Introspection can only find what is left behind and cannot operate while the original thought exists. It is a terrible error to mistake the track left behind for the thing itself. Immediately Lewis knew he was looking in the wrong place to find the Joy he had long sought. . . . He had always been wrong in thinking that he desired Joy itself. (18–19)
Lewis tells us that it was as if Joy had explained to him, I myself am your want of something outside yourself. This realization, Lewis writes, brought him into the “region of awe,” because at this point he came to understand that his experience of Joy was evidence, in his case irrefutable evidence, of something supernatural beyond himself—something which he could, in his words, have “commerce” with (221).
If Joy was the footprint, Jack suddenly came to understand there must be a foot.
Later, this something supernatural would become someone. Later, Jack would ask, who is the desired? At this point he stopped at, what is it? Still, even this was overpowering. In trying to describe what happened to him at this step of realization, Lewis simply states that awe overtook him. And perhaps this awe provides a partial explanation for Alan Jacobs’s claim that this step is too hard to understand. Anytime we are taken into this region of awe in someone else’s story, obscurity and inscrutability must of necessity set in.
This second move, his coming to see that Joy was only a footprint of something else, Lewis describes as the equivalent of losing his last remaining bishop. The third move initially seemed harmless to Jack, like losing a pawn. But in looking back, this was the kind of loss of a pawn which leads in a few moves to a checkmate. Lewis writes that this third move consisted “merely” in linking his new realization about Joy with his philosophical idealism (222).
Jack’s thinking as an idealist ran something like this: All human creatures have the root of their existence in the Absolute. Because of this, we yearn to be reunited with this Absolute. For Jack this meant—well, it is hard to say exactly what this meant. Here we must turn to Lewis’s own explanation in Surprised by Joy, and even with it readers may still find this move hard to follow. Lewis writes the following about the link between Joy and his conception of the Absolute:
We mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as we commonly see one another, are mere “appearance.” But appearances of the Absolute. . . . That is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for the unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called “we.” Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were, a dream. (221–22)
Lewis comments that this train of thought was both intellectually and emotionally satisfying to him. For his readers, it may serve simply as a help in understanding why idealism as a philosophical movement died out so quickly.
What is clear from this third move is that the two great sources of meaning in Jack’s life—his experience of Joy and his philosophical perspective—were now connected. At the time, this connection did not seem all that important to Lewis. Soon, it would prove critical.
A defining attribute of Jack’s personality was what might be called his consistency of thought. The fourth move by his adversary came about because of this deep need for intellectual integrity which characterized Jack.
One reason Jack had been chosen for the fellowship at Magdalen was his ability to teach both English and philosophy, and early on he tutored some students who were reading philosophy—though in his autobiography he claims to have done it rather poorly. His role as a tutor, as he saw it, was to make things clear. The problem, Lewis reports, was that the idealistic Absolute was a concept which could not be made clear. Jack found he could not in good conscience go on pretending that Hegel’s Absolute—though quite in fashion—was really more than a mystifying add-on and a way of obscuring simple theism.
In the end, Jack found that he needed a position of his own to serve as a basis for critiquing his pupils’ essays and had to choose between an Absolute that was “nobody-knows-what” and something that was a kind of superhuman mind and therefore a person (222). Jack, as a tutor trying to make things clear, was driven to the latter. He made a point in telling his students that his position did not embrace the God of popular religion. No, his was a philosophical God. But no matter what he called this person, Lewis reports that the fox had been chased from the Hegelian wood.
And so Jack ceased to be an idealist who believed in a vague Absolute and became a theist who believed in a philosophical God, the next step on his road to faith.
From Impersonal Theism to a Personal God
Halfway through Lewis’s account of how he was checkmated by his adversary, we find this wonderful description of how, after becoming what we might call a reluctant theist, he would attempt to articulate his highly nuanced beliefs about the remote and unapproachable God he now admitted must exist.
There was, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn’t call Him “God” either; I called Him “Spirit.” One fights for one’s remaining comforts. (223)
And so readers say a fond farewell to Jack’s Hegelian idealism and move on to a stage which they can perhaps—except for the “He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters” part—much more readily understand and perhaps identify with: the belief in an impersonal God who is off somewhere far away and does not interfere with humans or with anything.
I didn’t call Him “God.” On January 18, 1927, Jack wrote in his diary, “All the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions” (432). Presumably, by “childish superstitions” he is referring to belief in God and Christianity, beliefs which in his mind were still associated with the nursery and the kind of thing a person should outgrow.
One fights for one’s remaining comforts. Why would Jack find it a comfort for God to remain merely an impersonal Spirit? Wouldn’t the idea of a loving Father in heaven be more comforting? Near the end of chapter 14, Lewis reminds us that above all things in life he wanted not to be interfered with, to be able to call his soul his own. At this point Jack is most like his character Jane Studdock from That Hideous Strength, who resolves not to be drawn in. “To avoid entanglements and interferences had long been one of her principles,” Lewis’s narrator explains (71).
It is at this stage in Lewis’s faith journey that the epigraph he chose for chapter 14 becomes relevant. The sentence, italicized below, is from a passage in George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. The passage describes Lewis’s position at the time. It could be said to describe everyone’s position before submitting to God’s will.
For the one principle of hell is—“I am my own.” I am my own king and my own subject. I am the center from which go out my thoughts; I am the object and end of my thoughts; back upon me as the alpha and omega of life, my thoughts return. My own glory is, and ought to be, my chief care; my ambition, to gather the regards of men to the one center, myself. My pleasure is my pleasure. My kingdom is—as many as I can bring to acknowledge my greatness over them. My judgment is the faultless rule of things. My right is—what I desire. (332)
After telling us he was like a fox driven from Hegelian wood, Lewis reports that nearly everyone and everything—all the great writers, all his close friends, and even Joy itself—seemed to be in the pack chasing him from his idealism to his final belief in a personal God. Good books and good friends were critical in Lewis’s conversion. And the next book to play a major role was by an author he had discovered six years before in a hospital on the coast of France while recuperating from trench fever.
“You will remember,” Lewis self-mockingly tells us in Surprised by Joy, “that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity’” (223). Earlier Lewis had been impressed by a book of Chesterton’s essays. Now Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man would lay out for Jack the “whole Christian outline of history” in a form that made sense. Chesterton’s work was published in 1925, to some extent as a rebuttal of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History which had been published five years earlier.
We should note how far Jack has come since he declared to Arthur Greeves ten years earlier, in 1916: “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best” (CLI, 230–31). Now the Christian outline of history made more sense to Jack than its secular counterpart. Lewis observes that after reading The Everlasting Man he was brought to the nonsensical position of believing that Christianity itself was very sensible apart from its Christianity.
“Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken,” he states (223).
But Jack’s former position about the inadequacy of the Christian version of history had been shaken, badly shaken. Someone was closing in on Jack, though he did not realize it. Not yet.
The impact which Chesterton’s book had cannot be overstated. In 1962, just a year before his death, Lewis was asked by the Christian Century which books had been the most influential in his thinking. Of the thousands and thousands he had read over the course of his life, Jack picked just ten. The first two on the list were Phantastes and The Everlasting Man.
In the diary entry for April 27, 1926, Lewis notes that T. D. Weldon, one of his colleagues who tutored philosophy at Magdalen, stopped by his rooms for a chat that went late into the night. “We somehow got on the historical truth of the Gospels,” Lewis records (379). This conversation appears to be the one Lewis refers to in Surprised by Joy where he describes a visit from a militant skeptic who remarked, “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once” (223–24). To understand the impact this comment had on him, Lewis says that we must know that the speaker was the hardest of hardboiled cynics, “the toughest of the toughs.” If this atheist of atheists was not safe, what did this say about Lewis’s own position?
Jack’s late-night conversation with Weldon, and Weldon’s startling statement about the strong case for the historicity of the Gospels, is one of the better-known incidents in Surprised by Joy. Coming as it did in 1926, the conversation did not at this point lead to Jack’s acceptance of Christianity, which did not happen until five years later, in 1931. So why does Lewis include this episode here among the steps which led him to a belief in a personal God? This admission coming from this specific person forced Jack to reexamine his position on what he thought was and was not possible.
Later Lewis would use his fiction in this very same way. Through story he sought to break down readers’ preconceived notions and open them to new possibilities. Philip Yancey has pointed out this capacity of Lewis’s fiction to dismantle “barriers to faith” plank by plank and introduce readers to “another way of seeing” (94). Because of this ability, Stephen Smith has referred to Lewis’s fictional works, such as the Chronicles of Narnia, as “pre-apologetics” (168), works that serve to make those who have been closed to the gospel message more predisposed to hear it.
Weldon’s comment, Chesterton’s compelling outline of history, and Jack’s grudging acceptance of the existence of at least a philosophical God—these all came together, of all times and places, as Jack was riding home on the bus. Colin Duriez offers this dramatized rendition of this key moment in Lewis’s story.
Imagine an early summer’s day in the Trinity term of 1929, around lunchtime. The location is the upper deck of the Headington bus, starting its journey up the hill eastwards from the Oxford city center. A man sits there, about thirty, wearing a tweed jacket and baggy flannels, and a shabby hat on his head, with the brim turned down all around. He could be a young farmer, with his red complexion and thick-set form.
He looks out of the bus window, putting his cigarette to his lips and drawing its smoke into his lungs, apparently gazing over Headington Hill Park. The man is C. S. Lewis, and he is starting to grapple with a momentous decision. . . . Unprovoked by any particular event of the bus journey, Lewis suddenly feels presented with a fact about himself. . . . He senses that he has been shutting something out, holding something at bay. He would describe it later as if wearing uncomfortable clothing—like a cumbersome suit of armor. . . . It is as if suddenly a door appears before him that he can push open, or leave shut. He chooses in an instant to go through the door. . . . As he acts, he is freer than ever before, yet the choice is demanded by his deepest nature. (45)
In his autobiography, Lewis writes that before the bus ride was finished, he had made the choice “to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein” (224). These are metaphors, surely, for the process—but ones which imply that he had been doing the opposite: that through an act of will he had been closed and buckled up against something he wanted to keep at bay; that he had previously chosen to keep a tight rein on where intellectual investigation might lead him rather than letting philosophical inquiry take him where it would.
I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. There would be more choices and further steps to take as Jack slowly came to admit that God was God and then to accept Christ, but it could be argued that this decision—this calm, dispassionate choice made on the top of a bus going up Headington Hill—was the hinge upon which his whole life would pivot. For at this moment he decided to be open to the truth no matter what direction that truth might go, to not hold anything or anyone at bay—not anymore. And once he gave free rein to truth, once he let go of the reins he had pulled in so tightly, Jack would find that truth would take him to only one place.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us that the decision on the bus top took place “before God closed in” (224). God would not close in on Jack without permission. On the bus ride up Headington Hill, permission was given.
Lewis writes that following his decision he felt like a frozen snowman at long last beginning to melt, slowly at first, then faster and faster—drip, drip and then trickle, trickle. Lewis admits that he rather disliked the feeling. But shouldn’t letting go and unbuckling be an enjoyable feeling? Perhaps Jack did feel some relief in taking off the rigid suit of armor he had been wearing for so long—but if so, relief was not the dominant feeling.
Drip, drip, trickle, trickle. With Jack’s protective shell now removed, we sense the torrent that is to come. Lewis says this decision on the bus top was all or nothing—and he chose all. To open the door and take off his armor “meant the incalculable” (224). It could be argued that right at or near the top of the list of things Jack feared was the incalculable. Now anything might happen; truly, anything.
And it did happen—not in a day or even a week but over the coming months and the next two years. Drip, drip, trickle, trickle, as the snowman continued to melt.
And God continued to close in.
God Closes In
The final steps of Lewis’s acceptance of and submission to a personal God take on a character different from the previous ones. They are less gradual and more intense, less intellectual and more personal—less about actions Jack was taking and more about actions his adversary was taking. And this is as it should be, for, as Lewis tells us, each successive step was a step toward something more concrete, more imminent, more compulsive.
Earlier it was pointed out that one of Jack’s defining characteristics was his need for consistency of thought, for intellectual integrity. Now, as Jack moved closer to a belief in God, he felt a growing need for consistency of behavior, an integration of belief and actions. This desire to not only talk the talk but also walk the walk was not something totally new for Jack. Readers may remember that as a young boy at Oldies, Jack for a time became an effective believer and in response began to pray seriously, read the Bible, and attempt to obey his conscience. It was also during this time that he began making the list of resolutions that he carried in his pocket. Now, two decades later, Jack’s beliefs again demanded a response.
Another comment, this one made during an informal lunch in Jack’s rooms at Magdalen, became a catalyst for this next step. Jack was eating with his pupil Alan Griffiths and his friend Owen Barfield when the topic of philosophy came up. Griffiths would later become a Benedictine monk and take the name we find in Lewis’s dedication of Surprised by Joy, Dom Bede Griffiths. When Jack happened to refer to philosophy as a subject, Barfield quickly objected that philosophy was not a subject to Plato but a way. Lewis writes, “The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity” (225).
Jack immediately saw that Barfield and Griffiths were right. His own position was frivolous. Jack recognized that philosophy could not be merely another abstract subject, merely something a person might major in or teach. In the next sentence from Surprised by Joy, we find Jack’s response: “Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done” (225). Later, as a Christian believer, Jack would also see an undeniable need to put his beliefs into practice and, among other specific actions, would give away the majority of his book royalties to those in need and answer hundreds of letters seeking his advice. Now, as someone who believed in an increasingly personal God, what would this mean in his day-to-day living?
In theory there had always been an ethical component in Jack’s idealism. Theoretically, Jack had believed that we as humans were supposed to remember our true nature and in doing so ought to “reascend or return into that Spirit which, in so far as we really were at all, we still were” (226), whatever that meant. Lewis writes that he came to the conclusion that although a belief in an impersonal, undefined Spirit can be talked about and even felt, it cannot be lived. But once you believed in a God who was more than a “philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained,” as Jack now did, a “wholly new situation developed” (227).
Back in 1920 Lewis had written to a friend, “In the course of my philosophy—on the existence of matter—I have had to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory” (CLI, 509). Now, as Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy, the dry, dusty bones of what he once viewed as a philosophical postulate stood up and became a living presence. And for the first time, Jack saw that the initiative for his encounter with the divine did not lie with him. To talk of man’s search for God now seemed as naive and misguided as talking about the mouse’s search for the cat. Jack began to feel the steady, unfaltering approach of a God he did not really want to meet.
There are many pictures of the stately New Building at Magdalen showing its cloistered walkway and the windows of the two floors located above it. The two windows marking Jack’s rooms are easy to locate because they are on the second floor directly above the wisteria vine on the right as you face the building. And now we come to the most famous passage in all of Surprised by Joy.
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. (228–29)
Lewis goes on to point out the divine humility—we might add, the divine compassion—which accepts such an unwilling and unenthusiastic convert. He contrasts his own story with that of the prodigal son whose homecoming was made on his own two feet. But perhaps Lewis is being too hard on himself here. The prodigal son was returning home to a father he had known all his life—though, in the end, he still underestimated his father’s love by thinking that maybe if he were contrite enough his father might treat him as one of his servants. Unlike the prodigal, Jack gave in to a God he did not know, a God who might demand anything.
“For all I knew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me,” Lewis explains (230). Here Jack may seem uncharacteristically unthinking to some. Yes, he had not met this God before, but he knew those who had. This was the God of MacDonald, the God of Chesterton, the God of Herbert, the God of Tolkien, and the God of Coghill—men who had tasted the goodness of God and whose experience Jack could take at least some confidence in. We find a similar situation in Prince Caspian, when Trumpkin is terrified to meet Aslan, but not completely terrified, for he has the testimony of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—friends who had met the great lion and knew him to be not only terrible but also good.
Lewis finishes the account of his checkmate with a quote from the parable of the great banquet found in Luke 14. He gives its Latin version, compelle intrare (“compel them to come in”), to point us to the historic practice of using force to coerce members of other faiths or nonorthodox sects to convert. Lewis comments that while Christ’s words have been so abused down through history that they may cause us to shudder, God’s compulsion is quite different from ours. When understood properly—as Jack now did understand them—the words compelle intrare “plumb the depths of Divine mercy” (229).
Lewis characterizes himself as someone who was brought in “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape” (229). We could say he was compelled, but this would be only part of the story. We must also keep in mind the wholly free decision Jack made earlier atop the double-decker bus when he was presented with the choice to open the door or keep it shut. There was no kicking or struggling then—only the perfectly free option of saying yes or no to something he had been keeping at bay and could have continued keeping at bay had he wanted to.
Let us return to Lewis’s own words about that choice:
I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. . . . You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom. (224)
It did not really seem possible to do the opposite. This came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. How can Lewis’s seemingly divergent claims here be made compatible?
Perhaps they can’t. In his Confessions, Augustine tells God, “You follow close behind the fugitive and recall us to yourself in ways we cannot understand” (75). In a letter dated August 3, 1953, Lewis initially claims, “Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—‘It is not I who have done this’” (CLIII, 354–55). But then he goes on to insist, “The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out.”
In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis writes about the relationship of God’s will and our free will in this way:
You will notice that Scripture just sails over the problem. “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling”—pure Pelagianism. But why? “For it is God who worketh in you”—pure Augustinianism. It is presumably only our presuppositions that make this appear nonsensical. We profanely assume that divine and human action exclude one another like the actions of two fellow-creatures so that “God did this” and “I did this” cannot both be true of the same act except in the sense that each contributed a share. (49–50)
This came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. It did not really seem possible to do the opposite. In a scene from The Silver Chair where Jill finds herself alone and thirsty on a great mountain in Aslan’s Country, Lewis perhaps shows us how these statements can be reconciled. When the great lion she meets there asks if she is thirsty, she tells him she is dying of thirst. And yet, out of fear of him, she dares not come closer and drink from the stream he is lying beside. When she tells the lion that since he will not move, she will have to go and look for another stream, he informs her, “There is no other stream” (23).
In the end, Jill chooses to go to the stream and drink. Similarly, we could say that rather than die of thirst Jack chose to drink from the only stream there was. In this sense Lewis includes both necessity and freedom in his decision. He ends chapter 14 of Surprised by Joy embracing the paradox: “His compulsion is our liberation” (229). In these final words we can hear echoes of John Donne, who declares in “Holy Sonnet XIV” that unless God enthralled him, he would never be free—and so asks God to batter his heart, words that resonate with Lewis’s own story.
Possibly because Lewis was one himself, the story of the reluctant convert who resists at first but in the end comes the long way round to belief was one of his favorites. John from The Pilgrim’s Regress is certainly one. Jane Studdock from That Hideous Strength has already been mentioned. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is told by the great Oyarsa, “You have taken many vain troubles to avoid standing where you stand now” (121). In Perelandra, Lewis himself appears as a character whose greatest fear is being drawn in. In each of these characters, we can find a reflection of Lewis’s own experience. But perhaps we see him best in Trumpkin’s encounter with Aslan in Prince Caspian, mentioned earlier. All along, the skeptical dwarf has thought the idea of a great lion from across the sea to be “all bilge and beanstalks” (148).
Contemptuous of what he calls old wives’ tales, Trumpkin will believe in only what he can see with his own eyes. The stout dwarf declares, “I have no use for magic lions which are talking lions and don’t talk, and friendly lions though they don’t do us any good, and whopping big lions though nobody can see them” (148). In the end, as they did Jack, events bring Trumpkin to an encounter with the One whom he most earnestly desired not to meet.
“And now, where is this little Dwarf . . . who doesn’t believe in lions?” Aslan roars out and orders Trumpkin to approach (154). Aslan takes the terrified former skeptic in his mouth and gives him a great shake before setting him back on his feet and asking, “Son of Earth, shall we be friends?” (155). In the Trinity term of 1929, six months after his thirtieth birthday, Jack knelt and prayed, and took the first step in what would be a lifelong friendship.
Jack’s Final Step to Belief in Christ: The Road to Whipsnade
The famous final paragraph of chapter 14 of Surprised by Joy, where Jack finally gives in and admits that God is God, is heavy with allusions to the New Testament. Lewis refers to the parable of the prodigal son, who at least came home on his own feet, and to the parable of the great banquet, with the master’s command to compel them to come. In Lewis’s statement “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men” (229), we hear echoes of 1 Corinthians 1:25, where St. Paul tells us that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men and that the weakness of God is stronger than the strength of men. With these references, it is easy to see why someone who reads this paragraph in isolation might assume that this was the moment when Jack accepted Christ.
It wasn’t.
Lewis makes this point clear in the opening sentence of chapter 15, where we are told that what the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England had converted to in Trinity term of 1929 was theism “pure and simple”—not Christianity (230). This final step would not come until two years later, in September 1931, and it would not come without further opposition on Jack’s part. Lewis writes that his need to call his soul his own was again an obstacle to belief, creating a resistance to Christianity that was similar to his earlier resistance to theism. “As strong, but shorter-lived,” Lewis tells us, “for I understood it better” (237).
What exactly his “pure and simple” theism consisted of and where its defining characteristics came from, Lewis does not really say. While Jack did not yet believe in the Christ of the New Testament, the God that he now accepted was in many ways like the God of the Bible. He was someone one should kneel, pray, and submit to. Though Jack earnestly desired not to meet him, God earnestly desired to meet Jack. He was someone who, once admitted in, would make demands. These demands would be good and would have to be followed. In these ways, Jack’s theism foreshadowed the Christian beliefs he would later embrace.
Lewis tells us in his autobiography that theism made him less self-focused. “I had been, as they say, ‘taken out of myself,’” he writes (233). Even if it did nothing else for him, he notes, he would still be thankful that his new belief in God had cured him of the practice of keeping a diary, an activity he now found to be too centered on himself. It is interesting that the only fictional character Lewis creates who will keep a diary will be Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Like Jack, Eustace after his conversion abandons his diary—which was for the most part a listing of petty grievances and a catalog of his virtues and the shortcomings of others—and never picks it up again.
Recall the beginning of the passage from the afterword to The Pilgrim’s Regress mentioned earlier, where Lewis maps out his spiritual journey: “On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to . . .” (200). The phrase “on the intellectual side” implies that all along there was another side to his conversion. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis also tells us that now his theism did more than take him out of himself: it demanded regular moral evaluation and moral improvement. Any self-examination which occurred now could no longer simply be a pleasant, congratulatory session but became a duty and a spiritual discipline, something that was not comfortable. On January 30, 1930—in between Jack’s conversion to theism in 1929 and his acceptance of Christ in 1931—he wrote a long letter to Arthur describing what he now saw when he examined himself. One passage in particular provides an insightful portrait of Jack’s spiritual concerns at the time:
What worries me much more is Pride—my besetting sin, as yours is indolence. During my afternoon “meditations”—which I at least attempt quite regularly now—I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts . . . one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration. . . . I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realize I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be and how he will admire me. I pretend I am remembering an evening of good fellowship in a really friendly and charitable spirit—and all the time I’m really remembering how good a fellow I am and how well I talked. And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. . . . There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration. (CLI, 878)
Two weeks later, Jack would write Greeves again and return to this topic, comparing himself to an instrument that wants to play itself because “it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician” (CLI, 882).
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is finally able to see how dragonish he has been for most of his life. Finally desiring to change, Eustace—who has literally turned into a dragon—is able to shed the superficial layers of this dragon nature somewhat easily, without much pain, and without any help. The deeper layers will be just the opposite. Eustace finds they are impossible to remove on his own. He cannot undragon himself. He needs Aslan to do it for him.
Jack would have a similar need to allow Christ to help him shed “depth under depth” of self-love and self-admiration—his own act of finally giving the Musician control of the instrument.
One way that Jack’s theism differed from his later faith was that it initially included no belief in an afterlife—no hope of eternal reward, no fear of eternal punishment. At this point Lewis reports that he believed that God was to be obeyed simply because he was God.
In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis writes to his fictional correspondent about this stage when he did not yet embrace the promise of heaven.
You know my history. You know why my withers are quite unwrung by the fear that I was bribed—that I was lured into Christianity by the hope of everlasting life. I believed in God before I believed in Heaven. And even now, even if—let’s make an impossible supposition—His voice, unmistakably His, said to me, “They have misled you. I can do nothing of the sort for you. . . .” Would that be a moment for changing sides? (120)
In Lewis’s point that the promise of eternal life was not the reason he was on God’s side, that he would choose God even if there were no heaven, we may be reminded of the scene in The Silver Chair where Puddleglum tells the Green Witch, “I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia” (182).
Of course, Jack later came to believe in heaven, but he would see eternal life not as payment for correct behavior but as the consummation of a life of discipleship. In “The Weight of Glory,” he explains the difference this way:
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. . . . Proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, they are the activity itself in consummation. . . . Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship. (17–18)
Lewis noted that a new Christian might set out initially to do good out of the promise of heaven or fear of hell, like a young student might study in order to receive praise or avoid being punished. But as the student and Christian mature, the former will desire to learn for his or her own sake, and the latter, to do what is right simply because it is right.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
On September 25, 1929, Albert died at Little Lea. He had been ill, and Jack had been home the week before. After being reassured that his father was on the mend following surgery for cancer, Jack had returned to Oxford only to receive a telegram with news that Albert had taken a turn for the worse. Jack immediately set out for Belfast again. When he arrived at Little Lea, Albert was already gone. While Lewis assures us in Surprised by Joy, “My father’s death, with all the fortitude (even playfulness) which he displayed in his last illness, does not really come into the story I am telling” (215), George Sayer suggests that Jack’s spiritual journey was influenced by his father’s death. Sayer explains:
He could no longer rebel against the political churchgoing that was part of his father’s way of life. He felt bitterly ashamed of the way he had deceived and denigrated his father in the past, and he determined to eradicate these weaknesses in his character. Most importantly, he had a strong feeling that Albert was somehow still alive and helping him. He spoke about this to me and wrote about it to an American correspondent. . . . His feelings of Albert’s presence created or reinforced in him a belief in personal immortality and also influenced his conduct in times of temptation. (224)
The American correspondent Sayer refers to is Vera Matthews. In a letter dated March 27, 1951, Lewis wrote to her after she told him news of her father’s death. Lewis responded that he hoped she was not trying to pretend, as some high-minded Christians might, that the death did not really matter. About the death of a loved one, Lewis goes on to tell her:
It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel very strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some great good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if Our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind. . . . Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us. (CLIII, 104)
Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy that, as a new convert to theism, he felt morally obligated to make some public statement of the change in his beliefs as a next step: “I thought one ought to ‘fly one’s flag’ by some unmistakable overt sign” (233).
Now how exactly does a new theist—someone who believes only in God, pure and simple—fly his flag? Jack chose to begin attending the local Anglican church, Holy Trinity, on Sundays and the services in the Magdalen chapel on weekdays. Lewis makes a point of telling us that he did this although he neither believed in Christianity nor considered the difference between his theism and Christianity to be small. So why would Jack choose to fly his flag of theism in this way, in what he acknowledges was a merely symbolic action?
Several answers suggest themselves, but since Lewis does not provide further comment, they all must remain speculation. First, while Jack was not a Christian believer yet, it is entirely likely he already had leanings this way—leanings caused by his upbringing, his friends, and his favorite authors. Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy that to accept the incarnation was a step further in the same direction his theism had taken him. Second, in joining the worshipers at Holy Trinity and at college chapel, he would have joined people who shared his belief in God. They were Christian theists, and he was a “pure and simple” theist, but they were all in the theist camp. Lewis honored the point where they parted ways by not taking Communion with them. Finally, there would certainly have been plenty of atheists at Oxford. By attending services at Holy Trinity and the college chapel, Jack wanted to make it clear that he was no longer one of them.
There may have been some who attended these services because they liked the ritual, the beauty of the music, or the liturgy. Jack was not one of them. Lewis explains in his autobiography that he was not just antiecclesiastical but deeply antiecclesiastical, and in this delightful passage he provides his long list of objections to attending church:
It was . . . a wearisome “get-together” affair. I couldn’t yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one’s spiritual life. To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters. And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! The bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing. Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, a sort of spiritual gaucherie which makes me unapt to participate in any rite. (234)
And yet despite all his objections, despite the fact that he was not a Christian yet, Jack felt the need to fly his flag by attending. And so the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England became England’s most dejected and reluctant churchgoer.
T. D. Weldon’s comment, which back in 1926 had shaken Jack’s view of what was possible, now turned him toward considering the historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts of Jesus. Had all that about the dying god really happened once on a hill outside of Jerusalem? In Mere Christianity Lewis writes, “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it” (140). Now Jack carefully and without prejudice reconsidered the evidence of the New Testament record. In his autobiography, Lewis reports on the conclusion he was gradually drawn to.
If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable . . . as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson . . . , yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, . . . not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact. (236)
In his address “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis advised a conference of Anglican priests and youth leaders on how they might help bring others to the faith, and spoke of the role the evidence from the New Testament had played in his own conversion. “One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of truth,” he told the audience. “They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good” (101). Lewis then concluded with this assertion: “Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
Lewis’s most famous statement about the historical Jesus—often called the liar, lunatic, or Lord trilemma—is found in Mere Christianity. Lewis writes:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. (52)
If his conversation five years earlier with Weldon about the historical evidence from the Gospels now became one factor in Jack’s final step of faith, a second conversation would play an even more important role—a conversation quite well known among Lewis fans. On September 19, 1931, Jack, Hugo Dyson, and Tolkien talked late into the night as they strolled Addison’s Walk, the wooded path that runs alongside the Magdalen grounds. Though Lewis does not mention it in Surprised by Joy, the myth-become-fact passage quoted earlier came directly out of this conversation. Our record of what happened that night comes from three letters Jack wrote to Arthur Greeves.
In the first letter, dated September 22, 1931, Lewis explains that he could not write earlier because he had a weekend guest staying with him, Hugo Dyson, who at the time was teaching English at the University of Reading. Tolkien had joined them for dinner, and afterward the three of them went for a walk. Tolkien stayed until three in the morning. Dyson and Jack continued talking until four as they walked up and down the cloister of New Building.
In this first letter, Jack provides Greeves with only the mere basics about their talk. “We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth,” Lewis writes (CLI, 970). He then describes how they were interrupted by a mystical rush of wind that was so unexpected and so out of place on the still, warm evening that they were all startled and held their breaths. “We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot,” Lewis further reports. But he stops there and says no more about this long talk or about what it was he learned.
Nine days later, on October 1, Jack wrote Arthur again. This time he includes a few more details, but, given the announcement he makes, again they seem surprisingly scant: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it” (CLI, 974).
On October 18, Jack wrote to Arthur once more and finally gives him a full description of what happened on that late night walk and how the obstacle which had been keeping him from belief had been overcome.
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god . . . similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. . . . Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. (CLI, 976–77)
Tolkien and Dyson helped Jack see the historical as well as the spiritual truth of the Gospel story. They also helped him to see a new and deeper value in the myths from other traditions. Jack wrote to Arthur that he now saw Pagan myths as “God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there” (CLI, 977). Jack did not have to reject what he had loved so much in “Tegner’s Drapa,” Siegfried, or The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. If anything, he could even love and embrace these works more as glimpses of divine truth. Later, in Miracles, Lewis would describe what Tolkien and Dyson had helped him to understand in this way:
Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) or priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. (134)
The idea of the dying and reviving god . . . moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. In the final words of this statement, we can hear Jack’s bias against Christianity. Tolkien heard it as well and would not let it go uncorrected. This is the same bias found earlier in Jack’s statements about Chesterton and Herbert. It took a close friend to point out this deeply ingrained anti-Christian prejudice, a friend Jack thoroughly trusted and whose opinion he had the utmost respect for.
And so we have one of the world’s greatest stories of literary friendship. Without Tolkien’s Christian influence, there might have been no Screwtape Letters or Narnia. Similarly, without Lewis’s encouragement, there might have been no Lord of the Rings, for when Tolkien got discouraged and stopped altogether, Jack was there insisting on more.
On the morning of September 28, 1931—nine days after his late-night talk with Tolkien and Dyson—Jack took the final step to belief. Lewis warns us in Surprised by Joy that while he can say exactly when this final step was taken, he can hardly say how. And so what he can tell us is striking in its brevity. Lewis simply reports: “I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did” (237). Lewis comments that he had not spent the trip in deep thought or in great emotion. Like the decision on the bus top, there was a peculiar calmness and peace that accompanied this momentous resolution.
And so Jack became a believer, not while sitting in a wooden pew at Holy Trinity or during matins in Magdalen’s Renaissance chapel, not while kneeling beside his bed or on one of his beloved walks in the rural countryside, not while reading Northern mythology or in the middle of a book by a favorite Christian writer, but while whizzing past farms and fields in the sidecar of Warnie’s motorcycle. And while this was the end of a long, sometimes winding spiritual journey, it was also, as Lewis suggests in the chapter title, the beginning of another.
What were these last few steps to Christianity like? As he usually does, Lewis communicates his deepest truths through metaphors we can imagine or pictures we can see. On the bus going up Headington Hill, Jack was like a lobster, or a man wearing armor, who was given the chance to remove his defensive shell. Having made the decision to unbuckle, he was then like a snowman beginning to melt and like a fox chased out of the woods. The long process was like an angler playing a fish that did not even know it had been hooked. It was like a game of chess where, one by one, Jack’s pieces were put in disarray and captured, a game which ended in checkmate.
Now, in the final step, as he came to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, Lewis writes that it was like when “a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake” (237).
In his memoir, Warnie rejects one picture of Jack’s conversion that day and offers one of his own, writing: “I well remember that day in 1931 when we made a visit to Whipsnade Zoo, Jack riding in my sidecar. . . . This seemed to me no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing” (39).
Lewis finishes the very last page of Surprised by Joy with two final images. Upon reaching the zoo, he and Warnie found songbirds singing overhead, bluebells blooming underfoot, and wallabies hopping on their powerful hind legs all around them. Lewis writes that this setting, combined with his newfound belief in Christ, was almost like Eden come again.
And so we have come full circle from the opening epigraph in chapter 1—Milton’s line describing Adam and Eve’s precarious bliss in paradise: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.” On the road to Whipsnade, Jack found a new kind of happiness to replace the one he lost as a boy—this one well secured.
This one, paradise regained.
“But what, in conclusion, of Joy?” Lewis asks. “For that, after all is what the story has mainly been about” (238). Lewis announces that the topic has lost nearly all interest for him since he became a Christian. This is not because he has ceased experiencing Joy like he used to—quite the contrary. Lewis tells us that the old stab has come as often and as sharply as any time before. But now he recognizes Joy “only as a pointer to something other and outer.” In his final image, he compares his situation to a group that is on a journey. When they are lost in the woods, a condition which suggests Jack’s preconversion stage, the sight of a signpost is itself a great matter. But once they are back on the road to their destination, with signposts every few miles, no one wants to stop or take much notice of them—no matter how glorious these signposts are. Lewis concludes this final metaphor with words borrowed from The Scale of Perfection by the fourteenth-century English mystic Walter Hilton: “We would be at Jerusalem.”
And so the years from 1925 to 1931, which Jack began as an idealist not quite free of his New Look, ended with him a new convert to Christianity. In the preface for God in the Dock, Walter Hooper would later observe: “Lewis struck me as the most thoroughly converted man I ever met. Christianity was never for him a separate department of life, nor what he did with his solitude. . . . His whole vision of life was such that the natural and the supernatural seemed inseparably combined” (12).
In the final interview Lewis gave—one which took place in his rooms at Cambridge on May 7, 1963, and was later published under the title “Cross Examination”—he looked back on this final stage of his conversion and commented: “I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. I was glad afterwards at the way it came out, but at the moment what I heard was God saying: ‘Put down your gun and we’ll talk’” (261).
There would be more steps for Jack to take on his spiritual journey in the years after 1931, but rather than separate steps or distinct stages, these would be steps which continued on in the right direction—steps further on the road to Jerusalem.
Steps further up and further in.