1930–1932
1930–1932
The Most Reluctant Convert: The Making of a Mere Christian
Lewis is today remembered as a Christian writer. Yet the tone of his writings of the early 1920s is unquestionably atheistic, severely critical if not totally dismissive of religion in general and Christianity in particular. So how and why did he change his mind? In this chapter, we shall consider the slow conversion of Lewis from his early atheism, initially to a firm intellectual belief in God by the summer of 1930, and finally to an explicit and informed commitment to Christianity by the summer of 1932. It is a complex story, worth telling in detail both on account of its intrinsic interest and as a means of allowing us to understand Lewis’s rise to fame as a Christian voice in the quite different worlds of literary scholarship and popular culture.
The English Literary Religious Renaissance of the 1920s
In 1930, the celebrity author Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)—whose novel Vile Bodies had been hailed earlier that year as “the ultramodern novel”—dropped a bombshell in literary circles. He announced that he had become a Catholic. This development was so unexpected and significant that it immediately made the front pages of one of Britain’s leading newspapers, the Daily Express. How, its editor wondered, could an author best known for his “almost passionate adherence to the ultramodern” have embraced the Catholic faith? For the next week, the paper’s columns were filled with comment and reflection on this unexpected and baffling development.
Yet the cultural attention given to Waugh’s conversion was only partly due to his celebrity status as a fashionable young author of bestselling satirical novels. Waugh was the latest in a long line of literary figures to embrace Catholicism—such as G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who converted in 1922, and Graham Greene (1904–1991), who converted in 1926.[294] Some began to wonder if a Christian literary renaissance was under way.
Not all of the literary figures to convert to Christianity in this brief yet intense period of Christian revival adopted Catholicism. In 1927, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)—then best known for his poem “The Waste Land” (1922), still widely acknowledged as one of the finest and most-discussed poems of the twentieth century—converted to Anglicanism. Although Eliot’s conversion did not make quite the same newspaper headlines as Waugh’s, Eliot’s huge reputation as a poet and literary critic ensured that his conversion was widely discussed and debated. Eliot found in Christianity a principle of order and stability located outside the human self, which allowed him a secure vantage point from which to engage with the world.
Some four or five years later, Lewis became a Christian. Like Eliot, he chose to become a member of the Church of England. Yet nobody had ever heard of Lewis, and nobody paid any attention to this development—if they noticed it at all. Lewis, it must be appreciated, was almost totally unknown in 1931. He had published two cycles of poems under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Neither had been a critical or commercial success. Lewis’s rise to popular fame would not begin until 1940, with the publication of The Problem of Pain, which can now be seen to have set in motion a series of developments leading to his celebrity status as a wartime apologist. Where Evelyn Waugh drew attention to his religious faith on account of his fame as a novelist, Lewis’s faith would be the basis for the works that would eventually secure him popular acclaim.
Nevertheless, Lewis fits into a broader pattern at this time—the conversion of literary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests. Lewis’s love of literature is not a backdrop to his conversion; it is integral to his discovery of the rational and imaginative appeal of Christianity. Lewis hints at this throughout Surprised by Joy. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.”[295] Lewis’s reading of the classics of English literature forced him to encounter and evaluate the ideas and attitudes that they embodied and expressed. And to his chagrin, Lewis began to realise that those who were grounded on a Christian outlook seemed to offer the most resilient and persuasive “treaty with reality.”
Many leading writers came to faith around the same time through reflecting on literary issues. For example, Graham Greene criticised modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970) for creating characters who “wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.” There was, Greene argued, no sense of reality in their writings. To lose sight of “the religious sense,” as they had so clearly done, was also to lose any “sense of the importance of the human act.”[296] Great literature depends upon a passionate commitment to a real world—which, for Greene, demanded a foundation in a deeper order of things, grounded in the nature and will of God.
Evelyn Waugh made much the same point. Without God, an author could not give his characters reality and depth. “You can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.”[297] Good novels rested on a plausible account of human nature, which, for Waugh, in turn rested on the remarkable capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular. It provided a lens which brought the distorted world around him into sharp focus, allowing him to understand it properly for the first time. Waugh spoke of his delight in discovering this new way of engaging reality in a letter of 1949:
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.[298]
Similar concerns seem to have played a role in catalysing Lewis’s growing interest in the Christian faith. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis comments on his discovery in the early 1920s of the surprising depth of the literature shaped by and grounded in the Christian faith. Modernist writers such as George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946) “seemed a little thin”; there was “no depth in them”; they were “too simple.” “The roughness and density of life” was not adequately represented in their works.[299]
The Christian poet George Herbert (1593–1633), in marked contrast, seemed to Lewis to “excel . . . in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it”; yet instead of “doing it all directly,” he “insisted on mediating it” through what Lewis then termed “the Christian mythology.”[300] By the early 1920s, Lewis had yet to conclude that Christianity was true; he was, however, gradually coming to grasp its potential impact for an understanding of the world and the self. But he failed at that stage to appreciate the implications of “the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader.”[301]
Are we to see here a classic approach to the discovery of the divine, so memorably described by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) in the seventeenth century? For Pascal, there was little point in trying to persuade anyone of the truth of religious belief. The important thing, he argued, was to make people wish that it were true, having caught sight of the rich and satisfying vision of reality it offered. Once such a desire was implanted within the human heart, the human mind would eventually catch up with its deeper intuitions. The poets George Herbert and Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) did not persuade Lewis to believe in God; rather, they led him to think that such a belief offered a rich and robust vision of human life, making him wonder whether there might, after all, be something to be said for their way of thinking.
To piece together the story of Lewis’s conversion is primarily to explore the development of an internal world, which is unfortunately not available for public inspection. Clues to these developments abound, but they need to be woven together into a coherent whole. In what follows, we shall try to make sense of this complex yet fascinating story.
The Realising Imagination: Lewis’s Rediscovery of God
Lewis’s writings of the early 1930s show him to have been searching for a fundamental principle of order in life—what ancient Greek philosophers might have termed an archē—that was not a human invention but was grounded in a deeper order of things. Where could such a unifying vision of reality be found?
One of the reasons Lewis was drawn to study the literature of the Middle Ages was his sense that it witnessed to an understanding of the greater scheme of things that had been lost in the West through the trauma of the recent Great War. For Lewis, medieval culture offered an imaginative vision of a unified cosmic and world order, expressed in poems such as Dante’s Divine Comedy. There was a “big picture” of reality which was able to embrace its fine detail. Works such as the Divine Comedy, Lewis argued, demonstrate that “medieval art attains a unity of the highest order, because it embraces the greatest diversity of subordinated detail.”[302] We see here the literary expression of a fundamentally theological idea—namely, that there is a certain way of seeing reality that brings it into the sharpest focus, illuminating the shadows and allowing its inner unity to be seen. This, for Lewis, is a “realising imagination”—a way of seeing or “picturing” reality that is faithful to the way things actually are.[303]
Lewis’s literary reflections here resonate with his own inner personal quest for truth and meaning. In part, Lewis’s deep love for the best literature of the Middle Ages reflects his belief that it had found something that modernity had lost—and that he himself yearned to recover. Could the disruption of unity and continuity revealed by the Great War be healed? Might there be a way of bringing things back together again? Was there a way of reconciling his reason and imagination?
Gradually, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place, eventually to come into sharp focus in a devastating moment of illumination. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis sets out the series of moves which led him to faith in God, using a chessboard analogy.[304] None of these is logically or philosophically decisive; all are at best suggestive. Yet their force lies not in their individual importance, but in their cumulative weight. Lewis portrays these, not as moves which he made, but moves which were made against him. The narrative of Surprised by Joy is not that of Lewis’s discovery of God, but of God’s patient approach to Lewis.
What Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy is not a process of logical deduction: A, therefore B, therefore C. It is much more like a process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things, which both affirms their validity and indicates their interconnectedness. Things fall into place. A fundamental harmony between theory and observation emerges, once things are seen in the right way.
It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them. (The great French physicist Henri Poincaré once remarked, “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”[305]) It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern—a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not really wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true.
Any attempt to tell the story of Lewis’s conversion has to try and relate the events of his outer and inner worlds. Lewis presents himself as doing this in Surprised by Joy, telling the story of two quite different—yet interconnected—worlds: his external worlds of English schools and Oxford University, and his internal world of yearning for “Joy,” racked for so long by a tension between the rational and the imaginative.
On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.[306]
It is not, however, always easy to correlate events in Lewis’s inner world with the historical events in the world outside. For example, in the external world, Lewis travelled on a bus up Headington Hill, on his way from Magdalen College to his home in the former village of Headington (recently incorporated into the city of Oxford); in his internal world, he experienced the collapse of his mental defences against the approach of a God whom he never wanted to acknowledge, let alone meet.[307] Two quite different journeys thus converged on that single bus trip.
One of the chief difficulties in reading Surprised by Joy lies in attempting to construct a map of Lewis’s development which adequately and accurately links the events in his inner and outer worlds. Lewis’s own account of the relationship between these worlds, to the extent that it can be verified, is not always accurate. As we shall argue in this chapter, his rediscovery of God is almost certainly not to be dated from the summer of 1929, as Lewis himself suggests in Surprised by Joy, but from the late spring or early summer of 1930. Yet the subjective reality of Lewis’s memories is not to be doubted. Lewis is quite clear about the rearrangement of the furniture of his mind, and the factors which led to this; the difficulty lies in the historical timing of that rearrangement.[308]
The process of crystallisation around belief in God appears to have taken place over an extended period of time, culminating in a dramatic moment of decision. His resistance to what he increasingly realised to be true could not be sustained. This was not something he sought, but something that seemed to seek him.
Lewis’s prose here recalls Blaise Pascal’s famous distinction between the anodyne, disinterested “God of the philosophers,” and the fiery, living “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” What Lewis had thought to be at best an abstract philosophical idea proved to have a life and will of its own:
As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer.[309]
A close reading of Lewis’s correspondence confirms what this passage in Surprised by Joy suggests—a previous dabbling with divinity that has not been fully acknowledged. In a 1920 letter to his Oxford friend Leo Baker, Lewis remarked that, while reflecting on the philosophical question of the existence of matter, he had come to the conclusion that the “least objectionable theory” was to “postulate some sort of God.” Perhaps, he mused, this was a “sign of grace.” He had “stopped defying heaven.”[310] Was this the “playing at philosophy” that Lewis had in mind?
The key point about this passage in Surprised by Joy is that Lewis now describes an assertive, active, and questing God, not simply a mental construct or philosophical game. God was pounding on the door of Lewis’s mind and life. Reality was imposing itself upon him, vigorously and aggressively demanding a response. “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”[311]
One of the most powerful visual images in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the melting of snow, signifying the breaking of the Witch’s power and the imminent return of Aslan. Lewis applied this potent image to describe his own diminishing resistance to the divine advent in Surprised by Joy, as he reflected on his own conversion: “I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.”[312]
Lewis’s 1916 “treaty with reality” was now in the process of collapsing around him, as he realised he could no longer maintain his old mental frontiers in the light of the superior forces mustered against him. “The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me.”[313] The point that Lewis is making here is too easily overlooked. The image of a “treaty with reality” conveys a radical and comprehensive compartmentalisation of thought that enables troubling and disturbing thoughts to be locked away so that they do not disturb everyday life. We saw Lewis using precisely this strategy to deal with the horror of the Great War. Reality was subjugated to thought, which was like a net thrown over reality, taming it and robbing it of its ability to take by surprise and overcome. What Lewis discovered was that he could no longer domesticate reality. Like a tiger, it refused to be constrained by its artificial cage. It broke free, and overwhelmed its former captor.
Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “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.”[314] Lewis now believed in God; he was not yet a Christian. Nevertheless, Lewis tells us that as a public manifestation of this theistic belief, he then began to attend college chapel, and became a regular worshiper at his local parish church of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, not far from his home.[315]
This change in behaviour, which Lewis dates to Oxford’s Trinity Term of 1929 (that is, between 28 April and 22 June 1929), is of enormous importance, as it allows the correlation of Lewis’s inner and outer worlds. A change in the way Lewis thought led to a change in his public behaviour—something which marked a change in his habits and could be seen by others.
Lewis’s new and unexpected interest in chapel was the subject of much discussion and intrigue among other Magdalen dons in the early 1930s. The American philosopher Paul Elmer More, who visited Magdalen in 1933, later wrote of intense college gossip about Lewis’s new habit of attending chapel.[316] Yet Lewis insists that, at this stage, this was “a merely symbolical and provisional practice,” which neither indicated nor enabled a specific commitment to Christianity.[317] Yet it is a marker for the date of his conversion to theism. If we can identify when Lewis began to attend chapel, we have a clue to when he started to believe in God.
More important, Lewis began to see himself in a new way. “One of the first results of my Theistic conversion was a marked decrease . . . in the fussy attentiveness which I had so long paid to the progress of my own opinions and the states of my own mind.”[318] One practical outcome of this decision to break with this narcissistic introspection was inevitable: having failed to keep up his diary since March 1927, Lewis abandoned any thought of taking it up again. “If Theism had done nothing else for me, I should still be thankful that it cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary.”[319]
Having ceased to keep a diary since 1927, Lewis’s recollection of events after that date turns out to be somewhat unreliable. As he himself remarked in 1957, he could now “never remember dates.”[320] His brother was more emphatic: Lewis had a “life-long inability to keep track of dates.”[321] Surprised by Joy is primarily an account of changes in Lewis’s internal world, which are correlated—at times a little loosely and uncertainly—with events in the external world. It is “suffocatingly subjective,”[322] an introspective piece of writing dealing primarily with the rearrangement of Lewis’s interior world of thought and experience.
The traditional dating of Lewis’s transition to belief in God, set out by Lewis himself, locates this shift in the early summer of 1929. Yet this dating raises some puzzling questions. For example, if Lewis really came to faith in God around then, why did his correspondence around the time of the death of his father, several months later, contain no hint whatsoever of a belief in God, however emergent, on his part? Might his father’s death instead have acted as a stimulus for Lewis to reflect more deeply on the question of God in the midst of the emotional turmoil that he experienced around this time?
In preparing for this biography, I read all of Lewis’s published works in their order of composition. At no point in Lewis’s writings of 1929 did I discern any signs of the dramatic developments that he describes as having taken place in his inner life that year. There is no hint of a change in tone or tempo in any works written up to January 1930. Furthermore, Lewis makes it clear that, as a result of his conversion, he began to attend church and college chapel. There is no trace of such a significant—and publicly observable—change of habit, either as a topic of observation or discussion, in his correspondence of 1929. Even allowing for Lewis’s reluctance to self-disclose, his writings of this period do not point to any kind of conversion experience in 1929. As we shall see, however, his writings of 1930 tell a very different story.
So is Lewis right about the date of his own conversion as stated in Surprised by Joy? Might Lewis’s memory be faulty at this point? There is no doubt that Lewis recalled a conversion experience in his inner world, and describes its shape with some care. But how does this relate to the events of his outer world of years and months? Might Lewis have made a mistake? After all, there are other historical errors in the narrative of Surprised by Joy. (For example, Lewis recalls his first reading of George MacDonald’s Phantastes as taking place in August 1915, but this should actually be dated to March 1916.)
Given the importance of this question, it needs to be considered in greater depth.
The Date of Lewis’s Conversion: A Reconsideration
In Surprised by Joy, as we have just seen, Lewis dates the moment of his conversion to the Trinity Term of 1929. Lewis here refers to Oxford’s eight-week teaching term, which is to be dated from 28 April to 22 June 1929.[323] This date is accepted and repeated in every major biography of Lewis to date. The traditional chronology of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity is usually stated in terms of five landmarks:
I do not believe that this chronology is the best explanation of the evidence contained in the primary sources, and propose a significant revision. Lewis’s spiritual journey, by my account, is a year shorter than has traditionally been believed. The chronology which I propose, based on a close reading of the primary sources, is as follows:
What is the evidence for this proposed revision of the traditional view of the development of Lewis’s religious beliefs and commitments? To begin with, let us consider the date of Lewis’s conversion to theism—that is to say, when he began to believe in God. There is no evidence for any change of heart on this matter in any of Lewis’s writings dating from 1929, the time of his father’s death. But then things change in 1930. And only two people are allowed to know about it.
In a 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis remarked on how he divided his acquaintances into “first class” and “second class” friends. In the former category, he placed Owen Barfield and Greeves himself; in the latter, J. R. R. Tolkien.[324] If Lewis was to tell any of his circle about this new development in his life, it would have been his “first class” friends, Barfield and Greeves. Yet there is nothing in Lewis’s correspondence of 1929 with these two individuals which suggests that something significant had happened to him at any point during that year.
Yet things look very different in 1930. Lewis’s correspondence with Barfield and Greeves now points to a significant development, corresponding to the transition Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, having taken place in (or perhaps slightly before) Trinity Term 1930—about a year later than Lewis’s own account. In what follows, we shall examine one crucial letter from Lewis to each of these two “first class” friends. Both date from 1930, not 1929.
First, consider his very short, deeply introspective letter to Owen Barfield, dated 3 February 1930. In this letter, following a brief introduction, Lewis writes as follows:
Terrible things are happening to me. The “Spirit” or “Real I” is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.[325]
At this point, Professor Henry Wyld came to visit Lewis and interrupted his flow of thought. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “person from Porlock,” who disrupted the composition of his great poem “Kubla Khan” in 1797, Wyld prevented Lewis from saying anything more on this matter to Barfield. But what he says is enough. This is precisely the development that Lewis later described in Surprised by Joy, though he located it in Trinity Term 1929. God was becoming real to him, and taking the offensive. Lewis felt he was about to be overwhelmed by a greater force. As he put it in Surprised by Joy, he was being “dragged through the doorway.”[326]
Lewis’s comments to Barfield must prefigure his conversion; they make no sense if they took place a year later, referring to an experience Lewis had already undergone. Barfield himself was clear about the importance of this letter in a 1998 interview regarding its significance for Lewis: it marked “the beginning of his conversion.”[327] Yet Barfield’s interviewer at this point (Kim Gilnett) mistakenly assigned this letter to 1929, thus accommodating it within the framework proposed by Lewis in Surprised by Joy—despite the fact that the letter dates from the following year. This letter anticipates exactly the themes that Lewis described as converging on the devastating, imminent moment of conversion, which clearly lay ahead of, not behind, him.
The second significant letter was written to Arthur Greeves on 29 October 1930. As we noted earlier, Lewis explicitly states that he began to attend chapel at Magdalen College following his conversion. There is no hint of Lewis’s attending college chapel on a regular basis in his correspondence with anyone in 1929, or in the first half of 1930. Yet in a highly significant section of this 1930 letter to Greeves, Lewis mentions that he has now “started going to morning Chapel at 8,”[328] which meant that he had to go to bed much earlier than he had used to. This is clearly presented as a new development, a significant change in his routine, affecting his personal working habits, dating from the beginning of the academic year 1930–1931.
If Lewis’s own chronology for his conversion is correct, he would have begun attending college chapel in October 1929. There is no reference in his correspondence of that period to any such change of habit. Furthermore, the reference to attending college chapel in the letter of October 1930 clearly implies that Lewis was now doing something that was not part of his regular routine up to this point. If Lewis really was converted during the Trinity Term of 1929, why did he wait over a year before starting to attend college chapel? It makes little sense.
6.1 The interior of Magdalen College chapel, around 1927. Lewis began to attend chapel regularly in October 1930.
The traditional date of Lewis’s conversion would seem to require review. The evidence is best understood if Lewis’s subjective location of the event in his inner world is accepted, but his chronological location of the event is seen to have been misplaced. The nature or reality of Lewis’s conversion experience is not being called into question. The problem is that Lewis’s location of this event in the external world of space and time appears to be inaccurate. Lewis’s conversion is best understood as having taken place in the Trinity Term of 1930, not 1929. In 1930, Trinity Term fell between 27 April and 21 June.
Yet in rediscovering God in this way, Lewis had reached only a resting place, not his final destination. There was another milestone which had to be passed, which Lewis regarded as significant—a shift from a generic belief in God (often referred to as “theism”) to a specific commitment to Christianity. This appears to have been an extended and complex process, to which others were midwives. Some—such as George Herbert—spoke to Lewis as living voices from the past. Yet one person in particular spoke to Lewis in the present. In what follows, we shall tell the story of a nighttime conversation between Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, which totally changed Lewis’s outlook on Christianity.
A Nighttime Conversation with Tolkien: September 1931
The final chapter of Surprised by Joy speaks briefly and tantalizingly of Lewis’s transition from “pure and simple” theism to Christianity. Lewis takes pains to make it clear that this conversion had nothing to do with desire or longing. The God to whom he surrendered in Trinity Term 1930 was “sheerly nonhuman.” He had no idea that “there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy.”[329] Lewis’s conversion was essentially rational, unrelated to his long-standing fascination with “Joy.” “No kind of desire was present at all.”[330] His conversion to theism was, in one way, a purely rational matter.
Lewis’s rhetoric at this point can be understood as preempting a long-standing atheist caricature of faith as “wish-fulfilment.” This idea, given classic expression in the writings of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), has an intellectual pedigree going back into the mists of time. In this view, God is a consoling dream for life’s losers, a spiritual crutch for the inadequate and needy.[331] Lewis distances himself from any such idea. The existence of God, Lewis insists, was not something that he wished to be true; he valued his independence far too much for that. “I had always wanted, above all things, not to be ‘interfered with.’”[332] In effect, Lewis was confronted with something that he did not wish to be true, but was forced to concede was true.
This rational God bore little, if any, relation to Lewis’s world of imagination and longing on the one hand, and to the person of Jesus of Nazareth on the other. So how and when did Lewis make these deeper connections, so characteristic of his mature writing? The simple answer is that Surprised by Joy does not really tell us. Lewis pleads that he is now “the least informed” on this final stage of his spiritual journey from “mere Theism to Christianity,”[333] and that he may not fully be relied upon to provide a complete or accurate account.
What we find instead is a paper trail of disconnected ideas and memories, leaving the reader with the task of trying to link these thoughts and episodes into a coherent whole. Yet it is clear from Lewis’s correspondence that one extended conversation was of critical importance in enabling him to transition from belief in God to acceptance of Christianity. In view of its importance, we shall consider it in detail.
On Saturday, 19 September 1931, Lewis hosted Hugo Dyson (1896–1975), a lecturer in English at nearby Reading University, and J. R. R. Tolkien for dinner at Magdalen College.[334] Dyson and Tolkien already knew each other, having been exact contemporaries at Exeter College, where they studied English together. It was a still, warm evening. After dinner, they went for an extended stroll along Addison’s Walk, a circular footpath following the River Cherwell within the college grounds, discussing the nature of metaphor and myth.
6.2 Addison’s Walk, named after Joseph Addison (1672–1719), a former fellow of Magdalen College, photographed in 1937.
After a wind came up, causing leaves to fall to the ground with a noise like pattering rain, the three men retired to Lewis’s rooms and continued the discussion, which had now shifted to Christianity. Tolkien eventually made his excuses at 3.00 a.m., and headed home. Lewis and Dyson kept going for another hour. This evening of conversation with these two colleagues played a critical role in Lewis’s development. The imagery of the wind seemed to him to hint at the mysterious presence and action of God.[335]
Although Lewis now kept no diary, he wrote two letters to Greeves shortly afterwards, explaining the events of that night and their significance for his reflections on religious faith.[336] In his first letter, dated 1 October, Lewis informed Greeves of the outcome of the evening’s discussion, but not its substance:
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 night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.[337]
Greeves naturally wanted to know more about this intriguing development. Lewis provided a more extended account of the evening’s events in his next letter, dated 18 October. Lewis explained that his difficulty had been that he could not see “how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now.” An inability to make sense of this had been holding Lewis back “for the last year or so.” He could admit that Christ might provide us with a good example, but that was about as far as it went. Lewis realised that the New Testament took a very different view, using terms such as propitiation or sacrifice to refer to the true meaning of this event. But these expressions, Lewis declared, seemed to him to be “either silly or shocking.”[338]
Although Lewis’s “long night talk” involved both Dyson and Tolkien, it is Tolkien’s approach that seems to have opened a door for Lewis to a wholly new way of looking at the Christian faith. To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274) describes as the “journey of the mind to God.” Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis’s rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When engaging the Christian narrative, Lewis was limiting himself to his reason when he ought to be opening himself to the deepest intuitions of his imagination.
Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasised, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, “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.”[339]
The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a “fairy tale” or the pejorative sense of a “deliberate lie told in order to deceive.” This is certainly how Lewis once understood myths—as “lies breathed through silver.” As used in the conversation between Lewis and Tolkien, the term myth must be understood in its technical literary sense if the significance of this exchange is to be appreciated.
For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys “fundamental things”—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths offer a fragment of that truth, not its totality. They are like splintered fragments of the true light. Yet when the full and true story is told, it is able to bring to fulfilment all that was right and wise in those fragmentary visions of things. For Tolkien, grasping Christianity’s meaningfulness took precedence over its truth. It provided the total picture, unifying and transcending these fragmentary and imperfect insights.
It is not difficult to see how Tolkien’s way of thinking brought clarity and coherence to the jumble of thoughts that so excited Lewis’s mind at this time. For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths possess an innate capacity to expand the consciousness of their readers, allowing them to transcend themselves. At their best, myths offer what Lewis later termed “a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.”[340] Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.
Tolkien’s way of thinking clearly spoke deeply to Lewis. It answered a question that had troubled Lewis since his teenage years: how could Christianity alone be true, and everything else be false? Lewis now realised that he did not have to declare that the great myths of the pagan age were totally false; they were echoes or anticipations of the full truth, which was made known only in and through the Christian faith. Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which allowed him to see Christianity as bringing to fulfilment such echoes and shadows of the truth that arose from human questing and yearning. If Tolkien was right, similarities between Christianity and pagan religions “ought to be there.”[341] There would be a problem only if such similarities did not exist.
Perhaps more important, Tolkien allowed Lewis to reconnect the worlds of reason and imagination. No longer was the realm of longing to be sidelined or suppressed, as the “New Look” demanded, and as Lewis feared belief in God might imply. It could be woven—naturally and convincingly—into the greater narrative of reality that Tolkien had presented. As Tolkien later put it, God had willed that “the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein.”[342]
Christianity, Lewis realised, allowed him to affirm the importance of longing and yearning within a reasonable account of reality. God was the true “source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot . . . ever since childhood.”[343] Reason and imagination alike were thus affirmed and reconciled by the Christian vision of reality. Tolkien thus helped Lewis to realise that a “rational” faith was not necessarily imaginatively and emotionally barren. When rightly understood, the Christian faith could integrate reason, longing, and imagination.
Lewis’s Belief in the Divinity of Christ
As a result of his conversation with Tolkien and Dyson, Lewis was able to grasp the imaginative appeal of Christianity. Yet this did not take the form of an understanding of its individual elements—such as the core doctrines of the creeds. Rather, Lewis came to appreciate the comprehensive view of reality that he found in the Christian faith. Yet Lewis’s description of his journey of discovery specifically makes reference to wrestling with core doctrines, including the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. So when did this process of intellectual exploration take place?
Lewis recalled experiencing a process of intellectual clarification and crystallisation, during which the more theological aspects of his faith finally fell into place. His account of this development in Surprised by Joy makes clear that it happened during a journey to Whipsnade Park Zoo, yet makes no reference to any specific dates:
I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. 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. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought.[344]
We see here the repeated pattern of Lewis’s using a journey to mull over things in his mind, the pieces naturally falling into place without undue mental effort on his part. But when did this “final step” take place?
Lewis biographers have traditionally dated this “final step” to 28 September 1931, when Warnie drove Lewis to Whipsnade Park Zoo in Bedfordshire on a misty morning in the sidecar of his motorbike. It is now the received wisdom of Lewis biographers that this date marks Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.[345] This is supported by Warnie’s remark that it was during this “outing” in 1931 that Lewis decided to rejoin the church.[346]
If this interpretation is correct, the final stages of Lewis’s conversion from believing in God to commitment to Christianity might be pieced together as follows:
Following this scenario, Lewis’s process of conversion to Christianity is quite rapid, its critical elements having taken place over a period of ten days (19–28 September 1931). This is the traditional understanding of Lewis’s gradual rediscovery of Christianity, and it fits in well with the evidence of his writings.
Lewis’s conversation with Tolkien and Dyson allowed him to catch a glimpse of the imaginative potential of the Christian story, illuminating questions that had troubled him for some time. Having experienced the “imaginative embrace” of Christianity, Lewis began the rational exploration of its landscape. This rational exploration, expressed in terms of Christianity’s doctrines, follows on from the captivation of the imagination through its images and stories.
As has often been observed, Lewis sees theory as secondary to reality[347]—in effect, as intellectual reflection that arises after something has been apprehended or appreciated, primarily through the imagination. Lewis grasped the reality of Christianity through his imagination, and then began to try and make rational sense of what his imagination had captured and embraced. The traditional account of Lewis’s conversion suggests that this process was essentially complete within ten days. Yet Lewis’s correspondence suggests that it may have been a more extended and complex process, taking months rather than days.[348] So how confident can we be that Lewis’s Christological insight took place on the way to Whipsnade Zoo in September 1931?
Lewis’s account of the significant visit to Whipsnade Zoo in Surprised by Joy is traditionally held to refer to 28 September 1931, when he was driven to Whipsnade Zoo by Warnie in the sidecar of his motorbike. There is no doubt that Lewis visited Whipsnade on this occasion. But is this the occasion on which Lewis’s views on Christ were resolved? It is important to note that the narrative of Surprised by Joy makes no reference to Warnie, nor to a motorbike, nor to September, nor to 1931. Furthermore, Lewis wrote a long letter to his brother shortly after that visit, briefly recalling their day at Whipsnade—but making no reference to any religious transformation or significant theological adjustment on his part.[349]
A closer examination of Warnie’s recollections of that day in September 1931 also raises some doubts about the traditional interpretation.[350] Warnie’s reflections on that day are clearly not based on any personal and privileged disclosures from his brother, but from his own correlation of that journey with the narrative in Surprised by Joy. What some have interpreted as Warnie’s memory of a conversation with Lewis is clearly Warnie’s later interpretation of an event. And, as we shall see, this interpretation of that event is open to question. What if Lewis had been driven to Whipsnade on another occasion, when Warnie was not present? What if that was the occasion for his theological clarification?
Lewis’s memory of that critical day at Whipsnade Zoo, as set out in Surprised by Joy, includes a lyrical passage recalling “the birds singing overhead and the bluebells underfoot,” commenting that this scene at “Wallaby Wood” had been quite ruined by more recent construction work at the zoo.[351] Yet the English bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) blooms from late April into late May (depending on the weather), and its leaves wither and disappear by the late summer.[352] Bluebells flower later than usual at Whipsnade, due to the slightly colder climate on the elevated downs on which the zoo is located.[353] There would have been no sign of “bluebells underfoot” at Whipsnade in September. But they would have been blooming in profusion there in May and early June.
Perhaps the significance of this fact has been overlooked by some, or the English bluebell has been confused with its Scottish counterpart (Campanula rotundifolia, known as the “harebell” in England), which continues to flower into September. Lewis’s “Edenic” recollection of the birds and bluebells at Whipsnade Zoo recorded in Surprised by Joy is clearly a memory of a late spring or early summer day, not a day in early autumn.
Lewis’s heightened attention to the bluebells may well reflect their symbolic association with this moment of insight—after all, Lewis tells us that he had long been a self-confessed “votary of the Blue Flower” (page 16).[354] The “Blue Flower” motif in German Romanticism has complex historical roots. It was first stated in Novalis’s posthumously published fragment of a novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), and came to symbolise a longing for the elusive reconciliation of reason and imagination, the observed world outside the mind and the subjective world within. The bright blue European cornflower is often cited as the inspiration for this symbol.[355] It is easily extended to bluebells.
Upon reflection, it is quite clear that this “Blue Flower” passage in Surprised by Joy refers not to the autumn of 1931, but to a second visit to Whipsnade, made in the first week of June 1932, when Lewis was again driven to the zoo—but this time in a car on a “fine day” by Edward Foord-Kelcey (1859–1934). On 14 June, shortly after this trip, Lewis wrote to his brother, specifically noting the “masses of bluebells” he had seen during this visit to Whipsnade, and commenting on the state of “Wallaby Wood.”[356] The phrasing of this section of the letter is very similar to that of the critical passage in Surprised by Joy. Might this later date mark the occasion when Lewis finally came to believe in the Incarnation, perhaps as the apex of his exploration of the Christian faith? If so, it would clearly represent a deepened understanding of his faith from within, as Lewis had clearly identified himself as a Christian by this time. This would require a revision of the traditional chronology of events, as follows:
So did Lewis’s restless, questing mind finally bring everything together in a journey to Whipsnade Zoo in September 1931, a week or so after his conversation with Tolkien? Or was the process of reflection and crystallisation more extended, only being completed during a later journey to Whipsnade in June 1932? Lewis’s letter of 1 October 1931 to Greeves, in which he speaks of now “definitely believing in Christ,” could certainly be interpreted as an embryonic realisation of the significance of Christ that needed extended exploration and formulation, culminating in June 1932. Yet his correspondence of this later period—including a letter of 14 June 1932 to Warnie—makes no explicit reference to such a development. Nor can we eliminate the possibility that Lewis may have confused individual aspects of these two visits to Whipsnade in writing Surprised by Joy. He may even have fused them in his memory, bringing together the imagery and themes of two different visits, and telescoping them into one. So which of these two visits marks the true moment of illumination? We noted earlier how Lewis was not totally reliable concerning dates, and it is possible that the narrative in Surprised by Joy involves blurring of the boundaries between similar events.
We are left here, as so often in relation to this most tantalising of Lewis’s works, wishing for more, yet forced to work with what we have. The best solution at present is to allow the traditional date of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity—September 1931—to stand, while noting the ambiguities and uncertainties that surround it. Lewis’s letter to Greeves of 1 October 1931 makes most sense if a decisive Christological step has already been taken, even if the full unfolding and exploration of this insight continued into the following year.
Yet whenever Lewis’s insight is to be dated, it is to be seen as bringing to a conclusion an extended process of reflection and commitment, which proceeded in a series of stages. We cannot seize on a single moment—such as this one—as defining or dating Lewis’s “conversion” to Christianity; instead, we can trace an ascending arc of reflection, of which the conversation with Tolkien represents a critical imaginative transition, and the trip to Whipsnade Zoo its logical outworking.
One point on this ascending arc of Christian commitment merits special comment. Lewis attended a service of Holy Communion for the first time since his childhood at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, on Christmas Day 1931. In a long letter to his brother, Lewis briefly yet explicitly mentions attending the “early celebration”[357] on that day at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry—in other words, a service of Holy Communion. Lewis would have no doubt that his brother would have understood the significance of this development, given the traditions of the Church of England at this time.
6.3 Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford, seen from the south, showing the entrance porch, as photographed by Henry W. Taunt (1842–1922) in 1901.
Up to this point, Lewis had attended Matins, a “service of the word,” often leaving—to the irritation of the vicar, Wilfrid Thomas—during the last hymn, before the service had ended properly. But Lewis was clear that, while anyone could attend Matins, Holy Communion was only for the committed. By informing his brother of his decision to attend such a communion service, Lewis wanted to let his brother know that he had moved on significantly in his journey of faith.
What Lewis did not know was that Warnie had made a similar journey of faith, and had received communion for the first time since his childhood at the Bubbling Well Chapel in Shanghai[358]—also on Christmas Day 1931. The two brothers, unknown to each other, had made a public profession of commitment to Christianity on exactly the same day.
In the end, it is not so much the precise date of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity as its implications for his future writings that is of ultimate importance. His conversion might, after all, have been an inner event, of importance to Lewis, but without any obvious impact on his literary work. For example, T. S. Eliot converted to Christianity in 1927, generating much publicity in doing so. Yet many would suggest that Eliot’s subsequent writings were less shaped by this conversion than might be expected.
Lewis is different. From the outset, Lewis seems to have realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth. His youthful “treaty with reality” had been his own attempt to impose an arbitrary (yet convenient) order on a chaotic world. Now he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned—and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study. Lewis’s coming to faith brought not simply understanding to his reading of literature; it brought both motivation and theoretical underpinning to his own literary creations—best seen in his late work Till We Have Faces (1956), but also evident in the Chronicles of Narnia.
It is simply not possible to make sense of Lewis’s work as a scholar and author without grasping the ordering principles of his inner world, which—after a period of incubation and reflection—finally began to fall into place in the early autumn of 1931, and reached their final synthesis by the summer of 1932. When Lewis went to spend a holiday with Arthur Greeves between 15 and 29 August 1932, he was ready to map out his new and essentially complete vision of the Christian faith in the work that became The Pilgrim’s Regress (discussed on pages 169–174). Although Lewis would continue to explore the relation of reason and imagination in the domain of faith, the fundamental features of his settled understanding of Christianity were now in place.
In this chapter, we have explored the trajectory of Lewis’s complex and extended conversion to Christianity, raising concerns about some traditional datings and interpretations of this development. We must, however, avoid portraying Lewis’s as a representative or typical conversion. As Lewis later remarked, his specific way of coming to faith was “a road very rarely trodden,”[359] and could not in any way be regarded as normative. His account of his conversion represents it as an essentially private affair, marked by understatement and a studied evasion of any dramatic gestures or declarations. Yet gradually, Lewis’s faith would become both public and prominent, as we shall see when we consider his wartime role as an apologist.
But there is much more that needs to be said about Lewis as an Oxford don, above all about his approach to literature—the topic of the next chapter.