1946
TO MR. N. FRIDAMA, who seems to have asked Lewis about the steps in his conversion to Christianity: On the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination.
15 FEBRUARY 1946
I was baptised in the Church of Ireland (same as Anglican). My parents were not notably pious but went regularly to church and took me. My mother died when I was a child.
My Christian faith was first undermined by the attitude taken towards Pagan religion in the notes of modern editors of Latin and Greek poets at school. They always assumed that the ancient religion was pure error: hence, in my mind, the obvious question ‘Why shouldn’t ours be equally false?’ A theosophical Matron at one school helped to break up my early beliefs, and after that a ‘ Rationalist’ tutor to whom I went finished the job. I abandoned all belief in Christianity at about the age of 14, though I pretended to believe for fear of my elders. I thus went thro’ the ceremony of Confirmation in total hypocrisy. My beliefs continued to be agnostic, with fluctuation towards pantheism and various other sub-Christian beliefs, till I was about 29.
I was brought back (a.) By Philosophy. I still think [Bishop George] Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God is unanswerable. (b.) By increasing knowledge of medieval literature. It became harder and harder to think that all those great poets and philosophers were wrong. (c.) By the strong influence of 2 writers, the Presbyterian George MacDonald and the Roman Catholic, G. K. Chesterton. (d.) By argument with an Anthroposophist [ Owen Barfield]. He failed to convert me to his own views (a kind of Gnosticism) but his attack on my own presuppositions smashed the ordinary pseudo-‘scientific’ world-picture forever.
On Calvinism. Both the statement that our final destination is already settled and the view that it still may be either Heaven or Hell, seem to me to imply the ultimate reality of Time, which I don’t believe in. The controversy is one I can’t join on either side for I think that in the real ( Timeless) world it is meaningless. In great haste.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On the sources of his early atheism, on the importance of the doctrine of the Fall, on the danger of worry, and on living in the present moment.
20 DECEMBER 1946
No. I don’t think I feel like you ‘ disillusioned’. I think that though I am emotionally a fairly cheerful person my actual judgement of the world has always been what yours now is and so I have not been disappointed. The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war and presently the experience of it, had given me a very pessimistic view of existence. My atheism was based on it: and it still seems to me that far the strongest card in our enemies’ hand is the actual course of the world: and that, quite apart from particular evils like wars and revolutions. The inherent ‘ vanity’ of the ‘creature’, the fact that life preys on life, that all beauty and happiness is produced only to be destroyed—this was what stuck in my gullet….
I still think the argument from design the weakest possible ground for Theism, and what may be called the argument from un-design the strongest for Atheism.
Of course my error was in asking how I knew the universe to be so bad: whence came the light which discovered this darkness, the straight by which I judged this crookedness?
Hence the very important part which the Fall (both human and angelic) has played in my thought since I became a Christian. When you say that nothing here…has a value in itself, that everything has a value in relation to God, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I often, like you, think that all the valuable future may lie with the Christened Chinaman. But one mustn’t assume burdens that God does not lay upon us.
It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).
A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.
As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so. Pray for me always.