From here he went on to see that, in experiencing Joy, we yearn for that Absolute – his name for God – beside which we are mere ‘appearances’. This interest in the Absolute began to tie in with the philosophy he was now teaching at Univ. One difficulty Lewis found from lecturing on such philosophical idealists as Hegel and F.H. Bradley is that their ‘Absolute’ could not be made clear enough to satisfy him. He found the theistic idealism of George Berkeley more persuasive because it was easier to get some notion of what Berkeley’s ‘God’ is. Nevertheless, for Lewis this ‘God’ did not enter into personal relations: we could no more ‘meet’ him than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare.
Not long afterwards Lewis read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) and was surprised to find the whole Christian outline of history making sense. An even stronger blow at his efforts to keep God at bay came when, as he wrote in Surprised by Joy,
Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’ To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man … If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not – as I would still have put it – ‘safe’, where could I turn?’3
The hard-boiled atheist was probably Lewis’s colleague, Thomas Weldon,* Philosophy Tutor at Magdalen, who turned up at Lewis’s rooms on the evening of 27 April 1926. In his diary for that evening Lewis wrote: ‘Just settling down … when Weldon arrived. This meant whisky and talk till 12.30, greatly to my disappointment. We somehow got on the historical truth of the Gospels, and agreed that there is a lot that could not be explained away.’4
Some time after this Lewis was going up Headington Hill on top of a bus when he became aware of being offered a completely free choice: he could either accept or reject God. He could open the door or keep it shut. In a situation such as this, when it is almost perfectly clear what one ought to do, he saw that freedom and necessity were almost the same thing. In so far as the choice lay with him, he chose to open the door. When this happened, Christian friends such as Barfield, Tolkien and Hugo Dyson joined in making it nearly impossible for him to change his mind.
It would be a serious mistake to suppose that Lewis, because he was an atheist, did not believe in morality. He had done things he was later to regard as reprehensible, but one of the effects of war was to cause him to believe that God and the Good were different and separate. One of his complaints in Spirits in Bondage is that God, if there was such a Person, was not good. For some time, then, there had been an ethic attached to Lewis’s idealism and he now believed that only by attempting complete virtue could he see beyond his own selfish perspective and understand ‘universal Spirit’. Though still some way from believing in Christianity, he nevertheless felt he ought to act as though he believed. This attempt at virtue no doubt contributed to the belief he expressed in all his theological books, and most succinctly in The Abolition of Man where he said: ‘Only those who are practising the Tao’ – the Moral, or Natural Law – ‘will understand it.’5
One of the most noticeable ways in which Lewis was trying to practise the Tao was respect for his father. In the last few years of Albert’s life Jack spent three weeks with him each Christmas, and his letters home became appreciably warmer. He did not realize his father was close to death, but he knew he owed him a great deal. The shame that he had not acted sooner was to trouble him acutely when Albert died. He wrote to Arthur Greeves on 7 June 1930 about one such humbling experience, explaining that one of the colleagues he lunched with regularly, Frederick Lawson, had invited him to visit his father:
When we arrived, we found a lovely wild garden with a little red cottage in it. We met an old man speaking with a broad Yorkshire accent and plainly in the technical sense ‘not a gentleman’. Point No. 1 in favour of Lawson – he is not ashamed of his origins: he rose enormously in my eyes. Then Lawson shut up completely and let the old man talk, which he did, describing all he was doing in the garden. He was just like Lawson, only in the old man it was different: and the courage of him setting to work to build up a new life here in his old age was impressive. When we had been round the whole place and into the house, and when I saw so many things out of Lawson’s rooms in Merton brought out here, and saw the affection between them, and realized how Lawson had busied himself about the whole – and then remembered how abominably I had treated my father – and worst of all how I had dared to despise Lawson, I was, as I said, humiliated.6
But to go back to shortly before Albert died, in his attempt to bring his acts, thoughts and desires into harmony with ‘universal Spirit’ Jack discovered how all but impossible it is for an atheist to attempt to do the will of God without, sooner or later, coming, as St John says, to ‘know of the doctrine’ (John 7:17). This was a horrible revelation to him at the time and he felt that, in his case, it was as ridiculous to speak of his ‘search’ for God as it is to speak of ‘the mouse’s search for the cat’.7
He was still hoping that he might not be interfered with and be allowed to retain his freedom when God closed in on him. In what is perhaps the most moving passage in his autobiography he tells how it happened:
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. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare,8 compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.9
This conversion was, however, to Theism, and not to Christianity. He knew nothing about the Incarnation at this stage. Oddly enough, the transition from theism to Christianity was one which, despite its importance, Lewis claimed to remember very little about. Because it is so lightly sketched in Surprised by Joy, it seems the most appropriate subject for the remainder of this chapter.
Albert Lewis, it will be remembered, died on 25 September 1929, and Jack was shaken by this more than he imagined he could be. ‘Now’, he wrote to Warnie on 17 October, ‘you could do anything on earth you cared to in the study’ of Little Lea, ‘and it is beastly’.10 He and his brother were on their own now. It was sobering and it probably had a good deal to do with what followed.
One practical result of Lewis’s becoming a theist is that he began attending his college chapel on weekdays and his parish church on Sundays – and this despite his distaste for the ‘public’ aspect of churchgoing and his more intense dislike of organ music, which he once described to Walter Hooper as ‘one long roar’. He also began reading St John’s Gospel in Greek, thus initiating a practice he was to continue for the rest of his life: to read some portion of the Bible almost every day. From St John he got a more rounded picture of Christ than that he had in 1916 when he described Christianity as one among many mythologies and the Divine Son as a ‘Hebrew philosopher’.11 Indeed, his views were so radically altered that he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 9 January 1930 complaining that ‘In spite of all my recent changes of view, I am … inclined to think that you can only get what you call “Christ” out of the Gospels by picking and choosing, and slurring over a great deal.’12
Though still uncertain as to what the Gospels meant, Lewis had already begun his defence of a full and undiluted Christian faith.
As we have seen, Lewis discontinued his diary in 1927 but, fortunately for his biographers, he and Arthur Greeves had returned, after a lapse of several years, to the practice of writing every week. The latter had held out for years against Lewis’s atheism and it is, perhaps, natural that Lewis should now regard him as his ‘Father Confessor’.13 One of the most striking changes in Lewis’s letters is a sense of personal well-being and happiness. More than ever he delighted in his afternoon walks, conversations and books. As the frail securities of his recent atheism crumbled, they made way for a deep and genuine humility. He even admitted to liking the Christianity in the works of John Bunyan and George MacDonald and felt as though his youth had been given back to him. On 5 January 1930 he wrote to Greeves about a new discovery:
In the evening I started to read the Everyman volume of Jacob Boehme … The Dialogue at the end, called the Supersensual Life, was fairly easy going, and I should advise you to get and read it at once. Then I turned back and began the longer work, the Signatura Rerum … It has been about the biggest shaking up I’ve got from a book since I first read Phantastes … No fooling about for me: and I keep one hand firmly gripped round the homely and simple things. But it is a real book: i.e. it’s not like a book at all, but like a thunderclap. Heaven defend us – what things there are knocking about the world!14
Lewis was, at the same time, finding books by MacDonald which he had not previously read – one of which was The Diary of an Old Soul (1885). Writing to Arthur Greeves about it on 26 January 1930, he spoke of the beauty of finding himself ‘on the main road with all humanity … It is emphatically coming home, as Chaucer says “Returneth home from worldly vanitee.”’15
The afternoon walks from Magdalen to Headington Lewis regarded as periods of ‘meditation’ – times which he now set aside for the specific purpose of self-examination. Burrowing into his past, he was appalled at what he found. On 30 January 1930 he told Greeves that, though he was being supported in respect to chastity and anger, his main cause of alarm was pride, which he recognized as his besetting sin:
I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought ‘What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!’ I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. 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 … And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It’s like fighting the hydra … There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration.16
In a letter of 10 February he suggested that Arthur’s besetting sin was indolence, while his own was pride. Pride, he pointed out, is ‘the mother of all sins, and the original sin of Lucifer – so you are rather better off than I am. You at your worst are an instrument unstrung: I am an instrument strung but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician.’17
Lewis continued to accord to pride the fear it deserved and even devoted a whole chapter to it in his first BBC broadcasts (later included and revised in Mere Christianity). Years afterwards when Walter Hooper asked if he set much store by his growing fame, Lewis answered, ‘One cannot be too careful not to think of it!’
Though he continued to argue Christian doctrine with friends such as Barfield and Tolkien, Lewis said very little about the change he was going through to friends of his undergraduate days. An exception, however, was A.K. Hamilton Jenkin. Writing to him on 21 March 1930, Lewis confessed that his outlook had changed considerably since they were fellow Martlets at Univ.: ‘It is not precisely Christianity, tho’ it may turn out that way in the end. I can’t express the change better than by saying that whereas once I would have said “Shall I adopt Christianity?”, I now wait to see whether it will adopt me: i.e. I now know there is another Party in the affair – that I’m playing poker, not Patience, as I once supposed.’18
In the summer of 1930 when Lewis and Mrs Moore were negotiating the purchase of The Kilns, the question arose as to who the heirs of the property would be. This had the incidental effect of causing Lewis to consider the question of whether or not he would ever marry. He was forced into deeper consideration by the reading of Coventry Patmore’s long poem, The Angel in the House (1863). Writing to Arthur Greeves about it on 7 June 1930, he said that though he liked individual lines in it, he was troubled by Patmore’s theory of marriage as a mystical image of, and approach to, God:
He is extremely down on people who take the ascetic view. They will be shut without the fold as ‘too good’ for God. The whole poem has raised a lot of difficulties in my mind. Even if it were true that marriage is what he says, what help does this give as regards the sexual problem for the innumerable people who can’t marry? Surely for them asceticism remains the only path? And if, as he suggests, marriage and romantic love is the real ascent to Spirit, how are we to account for a world in which it is inaccessible to so many, and are we to regard the old saints as simply deluded in thinking it specially denied to them?19
This raises the question as to why Lewis included himself – which he did – among those who cannot marry. He probably felt that marriage was ruled out because of his promise to Paddy Moore that, in the event of Paddy’s death, he would look after his mother and sister. Despite this promise, the present domestic arrangement – for which all had worked so hard, and for which Lewis had years before suffered a partial estrangement from his father – would almost certainly have terminated had he taken a wife. There is, besides this, good reason for believing that Lewis liked the arrangement he had come to with Mrs Moore. Even without the Moores, he might still have preferred to remain single, and he told Walter Hooper in 1963 that he had ‘always been a bachelor at heart’.
Shortly after reading The Angel in the House, Lewis exchanged his Bombay edition of Kipling for the complete works of Morris. He had regarded the eroticism in some of Morris’s romances as dangerous and apt to lead to sensuality, but after reading Morris’s Love is Enough, he regarded the poet in a new light. As he wrote to Greeves on 1 July 1930,
I always thought Morris the most essentially pagan of all poets … Now in Love is Enough he raises himself right out of his own world. He suddenly shows that he is at bottom aware of the real symbolical import of all the longing and even of earthly life itself. In the speeches of Love (who is the most important character) there is clear statement of eternal value (coupled with a refusal to offer you crudely personal immortality) and also, best of all, a full understanding that there is something beyond pleasure and pain. For the first (and last?) time the light of holiness shines through Morris’s romanticism, not destroying but perfecting it. Reading this has been a great experience to me: and coming on top of the Angel in the House has shown me that in my fear of the sensual cheat which lurked at the back of my old romantic days (see Dymer VII) I have aimed at too much austerity and even dishonoured love altogether. I have become a dry prig. I do hope I am not being mocked – that this is not merely the masked vanguard of a new sensuality. But I verily believe not. In this light I shall come back to Morris and all that world. I have the key now and perhaps can stand the sweetness safely.20
Arthur was, frankly, confused by this and, in replying to Lewis’s letter, assumed that Lewis, in his return from ‘austerity’, now believed that chastity in an unmarried man was not so important as he had once thought. Lewis wrote to him on 8 July 1930 making it quite clear that ‘absolute chastity’ was his goal but that he now saw that he had gone about it the wrong wa
y. He had aimed at it by means of repression and a contemptuous distrust of emotional and imaginative experiences which border on the voluptuous. The right way, he maintained, was
to keep always alive in one’s soul a certain tenderness and luxuriousness always reaching out to that of which (in my view) sex must be the copy. In other words, whether, while I was right in seeing that a copy must be different from an original, I ought … to have remembered that it must also be like it – else how would it be a copy? … The whole thing has made me feel that I have never given half enough importance to love in the sense of the affections.21
Lewis had been seriously trying to obey the will of God when, on rereading The Princess and the Goblin (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) during the spring of 1930, he was jolted into seeing how difficult this is. MacDonald’s fairy stories helped him to realize that imaginative people, such as himself, are likely to confuse the mere thinking about a duty with the actual doing it. This was especially borne home to him by the passage in The Princess and the Goblin where Curdie dreams that he has woken and then, upon really waking up, finds that he is still in bed. ‘It is so fatally easy’, he wrote to Greeves on 15 June 1930, ‘to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself – to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.’22 Lewis considered it one of his greatest mercies that he was permitted to know God for some months before he had any belief in a future life. A preoccupation with immortality can, he believed, corrupt our thoughts about Heaven and Hell – meaningless apart from the presence or absence of God – and corrupt us whenever we treat mere ‘survival’ as an end in itself. As we have seen, he became a theist in the spring of 1929, but it is not until the summer of 1930 that his letters show that he had given any thought to the possibility of there being an afterlife. What may have set him thinking was an article on ‘Death’ written by Barfield, which Lewis particularly admired because of its similarity to MacDonald’s treatment of the subject. In a letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 July 1930, Lewis, reflecting on the ‘full understanding’ that he and Greeves enjoyed and which he hoped would never be lost, went on to say:
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