By Mark Ellis —
He was born in Belfast, the son of a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter. Lewis describes his parents as bookish or “clever” people. While his mother was cheerful, his father was moody, which bred in Lewis a certain distrust of emotion.
The “experiential” side of religion was unknown to Lewis during his childhood. “I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church,” he wrote in Surprised by Joy, which chronicles his spiritual journey.
His mother, Flora, passed away from cancer in 1908, when Lewis was nine years old. Her death left their home in disarray. Their father was deeply affected emotionally, causing some strain with his sons, contributing to their sense of isolation and abandonment.
It also triggered a spiritual crisis for Lewis. He had prayed fervently for her recovery, and when she died, it marked the beginning of his disillusionment with religion.
Shortly after Flora’s death, his older brother went off to an English boarding school. When the time arrived for Lewis to be shipped off himself, he likened the experience at Wynyard School to a concentration camp, run by an abusive headmaster he referred to as “Oldie.”
“I have known Oldie to enter the schoolroom after breakfast, cast his eyes round, and remark, ‘Oh, there you are, Rees, you horrid boy. If I am not too tired I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon.’
Lewis observed that one boy, “P.”, was flogged frequently, merely because he was the son of a dentist. “P. was the trained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until, toward the end of the torture, there came a noise unlike a human utterance. That peculiar croaking or rattling cry, that, and the gray faces of all the other boys, and their deathlike stillness, are among the memories I could willingly dispense with.”
The punishment the child received was for a mistake in a geometry lesson.
“If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different,” Lewis observed. (The headmaster was later found to be mentally ill.)
Lewis and the other students were taken to church twice on Sunday, but he was put off by the liturgy. “Was I not an Ulster Protestant and were not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated English atmosphere?” he wondered.
Still, he feared for his soul, and began to pray, read his Bible, and attempted to obey his conscience in a dutiful fashion.
At 13, he succumbed to his father’s influence and went through confirmation, which he regarded as one of the worst acts of his life. “I allowed myself to be prepared for confirmation, and confirmed and to make my first communion, in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation…I was acting a lie with the greatest possible solemnity.”
Joy (as Lewis viewed it) was absent from his life. He described Joy as a profound and intense longing for something transcendent, beyond the mundane experiences of everyday life. He saw it as an intense, almost painful yearning for an unknown, elusive object similar to what the Germans call “Sehnsucht,” a term meaning a wistful, yearning desire.
At this time Lewis continued his studies at Cherbourg House, a prep school for Malvern College. “At Chartres (Cherbourg) I made my first real friends. But there, too, something far more important happened to me: I ceased to be a Christian.”
He fell under the influence of Miss C., the matron of the school, who was lost in a maze of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, and other occult traditions. Gradually, Miss C. undermined the Christian underpinnings of his childhood. “Several years before I read Lucretius, I felt the force of his argument for atheism. Little by little…I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief,” he wrote.
At Malvern College, he found himself “living like so many atheists or antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”
After leaving Malvern, Lewis was tutored privately by William T. Kirkpatrick, known as “The Great Knock.” This period was crucial for his intellectual development and preparation for Oxford University.
The Great War
Although Lewis passed his exams to enter University College at Oxford, World War I interrupted his first term. Half the college was converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers. On his 19th birthday, Lewis arrived in the front-line trenches. As a Second Lieutenant, he participated in one extraordinary incident, capturing 60 German soldiers, the significance of which Lewis downplays in his book.
“How I ‘took’ about sixty prisoners – that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-gray figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up – is not worth telling, save as a joke,” he wrote.
In April, 1918, he was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers.
During his recuperation in the hospital, he read a volume of G.K. Chesterton’s essays. (Chesterton was a noted Christian author and apologist). “In reading Chesterton…I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere – ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
Following the Great War, which Lewis regarded as one of the turning points of his life, he returned to his studies at Oxford. He began to entertain the notion that there must be some great mind behind the universe. “I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos,” he reasoned.
Still, he resisted the Christian God, even regarding his position as distinct from Theism. “I suspect there was some willful blindness,” he confessed. He wanted the conveniences of Theism without believing in God. He and his friends could discuss the Absolute with ease, without it “making a nuisance of Itself.”
Like a great fisherman with a marlin on the line, God was reeling in Lewis, slowly but surely. “The great Angler played his fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue,” he wrote.
Lewis made a new friend, Nevill Coghill, in an English discussion class. “I soon had the shock of discovering that he – clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class – was a Christian.” Lewis was drawn to certain traits in Coghill, but was struck by other qualities that seemed old-fashioned: chivalry, honor, courtesy, freedom, and “gentillesse” – a French word meaning gentleness and kindness.
Christian writers like George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and George Herbert began to draw his attention, while the anti-religionists such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Gibbon, and Voltaire, suddenly seemed thin, “tinny,” lacking in depth.
New Christian friends
Then Lewis made two new Christian friends: H.V.V. Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. “Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices…I had been warned never to trust a Papist, and…never to trust a philologist (a scholar who studies language in historical and literary contexts). Tolkien was both.”
Lewis picked up Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the Christian outline of history in a way that made sense to him.
He was shocked when one of his unbelieving friends made a surprising admission. “The most hard-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,” the man said. “All the stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” (Rum thing, i.e., strange or unexpected.)
As Lewis reflected later about this period, he felt caught in the tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. “The odd thing was before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice,” he observed. “I could open the door or keep it shut…I chose to open.”
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me. (Revelation 3:20)
“I say, ‘I chose,’ yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite,” he discerned.
Convicted, a spirit of repentance fell on Lewis, as he examined his life. “I found what appalled me: a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.”
He recognized his need for God. “Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded…the demand was simply ‘All.’”
Alone in his room, Lewis dropped to his knees. The Great Fisher of Souls pulled in his catch. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling…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.”
Lewis’s perception at this point was that his conversion was to Theism, but not to Christianity. He started attending his parish church on Sundays and his college chapel on weekdays.
He ruminated on Chesterton’s Everlasting Man as he sought to land somewhere among the world’s religions. “There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarization of, these.” The more he examined Hinduism, the more he found it lacking in its historical claims.
But the more he examined the claims of Jesus Christ, the more they seemed to resonate as truth. “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myth,” he wrote. “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.
“No person was like the Person it depicted…lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.”
As Lewis got closer to accepting Jesus, he felt a spiritual battle within his soul. “As I drew near the conclusion, I felt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to Theism,” he noted.
On a sunny morning in 1931, he drove to the Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.”
Receiving Jesus as his personal Savior and Lord was not an emotional experience for Lewis. “It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
His long quest for authentic joy was now realized, but in a funny way, receded in importance to him. “The subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian,” he observed. “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.”
As Lewis discovered, his pursuit of joy and truth led to an unexpected and life-changing revelation – that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the World.
To know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
