C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 16
28 September 1931: Lewis comes to believe in the divinity of Christ while being driven to Whipsnade Zoo.
1 October 1931: Lewis tells Arthur Greeves that he has “passed over” from belief in God to belief in Christ.
15–29 August 1932: Lewis describes his intellectual journey to God in The Pilgrim’s Regress, written at this time in Belfast.
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:
March–June 1930: Lewis comes to believe in God.
19 September 1931: A conversation with Tolkien leads Lewis to realise that Christianity is a “true myth.”
28 September 1931: Lewis comes to believe in the divinity of Christ while being driven to Whipsnade Zoo.
1 October 1931: Lewis tells Arthur Greeves that he has “passed over” from belief in God to belief in Christ.
15–29 August 1932: Lewis describes his intellectual journey to God in The Pilgrim’s Regress, written at this time in Belfast.
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 . . . e
ver 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