Through the month of March 2022, the HSF will publish three articles about themes in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The year 2022 marks the seventieth year since its publication in 1952. Jesse Owens will consider Lewis’s argument for a universal moral law, Chris Talbot will analyze Lewis’s argument from imagination, and Phillip Morgan will examine Lewis’s view of the virtues. In this way, these essays will touch on three key subjects of philosophy, namely aspects related to metaphysics (universals), anthropology (imagination), and ethics (virtues).
For this week’s post, the HSF is publishing an adapted version of an essay (written by me) that was first posted in November 2012. It reviews Lewis’s journey of faith from skepticism to atheism to agnosticism to theism and finally to Christianity.
We have come to celebrate Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis (1898–1963) as the author of beloved books, including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia. However, he was not always a champion for Christianity but rather, for a period, a determined atheist. How did this critic of Christianity convert into one of its most ardent defenders?
Beginnings
August 23, 1908 is a good time to begin Lewis’s faith journey, for it was upon that date his mother died from cancer. Without question, this development challenged Lewis’s conception of God.[1] Prior to her death, Lewis viewed God “merely as a magician.”[2] But upon her death, this nine-year-old boy learned that God, Whoever He was, was not the magician he believed Him to be, for He did not heal his mother.
About a month later, Lewis began his education by spending nearly two years at the Wynyard School in England. Education would play a vital role in Lewis’s faith journey. But Wynyard did not challenge his intellect as later schools would, and he found no reason to doubt God—yet. He attended church, read the Scriptures, and prayed. However, skepticism would soon mount its head.
Skepticism
By January 1911, Lewis was attending the Cherbourg House (“Chartres”), where he spent about two-and-a-half years. It was there that his “education really began.” And it was there that skepticism arose, until finally (to use his own words) he “rendered [his] private practice of that religion [Christianity] a quite intolerable burden.”[3] Instead, through the influence of books and the School Matron, Lewis became deeply interested in mythology and the occult.
Lewis would leave Chartres and begin attending Malvern College, where the seeds of skepticism continued grow. However, something else also occurred during this period too: Lewis befriended Arthur Greeves, a Christian, in April 1914. Arthur would remain “the most faithful of friends” to Lewis through his lifetime.[4] And Lewis’s eventual conversion to Christianity would result partly from Arthur’s influence.[5] The Greeves-Lewis relationship undoubtedly demonstrates the importance of Christians befriending non-Christians. However, Lewis’s conversion was still about a decade-and-a-half away.
Atheism
Lewis began attending Great Bookham Surrey that fall under the private study of William Thompson Kirkpatrick, an atheist.[6] Without question, Lewis considered him a mentor and role model. While Kirkpatrick never attacked religion in Lewis’s presence, his influence was indisputable. As Lewis would later put it, he got “fresh ammunition” for his atheism “indirectly from the tone of [Kirkpatrick’s] mind or independently from reading his books.”[7]
Gradually, Lewis’s atheism began to show its teeth: “There is absolutely no proof for any of them [religions], and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best,” wrote Lewis just two years later to Arthur, “[And] the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology.”[8] Still, God was at work—and in a unique way.
Lewis had stumbled upon what he described as “a great literary experience” this same year, 1916: George MacDonald’s novel Phantastes (1858).[9] Little did he know what effect this book would have upon him at the time, but its influence would be exceedingly important: “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized,” Lewis wrote nearly forty years later, “the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.”[10]
Lewis similarly encountered G. K. Chesterton about a year later. Again, Lewis recalls this discovery in humorous fashion: “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, 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.”[11] Just as books had previously given him ammunition for his atheism, they would eventually help deliver him from it. However, for the time being, his atheism remained in full force.
Upon finishing at Bookham, Lewis began attending University College, Oxford, in April 1917. Again, his atheism was pronounced during this period: “I believe in no God,” he confessed to Arthur.[12] Despite this pronouncement and other troubling developments, Lewis’s brother, Warren (“Warnie”), held out hope: “Lewis’s Atheism is I am sure purely academic,” he would write to their discouraged father.[13] Sure enough, Lewis’s atheism soon turned to agnosticism.
Agnosticism
By September 19, Lewis had forsaken his fierce atheism for a more tempered agnosticism. He now, in his words, found “some sort of God as the least objectionable theory.” And, consequently, he “stopped defying heaven.”[14] Just as God used books and authors in Lewis’s faith journey, He also used friends.
We have already noted Arthur. Another important friend was a schoolmate, Nevill Coghill. In Lewis’s words, “I soon had the shock of discovering that he—clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class—was a Christian and a thorough-going supernaturalist.”[15]
By 1926, at which point Lewis had begun his teaching career at Oxford, he forged two other important friendships: Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien, both Christians. Lewis humorously recounted later, “[T]hese queer people [Christians] seemed now to pop up on every side.”[16] Still, it would be another five years before his conversion to Christianity.
Theism
By now, God had placed a sufficient support system around Lewis through books and friends to lead him to salvation. By 1929 Lewis converted from agnosticism to theism—though not yet to Christianity. This change occurred upon reading Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. And though he believed “that Christianity itself was very sensible,” he did not yet convert but simply “admitted that God was God.”[17]
In other words, Lewis believed in God but not yet in Christ. Lewis’s reluctance concerning Christianity was still clear. Writing to Arthur in January 1930, he charged, “In spite of all my recent changes of view, I am still inclined to think that you can only get what you call ‘Christ’ out of the Gospels by picking & choosing, & slurring over a good deal.”[18]
Even so, Lewis recognized that his conversion to Christianity was just around the corner. Just two months later, Lewis remarked 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.”[19] Sure enough, Christianity would get the better of him, eventually.
Christianity
Meanwhile, Lewis still struggled to accept Christianity. No longer was his difficulty a misconception about God or misplaced intellectual sophistication. Instead, it was something far more basic. “I think the trouble with me is lack of faith,” Lewis admitted to Arthur in December 1930, “when I pray I wonder if am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so—the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so.”[20] Intellectually, Lewis had no problem with Christianity. But some other part of him did.
The fateful day came about nine months later. Lewis recalls an evening in September 1931 on which he stayed up until 3 a.m., talking with Dyson and Tolkien about everything from myth to Christianity to poetry. Then, about a week later, on September 28, 1931, Lewis and Warnie visited a zoo. Lewis recalls the trip: “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. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”[21]
Several days later, Lewis made this confession to Arthur: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.”[22]
Conclusion
Most of us are familiar with Lewis’s profound influence for Christianity. Over the next several decades, he authored dozens of works on everything from apologetics to theology to science fiction to fantasy to poetry. These books have sold into the hundreds of millions, many of them even being adapted for radio, television, stage, and film production. For the following month, members of the HSF will consider just one of those works: Mere Christianity.
Selected Bibliography of Lewis’s Works
The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933)
The Problem of Pain (1940)
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The Abolition of Man (1943)
The Space Trilogy (1938, 1943, 1945)
The Great Divorce (1945)
Miracles (1947)
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)
Mere Christianity (1952)
Surprised By Joy (1955)
Till We Have Faces (1956)
The Four Loves (1960)
A Grief Observed (1961)
[1] So profound was Flora’s death for Lewis that we see autobiographical glimpses of this period in The Magician’s Nephew (1955), whose protagonist Digory Kirke also struggles with a dying mother.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando: Harvest, 1955), 21.
[3] Ibid., 58, 61.
[4] “Lewis Papers” or “Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930,” vol. 11, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (Volume I): Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 993.
[5] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 995.
[6] So influential was this instructor upon Lewis that he based at least two characters on him in his later writings: (1) Digory Kirke in The Magician’s Nephew (1955), later Professor Kirke in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950); and (2) Mr. MacPhee in The Dark Tower (1977) and That Hideous Strength (1945).
[7] Surprised By Joy, 140.
[8] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 230, 234.
[9] Ibid., 169.
[10] Surprised By Joy, 181.
[11] Ibid., 191.
[12] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 379.
[13] Ibid., 443n44.
[14] Ibid., 509.
[15] Surprised By Joy, 212.
[16] Ibid., 216.
[17] Ibid., 223, 227.
[18] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 862.
[19] Ibid., 887.
[20] Ibid., 944–45 (italics in original).
[21] Surprised By Joy, 237.
[22] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 974.
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