Any decent
autobiography only begins with the story of the author’s life. Sure,
there are plenty of autobiographies that tell a decent story, but only in the
same way that Kipling or Stephenson can tell a decent story. If an
autobiography is going to be worth anything, it really has got to say something.
There are many
moment in C.S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised
by Joy, that have stuck with me since the first time I read it—moments
where, in the midst of a life’s story, something was being said, and that something represented a truth far beyond the truth
or falsehood of the events surrounding them.
At some point,
Lewis, remembering (though not particularly fondly) the many years at school during
which he would have considered himself a sound and stalwart humanist—I time
spent desperately seeking to avoid falling back into the bottomless pit of
belief—observed that, “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.” Later, much along the same lines, he reminds
his reader that: “Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully.
Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.”
Now, Lewis
should understand the feelings of atheism significantly better than I, for he
experienced it, in all of inglory, from within, while the entire scope of my
knowledge comes from reading and observation. From without. I would not dare
complain, of course. While a Christian may, in fact, experience some tangible
benefit from having experienced part of his life as an atheist, he will also
have given up a perfectly good portion of time to endlessly futile pursuits. In
the same way, I think there is certainly an argument to be made for a few years
in prison as a character-building opportunity, but that doesn’t change the fact
that going there is generally a waste of one’s time.
So I do not plan
on embarking into an adventure in atheism any time soon (I am much too far gone
for that), though I am grateful for a man like Lewis, who ‘took the bullet’, as
it is said. He wasted years of his life so that I wouldn’t have to (comparisons
to Christ here may be warranted, but I can’t help but feel that Lewis would
disapprove, so I hold my tongue). He writes of time as an atheist like a spy
reporting from behind enemy lines (though, in his case, an unknowing spy).
I wrote
previously of Malcolm Muggeridge and G.K. Chesterton, each of whom experienced
their own conversions somewhat later in life, though with Lewis it is
different: He did not, as did Muggeridge and Chesterton, travel the short
distance between uncertainty (or agnosticism) and belief. Experiencing a very
nominal form of Christianity as a young man, which he quickly abandoned after
heading out on his own, he was forced to travel the almost unimaginable
difference between one firm, staunch, impenetrable belief (it would be a pity
to call atheism a “lack of belief”) and another. The two might as well have
stood on opposite sides of the universe. He is not the only Christian to have traversed
this gulf, of course, though he is perhaps the one to have described it most
beautifully (apart, one may certainly argue, from the Apostle Paul).
When Lewis writes
that “a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully,” it means something
entirely different than if I were to write the same thing, for with Lewis the
truth was borne out by experience. And yet, I very much might write something similar, for the truth is one that can,
indeed, observed: I have seen countless atheist individuals stumble over
themselves to avoid being exposed to Christian ideas, as if they were made of
poison gas, just as we have all seen atheist organizations pull out all stops
in order to stop the world from being exposed to the horrors of Christian
imagery. The attitude of atheism (and perhaps rightly so) has lately been one
of absolute quarantine—only by preventing any exposure to the beliefs and ideals
of Christians may one be made absolutely safe from them. The unwary atheist is
very apt to trip over a misplaced cross and suddenly be wracked by guilt over
his sin (I say this as if it were a joke, but in truth that is, often enough,
not far from the truth).
Well, the joke
is on them, because their attempts have never worked. The odd thing about
Christianity is that, the harder it is struggled against, the more powerful it
becomes, like a bacteria strengthened by penicillin. The Communists of the Soviet
Union understood this well enough to ban the Bible, though they failed to ban
Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, whose works are inseparable from their Christianity;
and Christianity thrived in Russia. Absolutely thrived.
The point of
this is that, in every way, it is the Christian who is free, while it is the
humanist who must guard himself with censorship. They may be called slaves of
God, but on earth they are the only ones who know freedom. Christians may read
what they like without fear of being exposed to the horrors of unbelief; they
may explore the truth in science while allowing for every possibility, while
the humanist is restricted to the tiny little box of unbelief (it is not God’s
fault that Christians often fail to understand this themselves).
Lewis, for
example, made the tragic mistake, while still an atheist, of reading Chesterton
(he was young and unprepared and did not guard his atheism as well as he,
perhaps, should have). “Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man,” he writes, “and for the first time saw the whole
Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.
Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. I already thought Chesterton
the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity.’ Now, I veritably believe,
I thought – I didn’t of course say; words
would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible
‘apart from its Christianity.’”
Reading Lewis—particularly
his allegorical novels and many of his essays—one can understand quickly what
he appreciated about Chesterton. It was the unique and astonishing tension (but
not contradiction) between the academic and the fantastic; between reason and
myth, history and poetry. It was a Christianity that could be reasonably
defended—logically, historically, scientifically—but at the same time a
Christianity that set itself as a fixture within the soul—the seat of myth and
fantasy. In Christianity, one has the freedom to look at Lewis’ Narnia books
and proclaim, without hesitation or qualification, that they ought to be seen
as works of non-fiction; that they might find a better home in the “History”
section of the library than in “Children’s Fiction”, for hidden within their
stories is a history of the world that carries far more truth than Gibbon
or Herodotus, and far deeper insight into true humanity than Kant or Descartes.
But
before he would ever come to write these books (and many others), Lewis struggled
mightily against the pull of Christianity; he felt, to use a phrase borrowed
from Francis Thompson’s poem, that he was being pursued relentlessly by the
Hound of Heaven.
Thompson
knew the struggle well:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up
vistaed hopes I sped;
And
shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
Lewis’s own story is, primarily, the
story of his flight and of his internal struggle; a fierce battle with the
truth that was welling up inside him. It is a strange thing, the atheist who is
compelled toward Christianity, for with every last gasp he will cry out that he
is only fighting to preserve truth, to preserve reason; that he is fighting, facts
against faith, when in actuality he knows (else he would not be fighting) that
they are fighting against truth
rather than for it (or there would be no struggle). Further, it is only by
faith that the atheist may to ignore the truth and remain an atheist—but only
the worst, blindest sort of faith, the sort that allows one to hold fast to
some ideal, even if a greater, truer ideal has presented itself. It is
something far different from the faith of the Christian.
Lewis’s own journey culminated, of
course, in his eventual conversion. Little by little the truth chipped away at
the walls of protection he had built up around himself, until at last they
crumbled. But it was not, as are so many superficial, temporary conversions of
today, a matter of a momentary decision, where one is stopped suddenly in their
tracks. Nor was it particularly dramatic. No, it was far too genuine for that.
“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning,”
Lewis wrote of the first moments of his new life. “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. And it was, like that moment on top
of the bus, ambiguous.”
It
is telling that Lewis should have titled his autobiography Surprised by Joy, for this is precisely the thing that can only be
understood by someone after discovering Christianity. It was, in part, an
intellectual understanding that began Lewis on his path to religion, and a
reasonable, sensible, logical sort of faith. He accepted its truth because he
realized that it was true; not, particularly, because of the good it would do
for him. Lewis would remark later that it is a grave mistake to become a
Christian believing that it will make life easier; one believes in Christ because
of His truth. That being said, what
Lewis discovered in Christianity, after the Hound of Heaven had caught up to
him after all, was that, despite the difficulties, despite the requirements,
despite being made into a servant of God, Christianity means true, lasting joy.
“I
call it joy,” he wrote, “which is here a technical term and must be sharply
distinguished from both Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has
indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that
anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and
considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a
particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt
whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power,
exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our
power and pleasure often is.”
Lewis
knew well that what he found in Christ was the same that Thompson had foreseen
as he concluded his poem, as at last God catches up to the Prodigal and offers
him a word of comfort:
“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come !”
Halts by me that footfall :
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest !
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.”
The
fundamental appeal I have felt toward Lewis’s theology, which he espoused again
and again in form after form after coming to Christianity, is similar to that
which draw me toward Chesterton and Muggeridge, and that is its devotion toward
truths that are universal; ideas that might be capable, if taken seriously, to
unite Christendom at last. It wasn’t as if Lewis wasn’t himself part of a
particular sect of Christianity (he was a devout Anglican, much to the dismay
of his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, who hoped that he would become a Catholic), but
as he wrote, he wrote of truths unquestionable. Whether in his apologetic works
(Mere Christianity stands almost
alone among 20th century explanations of God, while The Problem of Pain is a beautiful take
on a particularly vexing question), his allegorical stories (The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters,
Till We Have Faces) or his more straightforward theological works (Refletions on the Psalms, The Four Loves,
The Weight of Glory), the true beauty, the true joy, is that the truths are
primary. Lewis expresses the core principles of Christianity, without being
bogged down by sectarian nonsense.
(it
deserves note here that, as he grew in stature as a Christian writer, he
continued to hold a chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge
University; it is fair to say that today’s universities would surely never
stand for such a conflict of interests)
The
root of Lewis’s mainstream popularity is due in part to his highly accessible
works—particularly The Chronicles of Narnia,
Mere Christianity and The Screwtape
Letters. Like Chesterton, however, it is not difficult to argue that at
least part of Lewis’s longevity may be attributed to the fact that the pages he
composed are filled—at times over-filled—with
perfectly composed phrases that almost seem made to be removed and used
elsewhere (some Lewisisms, such as, “Someday you will be old enough to start
reading fairy tales again,” sounds suspiciously like something Chesterton
himself would have said). It is almost as if one could tear apart his books,
sentence by sentence, and then put them back together in a different order,
without losing the heart of his ideas. He is, in short, endlessly
quotable—enough so that one is likely to forget that the many phrases for which
he is famous are perhaps even more powerful in their original contexts.
Words,
Lewis knew, carry the potential for power greater than any wizard’s wand or
witch’s cauldron if wielded rightly. God, after all, was in no way stingy when
he chose the languages of men as a means of revelation. It was no accident that
the scripture came down to us as a book. Words are often the weakness of men—they
have a way of finding their way into the soul—and Lewis, better than most,
wielded the weapon rightly; in part, because he had come to truly understand
the lostness of man and the stark disparity between the kingdoms of God and
man.
“Indeed,” he wrote in
one of the most enduring passages from The
Weight of Glory, “if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the
staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that
Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about
with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an
ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot
imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too
easily pleased.”
Jesus Christ, in utero, is, without
question, the most popular fetus in the history of the world. Even the recent
“royal baby”, for all of the attention granted him while he was still growing
and forming in his mother’s womb, can hardly be mentioned in the same sentence.
True, while still forming he was the subject of a fair number of front page
stories and endless speculation, one can hardly expect Prince George’s birth to
ever be celebrated as an international holiday. It would take some strange sort
of madness to think that any nativity scenes will ever be replaced with ceramic
figures of a Prince and Princess, giving birth in a modern hospital,
surrounded, not by Magi or Shepherds, but by doctors, nurses, pain medication,
and, of course, the flash bulbs of the media.
