C.S. Lewis – The Priestly Professor

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 20^th 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.”