C. S. LEWIS was born November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland. He authored over thirty books, including the popular children's fantasy stories, the Chronicles of Narnia, as well as adult science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, and Christian apologetics, among these The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Miracles, and The Four Loves. Lewis had served on the faculty of Magdalen College at Oxford University for almost thirty years when, in 1954, he accepted the professorship of medieval and Renaissance literature at Magdalen College, Cambridge University. Lewis served on the faculty there until a few months before his death on November 22, 1963, the same day that Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy died.

"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth."¹

During the middle 1920s, Clive Staples Lewis began his career as a young Oxford don teaching English and philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. His was a sought – after position in those days. Fellowships were hard to come by after the war years, with a greater number of men vying for positions. These were men who had put off university, as Lewis had done after only one term, in order to fight in World War I.

Following the war, after serving his tour as a lieutenant in the army, Lewis returned to Oxford to continue his studies. Thoroughly at home at Oxford, Lewis relished getting back into academic life. It was during this time that Lewis began his quest in earnest for what he called "joy" – a quest that was to lead him where he did not want to go.

A SCHOLAR OF DISTINCTION

Lewis began his schooling at Oxford bent on the profession of teaching after the completion of his studies. Academic life was what Lewis felt himself to be uniquely qualified and best suited for. He also enjoyed writing and poetry, even having a volume of poetry published upon his return to the university. But that interest in poetry had to be curtailed as Lewis began to read (what we would call "majoring in") both philosophy and classics at Oxford.

By the time of his final examinations, Lewis had taken a "first" in Mods (Greek and Latin literature) and a first in Greats (classics and philosophy) .One first would have been an achievement of distinction, but two was outstanding.

But at that time Lewis decided to continue his education rather than try to obtain a teaching appointment right away. He knew his possibility for a position would be greatly enhanced if he could do well in a subject that would complement his excellent background in the classics and philosophy. With this in mind, he chose to read English and soon had taken another "first," namely, first class honors in the Honor School of English Language and Literature. He also won the Chancellor's Prize for an English essay he had written. This achievement is roughly equivalent in America to that of graduating summa cum laude with a triple major in classics, philosophy, and English literature.

During his study of English literature, Lewis found himself with a growing interest in Christianity, an interest that had been rekindled both by his friends and by literature. Rekindled, because though raised in a Christian home, Lewis early became a staunch atheist.

THE FORMATION OF A YOUNG ATHEIST

Lewis's early life was a happy one, one he remembered with gratitude. He recalled it later as a time of "good parents, good food, and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in."²

However, when Jack (a nickname he carried with him from his childhood) was nine years old, his mother died and things took a turn for the worse. Shortly after her death, Lewis's father sent him and his brother Warren off to boarding school in England.

It was during this time that Lewis gave up the faith he had adopted from his parents as a boy. He began to view religion as esoteric and eventually gave it up with "the greatest relief."³

Lewis describes this period in his life as one of loss – a loss of faith, of virtue, and of simplicity (the simplicity of youth).

Ironically, it was also during this time of rejecting religion that Lewis began his quest for joy. The joy that he had once briefly experienced as a child began to return to him at this time in his life, an experience that was to be central throughout his career.

This return of joy was brought on, for the most part, by the beauty and majesty of mythology, especially Norse mythology, and all the worlds and possibilities that it created. It triggered within Lewis his romantic passion of life and of the heroic quest. (Norse mythology was an interest that would eventually help lead him to his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who also shared this interest.)

                        PURSUING THE ECHO OF JOY

Through these stories Lewis, a great lover of language and literature, would often experience the joy that had become the "supreme object of desire." Lewis described his first encounters with this joy as a child in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.

The first was a memory of a memory. He recalled a time when his brother brought his toy garden into the house. A sensation of enormous bliss came over him and with it a desire – but for what he was not sure. He knew it was not just desire for a little toy garden. But somehow it had hinted at some far-off time or place for which he longed.

The second was a time in his childhood when, in reading Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin, he became so enamored with the idea of autumn that he could hardly contain himself. Again and again he would return to the book to have that otherworldly desire reawakened within him.

The third experience he recalled came through poetry, while reading Longfellow's Saga of King Olaf. In reading one brief refrain, "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead," Lewis grasped for one brief instant a glimpse of something so intense that it defied description, except that it was "cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote."

Of these early experiences Lewis recounts:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed, I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from 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.⁴

In small but rewarding ways the beauty and majesty, the other worlds and possibilities of mythology triggered within Lewis an echo of those childhood glimpses of joy, so much so that the reading and nature of myth helped him through some difficult times at boarding school. However, even Lewis's world of myth, which gave him such delight, also began to cause difficulties for him as his devotion to the subject continued to grow.

REALISM AND MYTH COLLIDE

Lewis found that his world of poetry and myth collided with his world of rationalism. On one side stood his imagination, on the other his intellect. Almost all that Lewis loved, he believed to be imaginary. Almost all that he believed to be real was for him grim and meaningless. The only exceptions were his close friends and nature itself.

But even nature posed troubles for Lewis, who at that time was a thorough-going materialist and realist. It was puzzling to Lewis that nature at the same time could be both beautiful as well as cruel and wasteful. Rationalism offered no real joy or solace to him, but it did do one thing – it eliminated God and gave man a free hand. For this Lewis was grateful. He cherished his freedom, or what he believed to be his freedom, rather than what Christianity might hold. The horror of the Christian universe for him was that there was no exit, no way of escape; it was all boundaries, or so he thought.

Lewis had a deep-seated hatred of authority and of anyone who attempted to interfere with his life. At that time in his life, the Christian God simply represented a transcendent interferer, someone Lewis believed he was better off without.

With Lewis's passionate rejection of religion, it is a wonder that he did not become an outspoken critic of faith and belief. Lewis himself writes in his autobiography:

Looking back on my life now, I am astonished that I did not progress into the opposite orthodoxy – did not become a leftist, atheist, satiric intellectual of the type we all know so well. All the conditions seem to be present. I had hated my public school. I hated whatever I knew or imagined of the British Empire. And though I took very little notice of Morris's socialism (there were too many things in him interested me far more), continual reading of Shaw had brought it about that such embryonic political opinions as I had were vaguely socialistic. Ruskin had helped me in the same direction.

My lifelong fear of sentimentalism ought to have qualified me to become a vigorous "debunker."...I suppose that my Romanticism was destined to divide me from the orthodox intellectuals as soon as I met them; and also that a mind so little sanguine as mine about the future and about common action could only with great difficulty be made revolutionary.

Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Lancelot, and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service. At times the strain was severe, but I think this was a wholesome severity.⁵

LOVE OF LEARNING

To prepare him for university, his father took Lewis out of boarding school, which was on the whole an unpleasant experience, and set him under a private tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, who was affectionately known to Lewis as "the Great Knock." Under Kirkpatrick, Lewis flourished. His love for learning soared to new heights. He could not get enough, especially of literature. Kirkpatrick taught Lewis to think, criticize and analyze, and to write logically. Although Lewis's atheism was greatly strengthened under Kirkpatrick, he owed a tremendous debt to him. Lewis acknowledges his great debt, writing in his autobiography years later; that "my reverence [of him] to this day is undiminished.”⁶

Also during this period in his life, Lewis began a correspondence with his Irish boyhood friend, Arthur Greeves, which would last until Lewis's death. Greeves, who was a Christian, never ceased praying for his friend, nor encouraging him in the many letters they wrote over the years.

It was during this time that Greeves asked Lewis what he thought of religion. Lewis replied that it was fine, provided you were not an educated or a thinking person. Greeves patiently listened, trying to ask questions that would provoke Lewis's thinking or help him to see the inconsistencies or consequences of his reasoning.

One time Greeves asked Lewis why with such a depressing outlook he did not simply commit suicide. To this Lewis answered that even with discouraging surroundings, he was having a good time and saw no reason not to enjoy life. He did not believe, however, that his atheism absolved him of moral responsibility. He believed the basis for moral action lay in the dignity of man. Years later Lewis showed the fallacy of that very reasoning in his BBC radio addresses and eventually in his book Mere Christianity.

Writing to Greeves served as a sounding board for Lewis. Their dialogue helped him to frame and shape his own changing beliefs. Later, it was to Arthur Greeves that Lewis first acknowledged that his atheism may not be as rock solid as he believed. Although he was unaware of it at the time, his atheism was beginning to show cracks in the dike. Even as Lewis continued his preparation for Oxford under Kirkpatrick and continued to read and read, the joy became rarer and rarer.

UNLOCKING NEW IDEAS

Not long before he was to enter Oxford, Lewis picked up Phantastes by George MacDonald, which, along with other of MacDonald's works, was to have a profound impact on Lewis's thinking. Here again, literature unlocked new ideas for him, Although he did not realize it at the time, Phantastes opened to Lewis a whole new side of Romanticism, aside associated with goodness, a side Lewis would eventually realize as holiness. These works by MacDonald brought Lewis a fresh glimpse of joy. And after reading Phantastes, Lewis realized that he had "crossed a great frontier" and remarked that he did not have "the faintest notion" what he had let himself in for in buying it.

Another author who was to have a dramatic impact on Lewis was G. K Chesterton. Chesterton, like MacDonald, was a Christian, and his writings had a similar effect on Lewis. Lewis commented in his biography that he liked Chesterton for his "goodness." Not that this brought out any inclination for Lewis to be good; he was rather enjoying vice to the exclusion of virtue at the time. But he did appreciate the quality of goodness even though he saw no reason to emulate it. Of Chesterton and MacDonald he later stated,

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. 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.⁷

"NO MORE ROMANTIC DELUSIONS!"

However, upon entering Oxford after the war, Lewis determined to adopt a new outlook on life, an intellectual one that gave no quarter to sagas and romance literature or the likes of Chesterton and MacDonald. As Lewis tells it:

There was to be no more pessimism, no more self-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the resolution "of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense." And good sense meant, for me at the moment, a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all the sort of Romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life.⁸

This new perspective satisfied Lewis for a time while things were going well. But then "the sky changed" and anxiety began to creep into Lewis's seemingly intellectual stronghold.⁹

First, two of his closest friends at Oxford, A C. Harwood and Owen Barfield, had become theists. For Lewis, this was quite disturbing.

Second, Barfield's turn to theism – and eventually Christianity – created a "great war" between Lewis and his close friend.

This war led Lewis to abandon forever two elements of his own thought. The first element to be jettisoned was what Lewis called "my chronological snobbery."¹⁰

This view held that the intelligent thing to do was to uncritically accept the intellectual climate of your day under the assumption that whatever has gone out of date was, ipso facto, discredited. Lewis came to realize that for a view to be refuted, it must first be discredited. And if it was not refuted, the fact that it had gone out of fashion did not discredit it. A view's going out of fashion said nothing of its truth or falsity. With Kirkpatrick's strong emphasis on discovering truth inculcated from the past, this view was more palatable than the next one Lewis was forced to adopt.

Barfield argued that Lewis's realism.–.the view that what could be known is only knowable through the senses–was an untenable position. Barfield maintained that if moral judgments, abstract thoughts, and aesthetic experiences have any value or can lead to truth, then realism must be abandoned.

This Lewis did, adopting absolute idealism in its place. Lewis felt realism had to be abandoned because if a person believed only what he saw, then those things that he could not see, such as thoughts or values, would not exist. Lewis explained his idealism in the following words: "the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos."¹¹

ASCENDANT IDEALISM

    Lewis's idealism, although impersonal, was absolute, perhaps even Absolute‑‑a sort of "watered‑down Hegehanism," as Lewis called it But there was no belief in God here or the faith that went with it. However, here was a step toward theism, and a step toward Christianity, even though Lewis did not see that as yet. So, in one fell swoop, Lewis jettisoned both his realism and his materialism (the view that only the physical world exists) and accepted the idea that the unseen did exist. The dike was beginning to crumble.

In fact, by the time Lewis had finished the Greats at Oxford and entered his program in English literature, his interest in Christianity had been revived through the reading of English medieval literature–the literature that would eventually take him to a chair at Cambridge University. It was soon after his "first" in English that he took a number of temporary teaching posts at Oxford until he was elected to a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. An ad in The Times announcing the appointment ran as follows:

The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr. Clive Staples Lewis, MA (University College). [A Tutor might be understood best in America as an assistant professor, and as the fellowship is renewed, an associate professor.] ¹²

THOUGHT–PROVOKING FRIENDS

Along with the election to his fellowship came new friendships into Lewis's life. Two of these were J. R. R. Tolkien (author of ne Lord of the Rings trilogy) and H. V. V. "Hugo" Dyson. They became Lewis's life‑long friends, and, as Christians, they played an important role in his coming to faith.

These new friends and the pleasure of finally settling into his chosen profession gave Lewis much enjoyment in his early years at Magdalen College. He particularly cherished the beautiful surroundings where his rooms overlooked a spectacular grove of trees and beautiful deer park.

Lewis's heavy work load kept him busy his first years as a tutor. This limited both his social activity and his writing. He tutored not only students from his own college, Magdalen, but also, during at least one term a year, a group of women from another college, that of Lady Margaret Hall.

During those early years, however, writing was not completely neglected. Lewis was still very interested in poetry. In his first year as tutor, he saw his allegorical poem Dymer completed and published.

The reviews were very favorable. As one reviewer wrote in the Sunday Times, "[Lewis's] long allegorical poem Dymer is executed with a consistent craftsmanship which excites admiration even where criticism is readiest to speak.”¹³

HOUNDED BY HIS "ADVERSARY"

Even with all this success coming his way‑that of his fellowship, the company of good friends and colleagues (something which Lewis dearly loved), and the success of his writing career‑Lewis was a man of uneasy spirit. As Lewis tells it the time had come for his "Adversary [as he was wont to speak of the God he had so earnestly sought to avoid] to make His final moves."¹⁴

Lewis called them "moves" because his life seemed like a chess match in which his pieces were spread all over the board in the most disadvantageous positions. The board was set for a checkmate, with the moves of his Adversary slowly pushing Lewis into an unsettling position.

The first move was the destruction of the last vestiges of the new outlook he had adopted upon entering Oxford. Lewis, after rereading a favorite classic, came to a turning point and realized he could no longer abandon his interest in the classics, sagas, and romantic heroic quests when they surfaced within him that intense longing for joy, or for that great unknown (unknown because he was still not sure what ,it was he was longing for). He was forever hooked.

The second move was a pivotal one. Shortly after reading Samuel Alexanders Space, Time, and Deity, Lewis realized that there was a distinction between "enjoyment" and "contemplation." For Alexander this meant a difference between "enjoying," say, the act of thinking or seeing, and . "contemplating" what you are thinking about or seeing. Lewis adopted this distinction and realized it had greater consequences:

I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought. A moment later its consequences–for me quite catastrophic–began to appear. It seemed to me self‑evident that one essential property of love, hate, hope, or desire was attention to their object.... You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope's object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible. ¹⁵

In other words, there is a distinct difference between, say, the "experience of joy" and "thinking on that experience."

There is a difference between hope and thinking about hope. There is a difference between the one you love and thinking about the love itself.

Lewis saw that you could not do both at the same time. You either turn inward and thus focus on the experience–in which case you then eclipse the object that brought about the experience in the first place–or you concentrate on the very object that elicits that experience. What Lewis came to understand was that even joy was not an end in itself. He had been longing for the experience of joy, not realizing that it must be pointing to something else. The very attempt to turn inward to contemplate the experience of joy cut him off from its source. For Lewis, this new found understanding as it applied to joy was an important turning point:

This discovery flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that all my waiting and watching for joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, "This is it," had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find would be either an image (Asgard, the Westem Garden, or what not) or a quiver in the diaphragm. I should never have to bother again about these images or sensations.

I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of

joy–not the wave but the wave's imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort "It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?”¹⁶

    Even with this discovery, Lewis did not yet see any particular way that it pointed to God. In looking back on that time, Lewis found it surprising that he could have overlooked what seemed so obvious in hindsight. But this new distinction, even when coupled with his idealism, still did not open a window to God. This was to come next.

A TURN TOWARD THEISM

The turn toward theism came in the next two moves, moves that were closely related. First Lewis realized that he must begin to take his philosophy seriously. This was the result of linking his previous conclusions about joy to his idealistic philosophy. Lewis now knew that this joy was real, not just a "quiver in the diaphragm," and that it had found its source in his Absolute.

Second, Lewis had never really defined what he meant by his Absolute. And now that he had begun to teach philosophy as well as English, the need to clearly delineate his own philosophy to his students again forced him to take his philosophy seriously.

The result was that he had no idea what an absolute idealism was, and Hegel and other philosophers offered no help. At this point he made a shift to Berkeley's "God."

George Berkeley was a seventeenth century British idealistic philosopher who firmly believed in God. Lewis felt that he was being forced away from his absolute idealism because he could not draw any clear conclusions about what it meant. So he was drawn toward an idealism that made more sense, namely, Berkeley's. Here, at least, a form of God had entered the picture. Of that shift Lewis wrote:

A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody‑knows‑what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person? After all, did Hegel and Bradley [F. H.] and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's "God" do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did.¹⁷

Lewis had become a quasi–theist. He was not willing to completely accept Berkeley's God. Lewis rejected the notion of a personal God at this point and, rather than calling Him "God," preferred to call Him "Spirit," writing that "one fights for one's remaining comforts."¹⁸

The final move came shortly after Lewis read G. K Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, from which he, for the first time, saw the whole Christian outline of history in a way that made sense. Although, as disturbing as that was to Lewis, it was not nearly as disturbing as the discovery he made when he entertained a man Lewis considered the hardest–boiled atheist he'd ever known (a man whose name Lewis does not reveal in his autobiography).

Seated across from Lewis in his room, on the other side of the fire, this atheist crushed Lewis when he remarked what good evidence there seemed to be for the historicity of the Gospels. He commented to Lewis, "Rum thing. All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once." Lewis's reaction was one of astonishment and discouragement:

    To understand the shattering impact of it you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of toughs, were not–as I would still have put it–"safe," where could I turn? Was there no escape?¹⁹

Now God was closing in on Lewis. He gradually became aware that God was of offering him a free choice, a choice that for Lewis was strangely unemotional. He felt moved by neither desires nor fears. He knew the choice was his, to open the door a crack and consider God's existence.

THE RELUCTANT CONVERT

This he finally did, and in doing so realized that he was surrounded by theists. For Lewis, nearly everyone was now in the "pack" including Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, and "joy" itself.  The metaphor Lewis used was of a pack of hounds who were now chasing him, "the fox," who, "had been dislodged from the Hegelian Wood" [i.e., Lewis had been chased away from Hegel's inscrutable absolute spirit, which made no sense, toward God].²⁰

He continued to wrestle with his own philosophy, ultimately coming to understand that idealism cannot be lived, that its spirit is not personal. An impersonal spirit cannot be prayed to.

Lewis now realized that his Adversary was not some impersonal spirit; rather, He was claiming, "I am the Lord"; "I am that I am"; "I am." Of that revelation Lewis wrote,

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about "man's search for God." To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat. ²¹

That response was a reflection of Lewis's lifelong concern not to be interfered with, of the fact that he wanted to call his soul his own. Yet as he clung to his freedom, God closed in on him. Here, taken from his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he recounts how it happened.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, 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. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can but duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. ²²

IS CHRISTIANITY THE ONLY WAY?

Lewis's conversion, as he called it, was only to theism and not to Christianity. At this stage, he knew very little about the Incarnation or of a future life. The God to whom Lewis had yielded was utterly nonhuman, though He was personal. It had been a difficult surrender for Lewis to admit God's existence, to no longer keep Him at bay. The question now before him was one of understanding; namely, to understand more of God and what was true of Him.

Shortly after his conversion, Lewis began to attend church on Sundays and his college chapel on weekdays. Lewis did this not out of any special devotion to the church; he simply believed that a person should publicly acknowledge his decisions in some way. He simply chose church because he did not believe at the time it made much difference where he went. In fact Lewis was not in the least ecclesiastical. The public aspect of church‑going was not something he relished.

However, one practical result of this was that Lewis began reading the Gospel of John in Greek. This began a practice of daily Bible reading that Lewis continued for the rest of his life. through reading the Gospels, Lewis began to get a more rounded picture of Christ and Christianity.

Lewis began to debate and argue Christianity with his closer friends, such as Tolkien, Barfield, and Dyson. But he said very little of his change to friends of his undergraduate days with the exception of A.K. Hamilton Jenkin and his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves. To them he said he was not precisely "Christian," though he admitted by then that he might yet become one. Instead, he said that whereas once he would have said, "Shall I adopt Christianity?" he was at a point of waiting to see whether it would adopt him. That is, he had recognized that he wasn't the only party in the affair as he had once supposed himself to be.

In a letter to Arthur Greeves, with whom he kept up a steady correspondence, he wrote of a time with his brother, Warren, who was also his close friend and was at that time an officer in the army at home on leave. He said that Warren

... has been with us all the month here.

... He and I even went together to Church twice: and–will you believe it–he said to me in conversation that he was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true. Mind you (like me, at first), he didn't want it to be, nor like it: but his intellect is beginning to revolt from the semi‑scientific assumptions we all grew up in, and the other explanation of the world seems to him daily more probable. ²³

THE TASTE OF TRUTH, NOT MYTH

Those letters are indicative of the change that had been slowly taking place in Lewis's thinking. Lewis had considered other religions besides Christianity as the possible expression of theism. But after sorting out what he called the perplexing multiplicity of religions, he concluded that there were only two possible answers: Hinduism or Christianity. Of these two Lewis further stated:

Everything else was either a preparation for, or else ... a vulgarization of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralized and philosophical maturity of paganism as a mere oil‑and‑water coexistence of philosophy side by side with paganism unpurged; the Brahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away, temple prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity.

And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion‑those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the pagan world around them‑was precisely the matter of the great myths. 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. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it

And no person was Eke the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable (ten times more so than Eckermann's Goethe or Lockhart' s Scott), yet also luminous, 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. ²⁴

The final transition for Lewis was almost in place. As he approached his conclusion, a resistance toward Christianity sprang up, almost as strong as his previous resistance toward theism.

Finally one evening, Lewis chose to dine with Tolkien and Dyson at Magdalen. Myth and resurrection were fresh on his mind. As the evening's conversation wore on, Lewis began to more clearly understand both the nature and purpose of Christianity. After dinner they took a stroll up Addison's Walk toward Lewis's room where they stayed and talked until 3:00 a.m., when Tolkien had to leave. Walking around the grounds at Oxford, Lewis and Dyson continued their conversation for another hour.

FEARS FINALLY BURIED

Some eight days later, Lewis and his brother, Warren, took a trip to Whipsnade Zoo. Of that trip Lewis writes in his autobiography:

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 joumey 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.²⁵

Just a few days afterward, Lewis closed out a longer letter to Arthur Greeves with the fresh news, "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.²⁶

The long and difficult journey had finally ended for Lewis. His fears were finally dislodged and buried and his life forever changed. In the end, his coming to Christianity was not as dramatic as his conversion to God, but the results were just as final. For purpose had now entered Lewis's life in the form of knowing and obeying God. The fruit of this purpose was to be most noticeable in his future writing.

                         BEYOND JOY

But what had become of joy, that unknown that Lewis had so long been seeking? Upon his conversion to theism, Lewis wrote that be did not know if he would have to give up any desire he might have for it. He believed that for all be knew God might have called for the total rejection of what he called joy. Lewis bad no idea at the time of any connection between God and joy, or that ultimately it was God who had truly been the source of all that he had called joy.

After becoming a Christian, Lewis said the subject lost nearly all interest for him, although the experience had not passed away. He wrote:

The old stab, the old bittersweet has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While the other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, "Look!" The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. ²⁷

Lewis had, indeed, found the road and was about to begin a whole new journey–a journey that would eventually find its way to, and beyond, what Lewis liked to call “The Shadow–Lands" in The Last Battle, his final book of The Chronicles of Narnia. In this book Lewis tells where this final journey will ultimately take him. A journey that really began as a quest for joy by a young atheist, who chose to follow the signposts along the way.

Aslan turned to them and said: ". . . you are–as you use to call it in the Shadow–Land– dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

... And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. ²⁸