Hunted

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”

— Psalm 139:7, KJV

The Defences Fall

When Lewis told the story of his conversion in Surprised by Joy, he did not describe it as a search. He described it as a pursuit, with himself as the quarry. Through the second half of the 1920s, he said, his defences fell one by one, and each time he retreated to a new position, he found that it too was untenable. It is worth following the retreat, briefly, because it shows the kind of man he was.

He had begun the decade as a materialist, believing that nothing existed but matter and energy. His philosophy studies, and his long arguments with Barfield, persuaded him that this view could not account for reason itself, for if our thoughts were only the by-products of atoms in motion, there was no reason to trust them, including the thought that materialism was true. So he became a kind of idealist, believing in an Absolute Mind behind the universe, but a mind that made no demands and could not be prayed to. That was comfortable. It asked nothing of him.

Then the Absolute began to look less like a philosopher’s abstraction and more like a Person. His reading kept betraying him. He read George Herbert and found that Herbert seemed to understand life better than any modern writer, and that the understanding came through his faith. He read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, and found for the first time an outline of history from a Christian point of view that made sense. He reread the old poets and found that the ones he loved most were Christians, and the ones who agreed with him seemed thin.

The Hardest Atheist

Early in 1926 there was an evening Lewis never forgot. One of the most hard-headed men he knew, a philosopher and atheist named T. D. Weldon, sat in his rooms and remarked, almost grudgingly, that the historical evidence for the Gospels was surprisingly good, and that the old pagan stories of a god who dies and rises again looked, oddly, as if they might once have come true. Lewis was shaken. If even this man could not keep the door shut, he wondered where he himself could hide.

The Date

At last, by Lewis’s own account, he gave in. He placed the moment in the Trinity term, the summer term, of 1929. He was alone in his room in Magdalen. For weeks he had known that he could not hold out much longer. And one night he stopped resisting. He knelt and prayed, admitting that God was God. He described himself, in a phrase that has become famous, as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

The phrase is from Surprised by Joy, chapter fourteen. So is the date, and here the biographers have found a difficulty. Alister McGrath, reading through Lewis’s letters of 1929 and 1930 in order, noticed that there is no sign in them of a change in 1929. Lewis wrote to his friends about his reading, his father, his work, as before. But in the letters of 1930 there are clear signs that something had happened: references to going to college chapel, to a new seriousness about religion, and to reading devotional books. McGrath concluded that Lewis had misremembered the year, writing about it twenty-five years later, and that the moment of surrender came in the summer of 1930. Most Lewis scholars have since accepted this, though some still defend the date Lewis gave. This book follows the majority view while noting the other. It does not change the story, only its timing.

Albert’s Death

The redating matters for one reason above all. It means that Lewis came to belief in God not before but after the death of his father.

In the summer of 1929 Albert Lewis fell ill. Jack went home to Belfast in August to be with him. Doctors found cancer. Through August and into September Jack sat with his father at Little Lea, and the long hours together seem to have softened some of the old bitterness. In the third week of September, when Albert seemed steady and the doctors saw no immediate danger, Jack returned to Oxford for the start of term. Within days a telegram summoned him back. He crossed at once, but he arrived too late. Albert had died on 25 September 1929.

Lewis was overwhelmed with grief and with guilt. He had spent ten years deceiving his father, mocking him behind his back and keeping him at arm’s length. Now there was nothing more to be done. Some of the most unguarded words he ever wrote, in letters to friends in the months that followed, are about his father: about Albert’s courage in his last illness, about his own coldness, about how impossible it was to set things right. If McGrath is correct about the date, this grief was part of the ground on which, a few months later, Lewis knelt down. A man who had behaved badly to his earthly father and could no longer make amends found himself on his knees before another Father.

Not Yet a Christian

It is important to see what Lewis’s surrender was, and what it was not. He believed in God. He did not yet believe in Christ. He had become what he called a theist: one who believes in a Creator, owes him obedience, and has no idea what else to say about him. It was a cold and joyless conversion, by his own description, and he expected nothing from it but duty.

He did what he thought a theist ought to do. He began to go to his parish church on Sundays and to college chapel on weekdays. He did not much enjoy it. He disliked hymns, which he thought were mostly bad poetry badly sung, and he disliked the sense of being a public convert. He went anyway, because he thought that if he believed in God he ought to show it by attending the worship of God, and because the church was the only place where that worship was offered. It was, in its way, an act of obedience before faith. Lewis later thought that it was one of the wisest things he ever did.

No Escape

The psalm at the head of this chapter asks where one could go to escape God, and answers that there is nowhere. Heaven, hell, the uttermost parts of the sea and the darkness itself are all full of him. Lewis knew that psalm. In the 1920s he had tried, with all his intelligence, to find a place where God was not. He had tried materialism and idealism and the cool detachment of the scholar. Each time, he found that God was there already. In the end he stopped running, not because he had found a better argument, but because he had been cornered. It was the beginning, not the end, of his conversion. But it was the beginning.