Addison’s Walk

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

— John 1:14, KJV

A Theist in Church

For more than a year after his surrender, Lewis lived as a theist. He prayed, he went to church, he read the Gospels, and he tried to obey his conscience. What he could not do was believe in Christ. The doctrines of the Christian faith, the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection, seemed to him at best puzzling and at worst meaningless. He could not see how the death of a man in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago could have anything to do with him now. Above all he could not understand the doctrine of the atonement: in what sense could the death of one man take away the sins of another?

In his letters to Arthur Greeves, now a believer of a gentle and rather uncertain kind, Lewis discussed these questions honestly. He also began to discuss them with his friends at Oxford. He was, in his own way, still looking. But this time he was looking in the right direction, and he was no longer running away.

The Night of 19 September 1931

On Saturday 19 September 1931, Lewis invited two friends to dine with him at Magdalen. One was Tolkien. The other was Hugo Dyson, a lecturer in English at the University of Reading, a quick, witty, exuberant man and a Christian. After dinner the three went out into the night and walked along Addison’s Walk, the path beside the Cherwell that runs around the water meadow behind the college. They talked for hours. The subject was myth.

What they said was reconstructed afterwards from Lewis’s letters to Greeves and from a poem Tolkien later wrote about the conversation. Lewis loved myths. He loved the old stories of Balder, of Adonis, of Osiris, of the god who dies and comes back to life, and when he met them in pagan literature they moved him profoundly. He did not ask what they meant. He felt their meaning without being able to put it into words. But when he met the same pattern in the Gospels, he demanded explanations, and the explanations he was offered seemed thin.

Tolkien and Dyson turned this around. Why, they asked, should Lewis not approach the story of Christ in the same way he approached the pagan myths, letting it move him and mean something to him before he could explain it? And then they made the decisive point. The story of Christ, they said, was a myth like the others, with all their power and beauty, but with one immense difference: it had really happened. The dying and rising God had come, in history, at a particular time and in a particular place, under a particular Roman governor, and the pagan stories had been dim anticipations of the true one. God had told the story not in words but in events. The myth had become fact.

Lewis listened, argued, and listened again. At about three in the morning Tolkien went home. Lewis and Dyson walked on and talked until nearly four.

The Ride to Whipsnade

Lewis did not become a Christian that night. But the conversation had removed the barrier that had stood between him and faith. He had understood that he could approach the Gospels as he approached the myths he loved, and that their meaning did not depend on his being able to explain it all in advance.

Nine days later, on Monday 28 September 1931, Warnie drove Jack to Whipsnade Zoo, which had opened in Bedfordshire that year. Warnie was on leave from the army, and he had a motorcycle with a sidecar. It was a sunny morning. Jack sat in the sidecar. What happened on the journey was not the result of a new argument, or even of conscious thought. As he put it in Surprised by Joy: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” He compared it to waking: one becomes aware that one is already awake, without remembering the moment it happened.

This book follows the date most biographers give for the ride, 28 September, which fits the dates of Lewis’s letters. One or two accounts give an earlier day the same month. Like the question of 1929 or 1930, it changes the timing and not the story.

The Letters to Arthur

On 1 October 1931 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves. He told him, quite simply, that he now believed not only in God but in Christ, and that his long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had had a great deal to do with it. A few weeks later he wrote again, at much greater length, explaining what had changed. He had come to see the story of Christ as a true myth, and to see that the doctrines the church drew from it were human attempts to translate into concepts what God had already expressed in a more real language, in actual events. He did not yet understand everything. He was certain only that he believed.

Warnie, Too

There was a second conversion in the family that year, and it is sometimes forgotten. Warnie, who had drifted away from faith much as Jack had, though with less philosophy, had been making his own quiet way back. In the spring of 1931, while serving with the army in England, he began to pray again and found that he believed. By the end of that year both brothers were believers again, and from then on they shared the faith as they had shared everything else since the nursery. When Warnie came home for good, the brothers worshipped together at Holy Trinity.

Christmas Day 1931

On Christmas Day 1931, Lewis took Communion at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, the parish church near the house where the household had moved the year before. It was his first Communion since the miserable confirmation of 1914. This time he believed. He remained a faithful communicant of the Church of England for the rest of his life, and he was buried in that same churchyard.

The Word Made Flesh

The verse at the head of this chapter is the heart of what Lewis came to believe on Addison’s Walk. The Word, the eternal reason and meaning of the universe, did not remain an idea. He became flesh, and he lived among us, and he was seen. For a man who had spent his life loving stories of gods and doubting that any of them were true, it was the most astonishing news in the world. All his longings, all his love of myth, all his rigour of mind, were not contradicted by the Gospel but fulfilled in it. Lewis spent the rest of his life trying to tell others what he had seen that night. The companion volume to this book describes how he told it. This book records simply that, at thirty-two, in a sidecar on the road to a zoo, he came home.