Schools, and a Faith Let Go

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

— Psalm 14:1, KJV

Campbell and Cherbourg

Wynyard closed in the summer of 1910 for want of pupils, and for one term that autumn Jack went to Campbell College in Belfast, a mile or so from home. He liked being near Little Lea, but he was ill with a chest complaint and Albert took him away before Christmas. In January 1911 he was sent back to England, to a preparatory school called Cherbourg House in the spa town of Malvern, in Worcestershire. Warnie was by then a pupil at Malvern College, the public school on the hill above it, so the brothers were again within reach of each other.

Cherbourg was a far better school than Wynyard, and Jack spent two and a half years there. He worked hard, read widely and in 1913 won a classical scholarship to Malvern College. But it was at Cherbourg, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, that he quietly ceased to be a Christian. He gave several reasons for it, looking back, and none of them was dramatic.

How the Faith Went

One reason was a kind and sympathetic matron, whom Lewis later wrote of with real affection. She had drifted away from conventional Christianity into a vague world of spiritualism and theosophy, and she talked about it to the boys. She did not set out to unsettle anyone. But to a clever, lonely boy, her talk had the effect of loosening the outlines of the faith he had been taught. If there were many paths and many mysteries, the plain creed of St Mark’s, Dundela, seemed less solid than before.

A second reason was the way he had been trying to pray. At Wynyard he had become anxious about his prayers. He thought that a prayer did not count unless he felt the right things while saying it, and he would lie awake night after night, saying his prayers over and over, trying to produce the proper feelings and never succeeding. It became a torment. Lewis later thought that this false and scrupulous religion, which put the weight on his own inner state rather than on God, made the faith a burden he was glad to put down. When he did put it down, the relief was enormous.

A third reason went deeper. Even as a boy he was struck by the waste, cruelty and indifference of the universe. He read the ancient poets and noticed that their gods were treated as fables by every modern scholar, and he could see no reason why the God of the Christians should be treated differently. Why should Christianity alone be true, out of all the religions of the world? No one he knew could give him an answer that satisfied him, and he did not much want one.

So, without fuss and without telling anyone, he stopped believing. There was no crisis. There was simply the end of something that had never been very strong. He went on saying his prayers in public and going to chapel, because that was expected. Inwardly, he was finished with it.

Malvern College

In September 1913 Jack followed Warnie to Malvern College. Warnie had loved the place. Jack hated it from the first week. Malvern, like most English public schools of the time, was ruled by the senior boys, the athletes and prefects who were called the Bloods. Junior boys were their servants. They cleaned shoes, carried messages and ran errands at all hours. The school worshipped games, at which Jack was useless. He also hated what he saw of its moral life: the snobbery, the social climbing, and a pervasive culture of sexual favouritism among the boys, which he wrote about frankly forty years later.

Lewis’s account of Malvern in Surprised by Joy is very bitter, and Warnie, reading it, thought it unjust. The truth probably lies between them. Jack was a shy, clever, bookish boy who did not fit, and he was miserable. He was exhausted by the fagging, he slept badly, and he developed a lasting contempt for the whole system of popularity and power. Lewis’s later preoccupation with pride, with the desire to belong to an inner ring, and with the misery of trying to keep up with the right people, all have roots in that year. He would write and preach about such things as a grown man, and those who heard him knew that he was speaking from experience.

There were consolations. Malvern had a good library, and a master named Harry Wakelyn Smith, whom the boys called Smewgy, who taught the classics with a love of poetry that Jack never forgot. And in his reading he discovered the northern myths. A few years before, he had come upon a picture and a few lines about the death of the Norse god Balder, and the old longing had flooded back. Now he read everything he could find about the gods of the north: the sagas, Wagner’s operas in summary, the stories of Asgard and Valhalla. He found in them a beauty he did not find in the religion of his childhood.

Arthur Greeves

During the Easter holidays of 1914, at Little Lea, Jack met a boy from the house across the road who was ill in bed. His name was Arthur Greeves. He was three years older than Jack, the son of a well-to-do Belfast family of Plymouth Brethren background, gentle, artistic and often in poor health. Jack had known him slightly and never thought much of him. Then he saw a book on Arthur’s bed. It was a book of Norse mythology. Arthur asked whether Jack liked it. Jack said that he did. And in a moment, as Lewis remembered it, each discovered that the other loved exactly the same things.

It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Lewis died. For nearly fifty years the two wrote to each other, and Lewis told Arthur things that he told no one else: his doubts, his reading, his temptations, and, years later, the stages of his conversion. Arthur was a Christian, though for some years an uncertain one, and Jack teased him for it. He could not have guessed that the letters he was writing would one day be read by scholars as the most intimate record of his long road back to God.

What the Psalm Says

The verse at the head of this chapter is blunt. In the language of the Psalms the fool is not a person of low intelligence but one who lives as though God were not there. By any worldly measure Jack Lewis was not a fool. He was one of the cleverest boys in the British Isles. But at fourteen he had decided in his heart that there was no God, and he would spend the next sixteen years living by that decision. Lewis himself would later have agreed with the psalm’s verdict. He thought that unbelief was rarely a matter of reasoning alone. It was a matter of the heart, and his own heart, at Cherbourg and Malvern, had wanted very much to be left alone.