C. S. Lewis: The Boy Who Learned to Argue

In September 1914, a month after the First World War broke out, a fifteen-year-old boy from Belfast stepped off a train at Great Bookham, a village in Surrey, south of London. He had been sent there to be taught by a private tutor, because his school had made him so miserable that even his father could see something had to change. The tutor was waiting on the platform: a tall, lean old man with side whiskers, shabby clothes and a voice that carried.

The boy’s name was Clive Staples Lewis, though he had refused to answer to Clive since he was tiny, and everyone who loved him called him Jack. The tutor was William Kirkpatrick, who had once been headmaster to Jack’s father. As they walked from the station, Jack tried to make polite conversation, the kind of thing a nervous boy says to fill a silence. He remarked that the Surrey countryside was wilder than he had expected.

Kirkpatrick stopped him. What, he wanted to know, did Jack mean by “wild”? And what grounds did he have for expecting anything else? Had he studied maps of the area? Read about it? Seen photographs? Jack had to admit he had done none of those things. Then, said Kirkpatrick in effect, he had no right to an opinion on the subject at all.

That is how Lewis told the story forty years later, and he told it with delight. Many boys would have been crushed. Jack was thrilled: for the first time in his life a grown man was taking his words seriously enough to test them.

Kirkpatrick was an atheist who simply assumed that no clear-thinking person could believe in God. Jack, by the time he got off that train, was an atheist too. He had quietly stopped believing a year or two before, at school, and had told almost no one. Now he would spend two and a half years with a man who taught him to argue better than almost anyone alive. He thought the argument about God was over.

It was not. It would take seventeen more years, and it would end in a direction neither of them expected.

A Prayer That Did Not Work

Jack Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, in the north of Ireland, a city of shipyards and linen mills. His father, Albert, was a solicitor in the police courts: clever, emotional, fond of long words, and anxious. His mother, Flora, was quiet, funny and unusually well educated; she had a university degree in mathematics and logic at a time when very few women anywhere went to university. His best friend was his older brother, Warren, called Warnie, and the family lived in a big, draughty house called Little Lea, crowded with books.

The family went to church, and Jack said his prayers, but he took God for granted, the way he took the house for granted.

Then, early in 1908, his mother was found to have cancer. She was operated on at home, as was common then, and for a while seemed to recover. In the summer the illness came back. The two boys were kept out of the sickroom, frightened and mostly uninformed.

Jack prayed. He had been told that God answers prayer, and he believed it. He prayed that his mother would get well. She died on 23 August 1908, aged forty-six. Then he prayed that she would come back to life. Nothing happened.

It would be easy to say that this was the moment Jack lost his faith, and plenty of people have said it. Lewis himself was more careful. Looking back nearly fifty years later, he thought that as a boy he had been treating God less as someone to love and more as a kind of magician: someone who would perform the trick, and then could be thanked and forgotten. When the trick did not happen, he was not so much shattered as left with nothing. But he believed the disappointment laid a foundation for what came later.

His father, who lost his own father and a brother in the same year as his wife, became for a time almost a stranger, given to outbursts of grief and temper. Less than a month after the funeral, Albert sent both boys across the Irish Sea to a boarding school in England. Jack and Warnie drew close to each other and away from their father, and began a habit of keeping their real thoughts hidden that lasted for years.

How a Faith Slips Away

The school, Wynyard, in the town of Watford, was a terrible one. Its headmaster beat the boys freely and taught them almost nothing, and he was later declared insane. And yet it was while he was at Wynyard, of all places, that Jack was taken to a church where the faith was preached as if it really mattered. For a while he prayed seriously and read his Bible.

Wynyard closed in 1910 for lack of pupils. After a term at a school in Belfast, Jack went in 1911 to Cherbourg House, a much better preparatory school in the spa town of Malvern, in the west of England. He was happier there. He worked hard and, in 1913, won a scholarship. And somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen, there, he quietly stopped being a Christian.

There was no single dramatic moment. Looking back, Lewis named several causes, and they are not the ones people usually expect.

The first was a kind adult. The school matron, whom the boys liked, had drifted away from ordinary Christianity into a vague mixture of spiritualism and Eastern ideas, and she talked about them. She meant no harm. But to a clever, lonely boy, her talk made the plain faith he had been taught seem less solid, just one opinion among many.

The second was the way he had been trying to pray. At Wynyard he had got it into his head that a prayer did not count unless he felt the right things while saying it. So night after night he would lie awake repeating his prayers, trying to produce the proper feelings, and failing, and starting again. It became a torment. When he finally let the whole thing go, the relief was enormous. Notice that the “faith” he dropped was not really trust in God at all. It was trust in his own feelings.

The third reason went deeper and was more like a real question. At school he read the classics, the poets of ancient Greece and Rome, and his teachers treated the old gods of those poems as fables, beautiful stories that nobody had believed for two thousand years. Why, Jack asked himself, should the Christian God be any different? Nobody gave him an answer that satisfied him. And he had begun to notice how much waste and pain there is in the world. He later said that one argument weighed more with him than any other: if a good God had made the world, surely it would not be so frail and faulty. He found it put most powerfully in the Roman poet Lucretius.

That is a serious question, and Lewis never pretended it was not. Much later he wrote a whole book, The Problem of Pain, wrestling with it. But he was also honest enough to admit something uncomfortable about his teenage self. Not all of his reasons were reasons. Part of him, he said, simply wanted to be left alone: not to be interfered with, not to have anyone, even God, with a claim on his life. Atheism suited that part of him very well.

So he stopped believing, and told nobody. He kept going to school chapel because it was expected. Inside, he was done.

Malvern and a Friend

In 1913 Jack followed Warnie to Malvern College, an expensive boarding school. Warnie had loved it; Jack hated it. The senior boys used the younger ones as servants, and everything revolved around games, at which Jack was hopeless, and around popularity and power. Lewis later wrote about it bitterly; Warnie thought his account unfair. But Jack was miserable, and his lifelong distrust of what he called the “inner ring” (the in-crowd that everyone longs to belong to) started there.

One thing never left him through all of this, and it matters for the rest of the story. Ever since he was small, Jack had been caught now and then by a sudden, piercing longing: at the sight of far-off hills, in a story, in a line of poetry. It always seemed to point beyond whatever had set it off. He later called it “Joy.” In these years it came to him most strongly through the old myths of northern Europe, the Norse stories of gods who would one day die. He did not believe in them, any more than he believed in God. But they moved him in a way nothing else did, and he could not explain why.

In the Easter holidays of 1914, back in Belfast, he went to visit a boy across the road who was ill in bed. His name was Arthur Greeves. On the bed lay a book of Norse mythology. Arthur asked whether Jack liked that kind of thing, and in a moment each discovered that the other loved exactly the same stories. They wrote to each other for nearly fifty years.

That September, Jack’s father finally gave in to his pleading letters, took him out of Malvern, and sent him to Great Bookham.

The Great Knock

The family called Kirkpatrick “the Great Knock.” He taught languages the same way he argued, and before long Jack was reading Homer’s Greek at speed.

But what Kirkpatrick really taught him was how to think. Define your words. Ask what your evidence is. Notice when someone, including you, is talking nonsense. Never say anything you cannot defend. Lewis later said those years were among the happiest of his life, and the clear, sharp way he wrote for the rest of it was learned in that house.

It also made Jack a more confident atheist. In the autumn of 1916, when he was seventeen, he wrote to Arthur, who was a believer, explaining that he believed in no religion at all. All religions, he said, were simply mythologies that human beings had made up, and Christianity was one more of them. He wrote it with all the confidence of a clever teenager who has just learned to win arguments.

But there was a crack in it, and Lewis saw it clearly later. He admitted that in these years he was living in a whirl of contradictions. He insisted that God did not exist, and at the same time he was angry with God for not existing. He was angry, too, with God for making a world like this one. You cannot really be angry at someone you are sure is not there. Part of him was still arguing with Someone.

Then there was a thing he did that he regretted for the rest of his life. In December 1914, just after he turned sixteen, he was confirmed at his family’s church in Belfast and took his first Communion. Confirmation is the service in which a young person declares in front of the church that they believe the Christian faith. Jack did not believe a word of it. He went through with it because he did not want a scene with his father, and because he could not face the argument if he refused. Later, after he became a Christian, he counted it among the worst things he had ever done: a solemn act before God, made out of cowardice.

It is worth stopping on that. Jack prided himself on honesty. And he stood in front of a congregation and said things he thought were false, to keep the peace at home. Being clever is not the same as being honest. Doubt, for him, was never only a matter of the mind. It was tangled up with fear, pride, loneliness, and a father he could not talk to.

A Book from a Station Bookstall

In March 1916, waiting for a train at Leatherhead, near Bookham, Jack bought a cheap book from the bookstall. It was Phantastes, a fairy-tale romance by George MacDonald, a Scottish writer who had once been a minister. He read it that evening.

He had no idea MacDonald was a Christian, and nothing in the book tried to argue him into anything. But it changed something. The old longing, the “Joy” that the northern myths had given him, was there in Phantastes too, but with a different feel to it: something bright, clean and good. Lewis later said that the quality he met in that book was something he could only call holiness, though at the time he did not know that was its name. He said that MacDonald had begun to work on his imagination. The rest of him, his reason and his will, would take years to follow.

It is worth knowing that the first step back toward God, for one of the great Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, was not an argument. It was a story he picked up to pass the time on a railway platform.

Nineteen in the Trenches

In December 1916 Jack won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. He arrived there in April 1917, but the war had emptied the university. As an Irishman he could not be conscripted; he chose to serve anyway. In June he joined a cadet battalion housed in Keble College, where his roommate was another young Irishman, Paddy Moore. Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, had come to Oxford to be near her son, and Jack spent many hours at her table.

At some point Jack and Paddy made a promise. If one of them was killed, the survivor would look after the other’s parent. We know about it from Paddy’s sister, Maureen, who remembered it years later, and from the way Jack lived afterwards.

Jack reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November 1917. He said very little about the war later, and never pretended he had been a hero. He tried, without complete success, to put it out of his mind. In February 1918, in hospital with trench fever, he read G. K. Chesterton for the first time and loved him, without in the least agreeing with his Christianity. Looking back, he joked that a boy determined to stay an atheist should have kept away from such books.

In March 1918 Paddy Moore was posted missing in the great German offensive. Months later, his family learned he had been killed. In April Jack was back with his battalion near the village of Mont-Bernenchon, in northern France. On 15 April 1918 a shell burst close to him, very probably a British one falling short. He was wounded in the hand, the leg and the chest, and the sergeant beside him, Harry Ayres, a steady, kind man who had looked out for his young officer, was killed. A small fragment of metal stayed in his chest for many years.

He wrote from London to his father, asking him to come. Albert did not come, that summer or that autumn. Janie Moore did.

The war did not make Jack a believer. In March 1919 he published a small book of poems, Spirits in Bondage, under a made-up name; many of them argue with a God the poet says is absent or cruel. Even as an atheist, notice, he could not stop addressing God.

What Came After

Jack went back to Oxford in January 1919, and kept his promise to Paddy. For more than thirty years he made a home with Janie Moore and her daughter, supporting them and looking after them, though for about ten of those years he hid much of it from his father. In 1925 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, teaching English literature.

The argument he thought had ended at Great Bookham started up again. His new friends were among the cleverest people he knew, and several of them were Christians, including a quiet professor named J. R. R. Tolkien. His reading kept betraying him too: Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man made Christian history make sense to him in a way he could not shake off. And Kirkpatrick’s own lessons turned on him. If our thoughts are nothing but the side effects of atoms moving in the brain, Lewis came to see, then we have no reason to trust them, including the thought that atoms are all there is. A mind trained to test every claim began to test its own atheism, and found it would not hold.

One night in his college room, Lewis gave in. He knelt and admitted that God was God. He later called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He dated it to 1929, the year his father died; biographers who have read his letters closely think it was more likely 1930. Either way, he now believed in God. He did not yet believe in Christ.

That came more slowly. He could not see how the death of one man in Palestine nineteen centuries ago could have anything to do with him. On the night of 19 September 1931, he walked and talked for hours along a riverside path at Magdalen with Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson. They talked about the old myths of a god who dies and lives again, which Jack had loved since boyhood. The story of Christ, they said, was like the myths in its power, with one immense difference: it really happened, at a real time, in a real place. A few days later, on 28 September, his brother drove him to Whipsnade Zoo on a motorcycle, Jack riding in the sidecar. Somewhere on that ride, without any new argument, he found that he believed Jesus Christ was the Son of God.

What did he believe about Jesus? That he was not a great teacher or a beautiful legend but God himself, come in person. As John put it: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (John 1:14). He believed that Christ’s death and rising again were real events, and that through them God forgives and remakes people who could not remake themselves. The longing he had called Joy, he decided, had been a signpost all along, pointing to the God who made him.

The rest of his life is famous: the wartime radio talks that became Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, the seven Chronicles of Narnia, and from 1954 a professorship at Cambridge. Late in life he married an American writer, Joy Davidman, and lost her to cancer in 1960. He died at his home near Oxford on 22 November 1963, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday.

He never stopped arguing. But he argued now as someone who knew from the inside what it was to want reasons, to be hurt, and to want to be left alone.

In Their Own Words

“When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”

— C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955)

Think It Through

1. Jack’s first “faith” was mostly about trying to feel the right things when he prayed. How is that different from trusting God? Have you ever judged your faith by your feelings?
2. Lewis admitted that some of his reasons for atheism were really wishes: he wanted not to be interfered with. Why is it hard to tell the difference between a reason and a wish, in yourself?
3. Kirkpatrick, an atheist, taught Lewis to think clearly, and that skill later helped him become a Christian. What does that suggest about whether hard questions are a danger to faith?
4. Lewis was confirmed without believing, to avoid an argument with his father. Have you ever said you believed something, or didn’t, to keep the peace? What would honesty have cost?

Read More on Ochorus

Lewis’s own books are still in copyright, but you can follow his whole life in C. S. Lewis (For Teens), which tells the story from Belfast to the end, and at greater length in Portraits of Courage – C. S. Lewis. The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis sets out what he came to believe. You can also read two of the books that helped bring him back: George MacDonald’s Phantastes, the book from the station bookstall, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. The article “The Old Books Behind C. S. Lewis” introduces more of the classics he loved, and his full biography is on his author page.