1. In the last three days I rushed through Surprised by Joy, the autobiography of Lewis' conversion. To be frank, I felt a good deal of sadness about Lewis' childhood. I had never thought of Lewis as a tragic figure. But it seems to me that his childhood was quite unhappy in some key respects.
It got happier it seems in his late teens. Even happier after WW1. I suspect much happier in his 40s. But I feel like I have a better understanding of what feels to me the strange combination of cold logic and Romanticism in Lewis.
2. His mother died when he was nine, almost ten. He did not get along well with his father. His dad seems an odd bird of the sort you would meet in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Melodramatic. Twisted things. I immediately thought of an acquaintance of mine that always seemed to get things twisted in their mind, and once it was lodged, it was very difficult to dislodge.
Both Lewis' initial time at boarding school and his year at Wyvern seemed particularly bad. I was appalled at what seemed to be institutionally sanctioned bullying. Lewis also talks about what he calls "pederasty"--older boys with younger boys in the school. This was around 1910.
Beatings for bad grades on exams doesn't seem like a particularly good teaching technique. Hazing of younger students by older ones is not completely foreign to the US. I consider what happens during pledge week at many universities to be somewhat of this sort. I've even heard of bullying initiations at Christian colleges several decades ago. Unchristian nonsense.
Lewis' remarks on the pederasty were quite astounding. He paints it as one of lesser evils of Wyvern, certainly less evil than the cruelty of the place. "Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh" (109). He considered those relationships voluntary rather than forced, and the older boys, he suggested, became less cruel in those encounters. "In his unnatural love affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood [older bully] went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was 'One of the Most Important People There Are.'"
And while the love was twisted "Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity" (110). This is quite an astounding passage. He is clearly not endorsing the practice. He is more indicting the violence of the "public schools" of that day (which in England are actually what we would call private schools). And he is indicting what he considers the hypocrisy of those who rail against such things. He attributes their feelings to "nausea" and disreputableness. "The real reason for all the pother is, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law. The World will lead you to Hell, but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job" (109).
Lewis himself was heterosexual, if a bit unromantic in that sense. He mentions a tryst with a girl in what we would be our early high school (68-69). He alludes to a twenty-year period when he lived with a woman twenty years his senior (198). Probably some Freudian things going on there. It started before he was converted and perhaps he felt duty bound to remain with her thereafter, which he did until she died.
Of his comments on pederasty, he confirms the thesis I have held now for twenty-five years that the notion of an orientation or "sexuality" is relatively new in history. Even for Lewis, indeed I would say even for my mother who is 94, same-sex is something people do rather than something they are as a matter of being. Lewis says of the boys at the school, "The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them" (109).
3. But the above is not the point of the book, of course. The point of the book is to share how he came to faith.
He was raised in the church. Most were in England 1900. He mentions his mentor Kirk (chapter 9) who was an atheist and yet still dressed up for the Sabbath (139). He mentions several atheists in his journey. Lewis allows himself to be confirmed while he is still an atheist because he doesn't want to get into it with his father (161).
Lewis first got a little serious about faith at his first boarding school (33), but it mostly involved fear and duty (34, 171). Indeed, he tries so hard and fails that he somewhat burns out on it. I identified with this in my college days, the tyranny of the oughts. Thou must get up and do devotions before 8. Thou must pray longer and longer of an evening before bed. These are now easy things but not so much to a hyperactive, attention deficient 17 year old male.
At Chartres, the lower school at Wyvern, he lost his faith and became an atheist. He gives a number of causes. One was a lovely matron who introduced him to all sorts of unorthodoxies and, in the process, made him realize there was more spirituality on the market than just orthodox Christianity. Then he was all too happy to be rid of fear and duty.
Then there was classic mythology. Why should one be ridiculous and Christianity different? Then there was his pessimism, not least assisted by his father's pervasive expectation to end in ruin. "And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief" (66).
4. The title of his autobiography hints of how he came to faith. It is a kind of argument from desire. I've heard people say, "Anyone can be happy, but joy is a Christian word." I always thought that was a little sappy. But I wonder if the idea is ultimately taken from Lewis.
Lewis speaks of Joy as something distinct from happiness and pleasure. For one, in some respects you can get pleasure whenever you want. For him, however, Joy is something that comes on you unexpectedly, something you can't make happen. And Joy is not something you have but a strange paradox of a glimpse of a delight you don't have.
"The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting" (166). It is "desire, not possession." I wrote "prevenient grace" in the margin.
It seems related to the glory of the sermon "Weight of Glory" from my last post. Joy is something like a glimpse of glory. Meilaender also connected it to The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader and Reepicheek's final destination. Lewis mentions three times in his childhood that he got a vision of this Joy (16-17).
5. His return to faith began when he was receiving private tutelage at Bookham, from 1914-16. What different times, where a person might go live with a tutor to prepare for Oxford entrance exams. Lewis remembers moments of previous Joy, particularly a spark of delight toward Norse mythology he had at one point (he calls the experience "Northernness").
"Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else... does the thrill arise" (168). He becomes aware of "something other and outer." But it is "the Object, the Desirable," something "further away, more external, less subjective." The title of this chapter is "Check" as God, the "Adversary" at this point, begins to make his move toward Lewis.
A doubt arises in his atheism, a crack. "A drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism" (175). He falls under the spell of Yeats, who is a believer. "I now learned that there were people, not traditionally orthodox, who nevertheless rejected the whole Materialist philosophy out of hand" (175).
So God moves Lewis toward faith. He fears there might be "a world, behind, or around, the material world." He is drawn to "Holiness" (179).
6. After the war, Lewis came to Oxford. There God moves him one more step. First, through Henri Bergson, he becomes convinced that the universe must existent. Something has necessary existence. Then through a friend he becomes convinced that there must be something beyond the sensory world. He cannot become a behaviorist and his friend shows him this is the alternative (209). He becomes an Idealist (like most at Oxford at that time--this is the stream of Platonism I mentioned in my previous post.) He comes to believe in the existence of "the Absolute."
Chapter 14 is titled "Checkmate," where he comes "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction" back to a belief in God (229). "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" (228-29). This chapter outlines the steps from belief in the Absolute, to belief in Spirit to belief in God. "My Adversary [God] began to make His final moves" (216).
It begins with the realization that all the people he admires are Christians. First it was a fellow student. Then it dawns on him that so many of his favorite authors are believers--George MacDonald, George Herbert, Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, Milton. Next he comes to an important philosophical distinction between reality and reflection on reality. Joy is not reflection on joy. It is real.
"A desire is turned not to itself but to its object... it owes all its character to its object" (220). "Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses, the naked Other, imageless... unknown, undefined, desired" (221). This is what I am calling Lewis' Platonic ontology (and also why I don't really resonate with a lot of Lewis' philosophy). "I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought" (218).
He connects his idealism with the strand of his thought having to do with Joy. Then, since he is teaching philosophy, he connects all these strands with George Berkeley's idealism and calls the Absolute, "Spirit." He's still trying to make this Spirit impersonal. "There was, I explained, no possibility of bein in a personal relation with Him... He projected us as a dramatist projects His characters, and I could no more 'meet' Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare" (223).
A couple further things then close the loop. First, an impactful conversation on the historicity of the Gospels. An atheist friend comments on the resurrection, "Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once" (224). This really gnawed at Lewis. "I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out."
Then there was the importance of an ethic for Lewis. His "Absolute" demanded nothing. "Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived" (226). But this "Spirit" of his began to demand something of him. The dry bones of Ezekiel began to live. "My Adversary [God] waived the point... He only said, 'I am the Lord'" (227). "Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded" (228).
"A young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully" (226).
7. The final chapter is titled, "the Beginning." The previous events had only brought him to Theism. "I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation" (230). He began to go to church again, not necessarily believing in Christ but because he thought it was important to "fly one's flag" in some way (233). He actually was still turned off by the idea of churchmanship.
An intellectual search was going on. The only two religions that fit with his understanding at that point were Hinduism and Christianity (235). He had become convinced of the authenticity of the Gospels. Still, he resisted Christianity. "I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken" (237).
"When we set out [to Whipsnade] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did" (237). "I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion."
1 comment:
Well done. Doesn't completely make reading the book superfluous, but you have come close.
Thanks.
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