The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis

Alister E. McGrath

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780470672792, 9780470672808
• eBook ISBN: 9781118503188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Marking the 50th anniversary of Lewis' death, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis sees leading Christian thinker Alister McGrath offering a fresh approach to understanding the key themes at the centre of Lewis' theological work and intellectual development.

• Brings together a collection of original essays exploring important themes within Lewis' work, offering new connections and insights into his theology
• Throws new light on subjects including Lewis' intellectual development, the uses of images in literature and theology, the place of myth in modern thought, the role of the imagination in making sense of the world, the celebrated 'argument from desire', and Lewis' place as an Anglican thinker and a Christian theologian
• Written by Alister McGrath, one of the world's leading Christian thinkers and authors; this exceptional pairing of McGrath and Lewis brings together the work of two outstanding theologians in one volume

1

The Enigma of Autobiography: Critical Reflections on Surprised by Joy

In 1955, Lewis published Surprised by Joy, subtitled “The Shape of My Early Life.” It is one of Lewis’s most cited works, and contains some of his finest prose and most intimate reflections. No study of Lewis can fail to engage with (and, at certain critical points, depend upon) Lewis’s personal narrative of conversion. Lewis had no hesitation in referring to this “story of my conversion” as his “autobiography.”¹ But what did he mean by this? What are we, his readers, to understand by this term?

The Ambivalence of Autobiography in Lewis’s Literary Outlook

The teasing title of Lewis’s autobiography draws on the opening words of the Miltonic sonnet of the same name by the English Romantic writer William Wordsworth (1770–1850).²

Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind.

Wordsworth wrote this sonnet in the aftermath of the death of his three-year-old daughter, Catherine. On experiencing a rare moment of joy following Catherine’s death in 1812, Wordsworth found this precipitated a series of emotional traumas. His fleeting experience of delight gave way to a somber realization that the one person with whom he longed to share that joy – Catherine – was gone, followed immediately by a pang of guilt over his ability to forget her even for that brief moment.

Lewis chose to appropriate the title, rather than the substance of Wordsworth’s poem, and develops the idea of “Joy” in his own distinct way (see chapter 5). Surprised by Joy is a narrative of a human collision with divine reality, in which old ways of thinking were shattered and disrupted, and new ways of seeing opened up. Picking up on the “visionary gleam” of joy³ that so briefly intruded into Wordsworth’s grief, Lewis offers his reflections on the source of a deeper vision of Joy, rooted at one level in the yearnings of the human heart, and at another in the nature of God. For Lewis, it is God who shoots such “arrows of Joy” as a means of heightening his sense of longing, stimulating his reflection, initiating his questing, and ultimately achieving his transformation.

Surprised by Joy remains something of an enigma among Lewis’s works, not least because at first sight it seems to subvert Lewis’s own views on the significance of texts. Especially during his “Personal Heresy” controversy of the late 1930s with E. M. W. Tillyard, Lewis made his reputation by insisting that the historical and experiential worlds of an author were not of great importance; what really mattered was their writings. Writers were not themselves a spectacle; their texts were rather a set of spectacles through which the world might be viewed.⁴

The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says “look at that” and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.

Yet, by definition, an autobiography invites its readers to look at its author. In writing Surprised by Joy, Lewis would seem to be pointing his finger at himself, choosing to make himself into a spectacle.

Perhaps this helps us understand why Lewis is almost apologetic about the whole enterprise of writing the story of his conversion. It is not something he wants to do; it is something he has been asked to do. The rhetoric of self-deprecation with which the work opens is not to be seen as a false humility on Lewis’s part. It is something rather more interesting – a belief that this kind of work is, in the first place not of importance as history; and in the second, is not something he feels sits easily with his views on literature. It is possible that this helps to make sense of its other­wise puzzling tendencies to mis-remember things in their proper context.

If Lewis is true to himself, we must see this work not as something we are meant to look at, but something we are meant to look through. The poet is “not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles;” a window through which we attend to the landscape.⁵ If we follow the “pointing of his finger,” we find Lewis inviting us to attend to the “arrows of Joy” that rain down upon us, and reflect on their deeper significance. Memory, joy, and longing then become gateways to God. Perhaps we should read Surprised by Joy, not primarily as a book about the life of C. S. Lewis, but a book about life itself. Lewis’s autobiography is then to be seen as much as a reflection on the meaning of human life in general as it is on the meaning of his own life.

Perhaps the most obvious influence on Lewis at this point is G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith (1908). Although Chesterton himself dismissed this as a “slovenly autobiography,” most critics have regarded it as one of Chesterton’s finest works.⁶ Probably modeled on John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua (1864), Chesterton’s autobiography is a powerful intellectual defense of the rationality of the Christian faith, and especially its capacity to make sense of things. Christian doctrine is not something that was forcibly imposed upon reality, but is rather the key that unlocks “life’s real meaning.” The Christian faith, he argued, was to be considered as a hypothesis which, once tested, can become a means of perception, making sense of what was previously obscure. While still an atheist, Lewis had been deeply impressed by Chesterton’s Everlasting Man;⁷ his subsequent career could be seen as a gradual assumption of Chesterton’s mantle as an apologist.

Might reading Chesterton have helped Lewis to grasp the apologetic potential of a spiritual autobiography? And alert him to how a potentially self-aggrandizing literary genre might be subverted for more noble ends? Or are we to see Surprised by Joy in a more literary and cultural context, understanding it, at least in part, as Lewis’s attempt to make sense of his own identity and agency, discerning or constructing a coherent narrative within his life?⁸

Surprised by Joy is not Lewis’s only autobiographical work. Lewis’s first attempt at autobiography is found in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), where Lewis represents his understanding of his own intellectual journey to faith through a proxy – the “pilgrim,” named John. Lewis’s difficult and at times perplexing work, written in two intense weeks during August 1932, surveys and assesses the intellectual byways that he explored – and occasionally inhabited – as he sought the true goal of the longings he experienced within himself.⁹ This work of allegory, modeled only very loosely on John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century classic Pilgrim’s Progress,¹⁰ remains an important source for any understanding of Lewis’s struggle to reconcile reason and imagination, yet makes little reference to identifiable events in the external world. In many ways, it shows a preoccupation with internal mental struggles and reflections, even if this is presented in the form of an historical journey.

The third autobiographical work is A Grief Observed, written in the aftermath of the death from cancer of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman, in July 1960. This work, initially published in 1961 under the pseudonym “N. W. Clerk,” offers a raw account of Lewis’s emotions and doubts following his bereavement. Once more, the focus is on Lewis’s internal thoughts, documented without any attempt to blunt its force or soften its tone.¹¹ Lewis allowed himself to express his grief “in all its rawness and sinful reactions and follies.” Although A Grief Observed “ends with faith,” it nevertheless “raises all the blackest doubts en route.”¹² The work remains a classic account of the bereavement process, and is an important source for understanding the difficulties and pressures of Lewis’s final years.

Surprised by Joy is different. Written at a time when Lewis’s reputation as a scholar and popular Christian writer was at its height, this autobiography mingles personal historical information and theological reflection. The publication of the “Chronicles of Narnia” had generated huge interest in Lewis, both as a writer of fiction and as a Christian apologist. How, many wondered, did Lewis come to discover Christianity? Lewis presents Surprised by Joy as his response to that question.

In fact, Lewis had already begun to draft such a work much earlier. Lewis’s brother Warren noted in his diary entry for March 25, 1948, that Lewis was working on his “autobiography,” which by that stage was focusing on their Belfast childhood. Lewis’s surge in creative genius during the late 1940s and early 1950s led to the writing of the Narnia series, which both delayed the production of his autobiography on the one hand, while creating a sustained public interest in it on the other.

Lewis presents Surprised by Joy as unproblematic.¹³ Its goals are quite simple: it “aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less ‘Confessions’ like those of St. Augustine or Rousseau.”¹⁴ It is Lewis’s own account of how he ”passed from Atheism to Christianity.” Yet while this illuminates the topic of the book, it discloses little concerning its literary form, style, or approach to its topic. Lewis clearly presents himself as narrating the histoire d’une âme. But how should one tell such a story? What narrative vehicle is to be adopted? What models shaped this narration?

Augustine of Hippo: A Model for Lewis?

Although Lewis eschews any suggestion of similarity between his own Surprised by Joy and Augustine’s Confessions, written during the years 397–8, the close reader of both works is left wondering quite what Lewis meant by this statement. The parallels between the two works sometimes appear more striking than their divergences. Lewis’s writings from the mid-1930s show that he clearly had a high regard for Augustine’s Confessions,¹⁵ and it would be surprising if its ideas, themes, and narrative structure were not directly or indirectly echoed in Surprised by Joy.

Both the Confessions and Surprised by Joy conce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• A Brief Biography of C. S. Lewis
• Introduction
• 1: The Enigma of Autobiography: Critical Reflections on Surprised by Joy
• 2: The “New Look”: Lewis’s Philosophical Context at Oxford in the 1920s
• 3: A Gleam of Divine Truth: The Concept of Myth in Lewis’s Thought
• 4: The Privileging of Vision: Lewis’s Metaphors of Light, Sun, and Sight
• 5: Arrows of Joy: Lewis’s Argument from Desire
• 6: Reason, Experience, and Imagination: Lewis’s Apologetic Method
• 7: A “Mere Christian”: Anglicanism and Lewis’s Religious Identity
• 8: Outside the “Inner Ring”: Lewis as a Theologian
• Works by Lewis Cited
• Index