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Newman's Grammar, Lewis's Assent
James Como on the Debatable Conversion of C. S. Lewis
My belief is that C. S. Lewis was not converted—that is, not as he claimed he was—because he had been (albeit unbeknownst to himself) a believer all along. His upbringing, contrary to his judgment, was not "nominally" Christian. Moreover, we learn, from him, that the books he liked most were by Christians, and even Spirits in Bondage—his first published book, a poem cycle written presumably while he was that "blaspheming atheist," as he called himself—displays a theistic pre-disposition, as does the slightly later Dymer (in which a young man escaping from a totalitarian state begets a monster who, after killing Dymer, becomes a god). Thus his older brother (and closest friend), Warren, could honestly say that what felt to the younger man like a conversion was in fact a recovery from "a long mental illness."
That is why Lewis did an unsurprisingly weak job of explaining his change. It's not that he's all over the place but simply that there are so many places.
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more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
Lewis, Chesterton, et al. Against the Frauds, Experts & Revisionists by Vigen Guroian
30.6—Nov/Dec 2017
on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard
more from the online archives
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
27.4—July/August 2014
The Bible, Sacred Theology & the Mind of Christ by Patrick Henry Reardon
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