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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.
Reasons & Motives
In Surprised by Joy, the story of his conversion published in the early 1950s, twenty years after the fact, Lewis at first uses the verb "chose" in relating his experience on that famous bus ride back to Headington from Oxford, when he accepted an offer to pass through a mental door into belief. But he then immediately calls that word into doubt: "I say, 'I chose,' yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. . . ." His description of his ride to the Whipsnade Zoo (to see Bultitude the bear) in the sidecar of Warren's motorcycle is even less helpful: when he left home, he did not believe Jesus was God incarnate; when he got there, he did, but don't ask him why that happened—he cannot say.
The places accumulate. A late-night walk in the woods, talking with friends about myth (which Lewis found compelling), especially that a myth could also be fact (as in the Incarnation), though pivotal in his conversion, was necessary but impossibly insufficient. The same goes for his literary critical judgment that the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels is reliable reportage. That is, the writers witnessed Jesus, recorded what they witnessed, and so provided a credible view of the charismatic, highly articulated Figure, making for the famous trilemma that the Figure was either crazy, demonic, or, yes, God (leaving no space for a mere mortal, even a highly ethical, even visionary, mortal).
In Mere Christianity we begin with the existence of Natural Law ("We have all heard people quarrelling" is the famous opening sentence): that eventually leads to belief. In several writings we learn that Reason is the best evidence against Materialism,leading to the inevitable, particularly in the terrifically suggestive and moving peroration of Miracles. In "The Seeing Eye" he points to his Conscience as the agent provocateur that begins his submission. (The "long-evaded encounter happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience.") And yet Law, Reason, and Conscience would have company.
In Surprised by Joy Lewis offers a philosophical cartography (emphasizing Bishop Berkeley's Idealism, which he allows he's never gotten over) that leads towards but does not catalyze the great epiphany. Of course, we know that Joy—an unquenchable longing—was central to the process; he always, and in the unlikeliest of places, brings forth the Hope that is conveyed by that Sehnsucht: for example, in The Problem of Pain, the last chapter of which is titled "Heaven." And his first Christian book, written in a mere two weeks, the very complex allegory Pilgrim's Regress, is about little else, playing out that "dialectic of desire" by way of which he worked to find his way home. (Pure Chesterton: there are two ways to get home. . . .)
In short, though he had his reasons to "convert," he also had motives, namely, this constellation of several topoi. Note that nowhere does he argue directly for a dogma, not even for the Incarnation. Rather, his reasoning unpacks from the possible, to the plausible, to the promising (as hope is), and then to what is deeply desirable (where his rhetoric soars); that is, in any given place, his progressions are reasonable, sure, but finally motivational. And as with his apologetic project, just so with his recovery—inferential, illative, and ultimately existential. (An uncompelled decision arising out of a concrete psychological or spiritual experience, or a gathering of experiences, is at the center of an existential moment.) In short, Lewis was his own apologetic project, one he would spend a lifetime sharing with the rest of us.
Newman's Roadmap
In A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis (Why It Did Not Include Rome) Stewart Goetz has shown that Lewis's process was "mental-to-mental causation" (so many places); then, relying upon Miracles, he reminds us that such a process is "apprehended, grasped . . . [and] becomes part of a reasoning (inferential) process," producing beliefs. But how so? An answer, I think, lies with our great psychologist of belief, the Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman and his An Essay in the Aid of a Grammar of Assent
(1870).
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more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives
30.6—Nov/Dec 2017
on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard
18.3—April 2005
on Being a Free Narnian & the Joy of Subordination by Donald T. Williams
more from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
32.2—March/April 2019
Reality Shows, Even in a Popular TV Series by C. E. Smith
19.10—December 2006
Workers of Another World United
A Personal Commemoration of Poland’s Solidarity 25 Years Later by John Harmon McElroy
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