“I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans”

“I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans” is C. S. Lewis’s compressed description of a religious position formed through reversals: childhood Christianity, apostasy, renewed openness to the supernatural, and eventual surrender to God. The phrase turns on an asymmetry. Lewis calls himself a convert because belief returned after its rejection; the “apostate Puritans” are those he regarded as having inherited Christianity while losing or neglecting its religious substance.

Meaning and Context

The line follows Lewis’s account of sexual appetite and his difficulty with the moral assumptions of his time. He distinguishes his desire for a dancing mistress from romantic devotion and says that such appetite did not produce guilt in him. The phrase that follows generalizes the resulting mismatch: Lewis’s own religious history had moved from inherited Christianity through unbelief, while the surrounding culture seemed to him to combine Puritan inheritance with a practical departure from faith. It is a retrospective self-description, not a claim that every person around him held the same beliefs.

From Childhood Belief to Apostasy

At Oldie’s school, Lewis became an effective believer. The church’s Anglo-Catholic worship initially struck him as strange and foreign, but its ministers taught Christian doctrines as matters they themselves believed, bringing to life convictions he had already professed without deep engagement. Fear for his soul accompanied this awakening. He began to pray seriously, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. Religious discussion among the boys, he recalled, could be grave and healthy rather than hysterical.

That faith did not remain secure. At Chartres, the strain of trying to force vivid emotional “realizations” into nightly prayer turned religious practice into an exhausting burden and helped make apostasy attractive. Classical study, especially Virgil, supplied a more conscious intellectual challenge: teachers treated pagan religion as natural falsehood while exempting Christianity as uniquely true, without explaining the relation between them. Lewis could not see why Christianity should be treated as an exception to the general history of religion. Pessimism and occult interests also worked against his faith, though he did not claim that they formed a logically consistent position. Gradually, and with relief rather than a sense of loss, he abandoned Christianity.

A Convert Before Christian Conversion

Lewis’s return began not with acceptance of Christian doctrine but with a reconsideration of materialism. Reading W. B. Yeats’s prose brought him into contact with a serious, non-Christian belief in magic and a world beyond the material; reading Maurice Maeterlinck exposed him to Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism. Lewis did not assent to these systems, but their existence unsettled his assumption that materialism was the only intellectually responsible position. The possibility that there was “something else” revived his earlier interest in occult lore.

Years later, his disputes with Owen Barfield challenged his confidence in the assumptions of his own age and in a purely sensory account of reality. Barfield’s criticism exposed a problem in Lewis’s realism: he wanted to treat the sensed universe as fundamental while also claiming objective validity for logic, morality, and aesthetic judgment. Lewis came to see that this combination could not support the claims he made for thought and value. These arguments helped open the way to theism, but did not make him an Anthroposophist or immediately make him a Christian.

The Phrase’s Limit and Its Fulfillment

In Trinity Term 1929, alone in his room at Magdalen, Lewis surrendered to the conclusion that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He later described this as conversion to theism alone: the God he acknowledged was not yet connected in his mind with Joy, and he did not then believe in a future life. The phrase’s “converted Pagan” therefore marks a genuine but incomplete turning point, not his final Christian conversion.

Lewis’s later movement toward Christianity changed how he understood the plurality of religions. Rather than searching for one true religion among a thousand false ones, he began asking where the hints present in pagan traditions had reached maturity. He came to see the Gospels as at once historical and unlike ordinary history or myth, in which the myth had become fact and God had become Man. The phrase thus names a passage through belief, rejection, and renewed belief; it does not collapse those stages into one event or imply that the earliest return to God already contained the Christian conclusion.