Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson is a philosophical influence in C. S. Lewis’s memoir, associated with two changes that reach beyond abstract argument: a new capacity to relish the force and abundance of life, and a loosening of the pessimistic idea that the universe might not have existed. Bergson does not erase Lewis’s former aesthetic attachments; he gives him another love, one directed toward energy, fertility, and things in the act of growing.

Encounter and Intellectual Context

Lewis recalls reading Bergson in a Convalescent Camp on Salisbury Plain during the First World War. The encounter had an intellectual effect: it taught him to be wary of the snares surrounding the word “Nothing.” It also altered his emotional outlook. Until then, Lewis had been drawn toward what seemed pale, remote, and evanescent, including the water-color world of William Morris, the leafy recesses of Thomas Malory, and the twilight associated with W. B. Yeats. He says he could not have understood Goethe’s image of the golden tree of life before Bergson showed it to him.

The change is presented not as a repudiation of those earlier loves but as an enlargement of Lewis’s response. Bergson did not abolish the old attachments; he gave Lewis a new one. Lewis became able to relish energy, fertility, and urgency, as well as the resourcefulness, triumphs, and even insolence of things that grow. That altered receptiveness opened new artistic territory: he believed he could now appreciate Beethoven, Titian’s mythological pictures, Goethe, Dunbar, Pindar, Christopher Wren, and the more exultant Psalms—artists and works he thought would previously have meant nothing to him.

Necessary Existence and the New Look

When Lewis later reopened Bergson’s books, he found the exact path of the argument less clear to him. What remained was his sense that Bergson had helped refute Schopenhauer’s haunting possibility that the universe “might not have existed.” Lewis understood this as an encounter with the divine attribute of necessary existence. At the time, however, he attached that attribute to the wrong subject: the universe rather than God.

Even so, the idea had considerable force. Once reality no longer seemed an arbitrary alternative to nothing, Lewis concluded that neither pessimism nor optimism about the Whole made sense. Blaming or praising the Whole became as futile as defying it: since the speaker is part of reality, the defiance is, in Lewis’s account, reality speaking against itself. He therefore describes his New Look as a Stoical Monism that called for accepting the universe totally, loyally, and without reservations. It brought him a great sense of peace, which he regarded as perhaps his nearest approach to a religious experience since his prep-school days, and ended his idea of making a treaty or compromise with reality.

From Philosophy Toward Religious Understanding

Bergson’s influence belongs to a transitional stage, not to Lewis’s final religious understanding. Lewis’s account stresses that the perception of even one divine attribute could have consequences beyond the system in which he first encountered it. He later places Bergson beside Absolute Idealism as one of two intellectual advances: Bergson had shown him necessary existence, while Idealism had brought him nearer to understanding the words of thanksgiving for divine glory.

The memoir gives this development a retrospective image of an angler whose fish never notices that the hook is in its tongue. Lewis had not yet recognized the theological implications of what he had learned. The attribute of necessary existence was still attached to the universe, not God; nevertheless, the idea had carried him closer to a religious horizon. Bergson’s significance lies in that combination of immediate and unfinished effects: he made life’s energetic abundance newly appreciable, weakened Lewis’s old pessimistic alternative of nothingness, and supplied a concept that Lewis would later understand as part of a movement toward God.