Lewis's apostasy

Lewis's apostasy was the gradual abandonment of the Christianity he had begun to practise seriously at Oldie's school, a change that took shape during his years at Chartres and ended, by his retrospective account, in relief rather than grief. Its causes were not singular: the occult opened an alternative realm of belief, an anxious routine made prayer feel intolerable, classical education cast religious traditions as natural error, and pessimism made the world seem poorly made. The memoir presents apostasy not as a clean intellectual rebuttal, but as the convergence of ideas, habits, desire, and relief—and carefully separates it from Lewis's later surrender to God and eventual Christian conversion.

Belief at Oldie's school

At Oldie's school, Lewis first became an effective believer. The church, which the boys attended twice every Sunday, was Anglo-Catholic. Its candles, incense, vestments, and hymns sung on their knees met his conscious resistance as unfamiliar features of an English religious atmosphere, but he later suspected they may nevertheless have affected him. More important, he heard Christian doctrines taught by men who plainly believed them. Since he had no skepticism, the teaching gave life to convictions he would already have said he held.

Belief also brought fear. On blazing, moonlit nights in the curtainless dormitory, Lewis feared for his soul; the remembered sound of other boys breathing in their sleep remained attached to the experience. He judged this fear neither excessive nor harmful. He began to pray seriously, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. Religious conversations among the boys, as he recalled them, were grave and healthy rather than hysterical or embarrassed. This early practice matters because the faith later relinquished at Chartres had been lived as prayer and attempted obedience, not merely inherited as a label.

Chartres and the occult

Chartres healed Lewis's quarrel with England. He delighted in the blue plain and the green, peaked hills, saw beauty for the first time in Wyvern Priory, and formed his first real friendships. Yet the school also became the setting of a more consequential change: he ceased to be a Christian. He placed his stay from the spring term of 1911 to the end of the summer term of 1913, while acknowledging that he could not date the stages of his apostasy precisely. It had not begun when he arrived and was complete shortly after he left.

Lewis approached the role of Miss C., Chartres's matron, tenderly and without assigning her blame. She had cared for boys with unusual skill and warmth; he remembered her as selfless and especially loved her as an orphan. She was herself searching for spiritual truth, but had become involved in Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, and the wider Anglo-American occult tradition. She had no intention of damaging Lewis's faith and did not know that her conversations were bringing unfamiliar ideas into a mind for which they could have explosive consequences.

Before then, Lewis had enjoyed imaginings of strange sights and other worlds without believing them real. His imagined Animal-Land and India were plainly inventions to him, and even a phantom dwarf had appeared only momentarily. Miss C.'s occult interests introduced a different possibility: that marvels might exist in the world, and that the visible might conceal extensive regions beyond his simple theology. The discovery awakened a desire for the preternatural for its own sake, a fascination he later described as a consuming spiritual lust that could make everything else seem uninteresting.

The effect extended beyond occult belief. Lewis said that the speculative vagueness of occultism gradually softened the edges of his Christian convictions. Belief began to feel like one possible matter of feeling rather than a truth demanding assent and obedience. He recalled changing “I believe” to “one does feel,” and the change brought relief: the demanding certainty associated with his earlier religious life gave way to an easier, cooler intellectual posture. In his later interpretation, Miss C. supplied the occasion, not an intention or a direct plan; he attributed the deeper movement to an inward readiness to evade the faith.

Prayer, education, and pessimism

That readiness had a private source. After being told that prayer required not only saying the words but thinking about them, Lewis tried to monitor the quality of his attention. Once he had finished, an accusing inner voice asked whether he had truly concentrated, or whether he had done so as well as on the previous night. He responded by repeating the prayer, without any assurance that another attempt would be better.

He then set himself a stricter test: no clause counted unless accompanied by a “realization,” meaning a vividness of imagination and feeling. The test required him to produce by willpower an experience that willpower could not guarantee. At night he tried to summon such realizations while desperate for sleep, often in despair. The requirement threatened to become an infinite regress: even the preliminary prayer for a good realization might itself need to be realized. He remembered the cold oilcloth, the quarters chiming, the night passing, and a weariness that made bedtime an ordeal. The nightly strain darkened the whole evening, and he feared that continuing along this path might have driven him mad.

Lewis later called this burden a false duty and an unconscious motive for wanting to abandon Christianity. His account does not say that prayer itself caused his loss of faith; rather, a mistaken spiritual technique made his private practice feel oppressive, giving his desire to escape religion a powerful practical incentive. The distinction is central to his retrospective explanation: what he had treated as a test of devotion had become an exhausting demand for a subjective intensity he could neither define nor command.

Classical reading supplied a conscious intellectual pressure. In Virgil and other classical material, Lewis encountered religious ideas that teachers and editors treated as illusions, without explaining how pagan belief might anticipate or be fulfilled by Christianity. Religion in general appeared to him as a natural growth of human error: a thousand false systems, with Christianity alone declared true. He could see no clear ground for treating his own faith as an exception to the same general category. The problem was not simply that pagan beliefs differed from Christian doctrine; it was that the educational account offered no persuasive reason for Christianity's privileged status.

Pessimism further weakened his attachment to faith. Lewis was not then unhappy, but had formed the intellectual judgment that the universe was, on balance, a regrettable institution. Looking back, he connected this disposition to an early, largely inarticulate sense of resistance from inanimate things, which he associated with his clumsiness. He did not mean that a child consciously inferred cosmic evil from difficulty using scissors; his point was that private defeats could foster an expectation that things would frustrate one's intentions. That disposition later found expression in the thought that a designed world would not be so frail and faulty.

The course and character of the loss

Lewis did not claim that these pressures formed a coherent argument. Occult desire and the case against religious belief moved him in different moods, but shared the consequence of weakening Christianity. Across his Chartres years, his faith ebbed with fluctuations he could no longer reconstruct. Eventually he became an apostate, dropping belief without a sense of loss and with what he identified as profound relief. The ending was therefore not a single dramatic repudiation: it was the culmination of a process whose exact chronology remained obscure even to the adult narrator.

The school period also changed around him. About halfway through his stay, a beloved under-master and Miss C. left at the same time. Lewis recalled a sharp decline in what he considered the solid good of the school, although not necessarily in its apparent happiness. He credited Miss C. with real benefits as well as harm: her warmth had awakened his affections and helped counter an inhibition against emotion rooted in earlier experience. He also believed that genuine, disinterested elements in her spiritual searching had benefited him. But after she left, he thought the good effects withered while the damaging ones remained. This retrospective qualification resists a simple story in which a single person or influence explains his apostasy.

Later perspective and distinct conversions

Lewis's later encounters with occult writing show that the Chartres fascination was not confined to the period of his loss of faith. During the Bookham years, reading W. B. Yeats's poetry and prose led him to recognize that Yeats seriously believed in magic and in contact between the material world and another realm. Since Lewis had treated scientific rationalism as authoritative, Yeats presented a competing authority: a learned, responsible, non-Christian writer who rejected materialism. Reading Maurice Maeterlinck introduced him to Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism as further claims that reality exceeded the material. Lewis did not assent categorically, but admitted a disturbing “Perhaps” into his materialism, and the old Chartres excitement returned. The recurrence helps clarify that apostasy did not simply eradicate his appetite for the occult; it left an imaginative and intellectual opening that could trouble a later materialist certainty.

His eventual movement back toward religious belief was neither immediate nor equivalent to undoing the Chartres apostasy. In his disputes with Owen Barfield, Lewis abandoned what he later called chronological snobbery: the assumption that a belief is discredited merely because it is out of date. Barfield also exposed an inconsistency in Lewis's earlier realism, which treated the sensory universe as ultimate while continuing to regard logic, moral judgment, and aesthetic value as objectively valid. Lewis later described the challenge as forcing him to give up realism rather than accept a behaviorist account of thought and value that he found literally unbelievable.

In 1929, Lewis surrendered to theism in a room at Magdalen, kneeling and praying after feeling the approach of God night after night. He explicitly distinguished this from Christian conversion: the God he acknowledged was, at that point, nonhuman, and he knew nothing of the Incarnation. Only later did he reconsider religion not as a contest in which Christianity was the sole true system among a thousand false ones, but as a history in which pagan traditions might contain hints awaiting fulfilment. He came to see the Gospel account of Christ as both historical and uniquely like myth made fact, and accepted the claim that God had become human. In placing these stages side by side, the memoir makes apostasy a real interval in Lewis's religious life, not a disguised first step toward a conclusion he had already reached.