Liu Yiushui converts to theism

Lewis’s conversion to theism was the moment, in the Trinity Term of 1929, when philosophical belief ceased to be an idea he could keep at a distance and became an encounter with a personal God to whom he surrendered. The memoir distinguishes this reluctant, ethical and intellectually prepared theistic conversion from his later acceptance of Christianity: Lewis knelt and prayed, but did not yet believe in the Incarnation or consider whether there was life after death.

From earlier belief to apostasy

At Oldie’s school, Christian doctrine became effective belief for Lewis. The church’s candles, incense, vestments and hymns sung on their knees unsettled him as an Ulster Protestant, but he later judged that the decisive influence was hearing Christianity taught by people who plainly believed it. With no skepticism to overcome, he experienced the teaching as bringing to life what he had already said he believed. Fear for his soul, especially on moonlit nights in a curtainless dormitory, accompanied his renewed prayer, Bible reading and attempts to obey his conscience.

That faith did not hold. Prayer became a nightly ordeal when Lewis demanded a vivid imaginative and emotional “realization” to accompany every clause. He could not tell with confidence whether the required feeling had occurred, and even a successful effort seemed spiritually mediocre. The task turned bedtime into a feared trial of will and helped create an unconscious motive for escaping Christianity. Classical study supplied a more conscious doubt: in reading Virgil, Lewis encountered pagan religious ideas treated by teachers and editors as sheer illusion, while Christianity was presented as the exceptional true religion. He could not see why it should be exempt from the general dismissal of religion.

His resulting apostasy was gradual, and the memoir resists a tidy chronology for it. Lewis’s occult interests and what he later called the Argument from Undesign worked against Christianity in different moods, without forming a logical system. He eventually dropped his faith with relief rather than a sense of loss. His conversion in 1929 therefore follows not an unbroken religious development but years of unbelief and changing intellectual commitments.

The doubts that loosened materialism

Lewis’s later return toward belief began not with Christian doctrine but with a disturbance in his confidence that the material world was all there was. During the Bookham period he encountered W. B. Yeats’s prose as well as his poetry, and recognized that Yeats seriously believed in magic and in possible contact with a world beyond the material one. Lewis had relied on scientific findings largely on authority; Yeats presented a competing authority, one Lewis considered learned and responsible. Reading Maurice Maeterlinck then brought him to Spiritualism, Theosophy and Pantheism. He did not assent outright, but allowed that perhaps there was “something else,” a possibility that revived earlier occult interests without yet restoring Christianity.

A more fundamental change followed Lewis’s arguments with Owen Barfield. Barfield challenged chronological snobbery—the assumption that an idea was discredited simply because it belonged to the past—and exposed a problem in Lewis’s combination of sensory realism with strong claims for abstract thought, moral judgment and aesthetic value. If reality consisted only of the universe disclosed by the senses, Lewis saw that he would have to accept a behavioristic account of logic, ethics and aesthetics, which he found impossible to believe. He was driven to abandon realism and acknowledge that mind could not be a late, incidental product of a wholly mindless universe. The resulting Idealism gave him a way to think about Spirit, but it was not yet surrender to the God of religion.

Lewis also describes an ethical consequence of trying to live by this philosophy. He believed that finite selves should see beyond the distortions of their separate interests and act from a universal vision. When he began examining himself with practical seriousness, however, he found what he called a “zoo of lusts,” a bedlam of ambitions, fears and hatreds. He could not sustain the attempt without continual recourse to Spirit. In practice, the distinction between appealing to Spirit and praying to God began to collapse: if human thought depended on a greater mind, Lewis reasoned, the initiative could not ultimately belong to him. A philosophical theorem was becoming a living presence, and the former abstraction no longer seemed safely passive.

The choice on Headington Hill

Before that presence became unavoidable, Lewis recalled a moment of apparent freedom on a bus going up Headington Hill. Without words, and almost without images, he became aware that he was holding something at bay. He understood his resistance as a closed door or as stiff clothing, even a suit of armor. He felt offered a choice: to open the door and unbuckle the armor, or to keep them closed. Neither option carried a threat, promise or stated duty, but opening seemed to entail incalculable consequences.

Lewis chose to open and loosen his restraint, while admitting that it had not seemed possible to do otherwise and that he could identify no motive. He therefore leaves the choice suspended between freedom and necessity rather than presenting it as a simple act of will. Its imaginative aftermath was the image of a snowman beginning to melt, first in the back, drip by drip. The image gives physical form to a change that he disliked even as it began: resistance was thawing, though the experience did not yet amount to Christian belief or even to the final act of surrender.

Surrender in Magdalen

The change from philosophical assent to religious submission was marked by a new demand. Lewis had long wanted not to be interfered with and had tried to limit what belief might require of him. He had treated the supernatural first as an illicit thrill and later as something repellent, while his ideal of virtue remained protected by the assumption that it would not lead to intolerable pain. Now that ideal became a command. He could no longer make a treaty with the reality pressing upon him, or reserve some part of himself from its claim: the demand, as he understood it, was simply “All.”

Lewis likened the encounter to a mouse’s search for a cat, not to a comfortable human search for God. The change was frightening because it put him in the position not of a seeker in control of the inquiry, but of someone confronted by a presence from which he had wanted escape. He recalls being alone in his room in Magdalen, night after night, and feeling the approach whenever his attention lifted from his work. In the Trinity Term of 1929 he gave in, admitted that God was God, and knelt in prayer. He remembered himself as perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in England.

He later interpreted the reluctance not as a reason the conversion failed, but as part of what made divine mercy visible to him. The prodigal in his comparison is brought home kicking, struggling and resentful; the welcome does not depend on a willing, untroubled approach. Lewis’s account thus gives the moment two connected meanings: God’s claim overrides his effort to remain self-contained, while the acceptance of even a resistant convert becomes, in retrospect, an expression of divine humility. What felt like compulsion at the time comes to signify liberation.

What the conversion did—and did not—mean

The memoir is explicit about the limits of this change. Lewis had converted to theism, “pure and simple,” not to Christianity. The God to whom he surrendered was, as he then understood Him, wholly nonhuman; Lewis knew nothing yet of the Incarnation. Nor did he then believe in a future life. For several months, perhaps a year, he was able to know God and attempt obedience without asking whether anything lay beyond death. The distinction matters: surrender to God did not instantly resolve every theological question or produce a complete Christian faith.

The conversion also brought no immediate assurance that God was the source of the Joy Lewis had experienced since childhood. He found no inward music or sense of an eternal garden at the threshold; he feared that the rejection of Joy might itself be among God’s first demands. Nor did conversion arrive as a surge of desire. Its force lies instead in the reversal of Lewis’s governing wish to keep his soul his own: a reluctant intellectual and moral surrender opened a new stage of belief, while leaving the further step toward Christianity still to come.