Nietschism

Idealism gives Lewis a way to affirm that reason, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience disclose more than private sensations, while stopping short of belief in a God who might address or command him. Its Absolute promises a reality beyond the sensory world and a reconciliation of opposites, but makes that reality impersonal and inaccessible. The framework thus becomes both a genuine advance in Lewis’s religious understanding and a shelter from the personal demands that belief would entail; later, his account of Joy begins to unsettle that shelter from within.

From Realism to Idealism

Lewis describes his earlier position as technical realism: the universe revealed by the senses was accepted as rock-bottom reality. Yet he and like-minded thinkers also treated abstract thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience as more than subjective events. In his account, Barfield’s arguments exposed the inconsistency. If thought were purely subjective, Lewis reasoned, claims for the objective validity of logic, ethics, and aesthetics would have to be abandoned. A strictly sensory account would press toward behaviorist explanations of these domains, an alternative Lewis found literally impossible for his mind to accept. He therefore gave up realism, though he had defended it since beginning his study of philosophy.

That defense had been partly a reaction against Oxford’s dominant Idealism: Lewis was inclined to oppose what prevailed. It also answered an emotional need. He wanted Nature to exist independently of observation, indifferent and self-subsisting, and valued the bare particularity of things. Barfield’s challenge forced him to relinquish that desired independence. To avoid the alternative he considered unbelievable, Lewis had to admit that mind was not a late-arriving by-product of the universe: reality was mental in the last resort, and human logic participated in a cosmic Logos.

The move was not, in Lewis’s own account, an immediate conversion to theism. He could treat Idealism as distinct from belief in God because its Absolute was surrounded by conceptual safeguards. The English Hegelians, including T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet, offered versions of an Absolute Mind or Absolute that might be impersonal, or might know itself through human beings without knowing them in return. When philosophical contradictions appeared, they could be assigned to the limited level of Appearance, while Reality was placed beyond discursive thought. The result allowed Lewis to speak of transcendent reality without accepting a personal God.

The Absolute: Religious Promise and Protection

The Absolute nonetheless carried religious force. Lewis describes it as the hidden glory beyond the sensory veil, a fullness of reality that reconciled contraries and transcended finitude. It possessed something of Heaven’s quality, and he was glad to have passed through the experience of Idealism. He retained from it the conviction that Heaven’s existence mattered more than whether any individual could reach it.

But this was a heaven that its adherents could not enter: to be fully in Reality was, by definition, no longer to be oneself as an apparent, finite being. Lewis compares its devotees to Dante’s virtuous pagans, living in desire without hope, and to Spinoza, whose love of God did not include the wish that God might love him in return. The vision could therefore be intensely religious while leaving its believer untouched by personal obligation. The Absolute was safely there, not here; it could neither intrude nor command. Lewis characterizes the arrangement as a one-way movement of desire, without a reciprocal love descending from the divine and without anything to obey.

This distance was not simply a deficiency. The Absolute preserved for Lewis an apprehension of hidden glory and transcendence that he considered more religious than some experiences called Christian. Yet its very remoteness made it an accommodation: it retained the consolations of religious thought while insulating him from a God who might act in relation to human beings. Idealism’s importance in his intellectual history lies in that double character, at once a step toward religious reality and a means of keeping that reality impersonal.

Joy Reinterpreted Through Idealism

Lewis’s account of Joy gave the Idealist framework a new role. He concluded that Joy was not valuable simply as an event in his own mind or body. Its value lay in what it desired: something other than himself, not reducible to sensation, biological or social need, imagination, or any condition of his own consciousness. Joy thus pointed beyond the self toward what Lewis calls an objective, unknown, and undefined reality. At this stage he asked what the desired object was, rather than who it might be.

He then fitted this discovery into Idealism. Human beings, considered as the sciences describe them or as they ordinarily see one another, were appearances of the Absolute; whatever reality they possessed had its root in that ultimate reality. On this account, Joy expressed a longing for unity with the Absolute, a reunion that finite individuals could not attain while remaining separate. Its visitations were not deceptions but moments when human beings became most conscious of their fragmentary status and yearned for a union that might dissolve their separate existence.

The synthesis seemed satisfying both intellectually and emotionally. It let Lewis affirm that Joy genuinely disclosed something beyond the self while continuing to believe that the ultimate reality was not one he could personally meet. In retrospect, however, he identifies a change in the direction of his thought: considerations from different areas of experience were beginning to converge. The joining of his experience of desire with his philosophy foreshadowed a point at which he would have to take that philosophy more seriously than he had intended. What looked like a secure explanation of Joy was also a step toward a more consequential account of reality.

From the Absolute Toward a Personal God

The limits of the Absolute became more visible when Lewis was teaching philosophy as well as English. He found his diluted Hegelianism inadequate for tutorials, where a tutor had to make ideas clear. The Absolute, he argued, could mean something no one understood, or it could mean a superhuman mind—and, on that second reading, a person. He came to think that Hegel and Bradley had added obscurities to Berkeley’s more workable theistic idealism. Berkeley’s God appeared to perform the same philosophical work as the Absolute while being more intelligible.

Lewis therefore moved back toward something like Berkeleyanism, though with modifications of his own. He continued to insist on a sharp distinction between this philosophical Spirit and the God of popular religion. He believed that Spirit projected human beings as a dramatist projects characters; a character could no more meet its dramatist than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. The analogy preserved the gulf between creator and creature, and Lewis’s choice not to call this being God preserved what he regarded as a remaining comfort: a philosophical account of mind without a personal relationship.

In the larger movement of Lewis’s thought, Idealism is a passage rather than a destination. It forces him to abandon the sensory universe as the sole measure of reality, preserves the conviction that Heaven and transcendent glory are real, and makes Joy intelligible as desire directed beyond the self. At the same time, its impersonal Absolute postpones the question of relationship and obedience. The pressure of Lewis’s own argument gradually narrows that distance: once ultimate reality is understood as mind, and then approached through an account of Joy that points outside the self, the impersonal explanation becomes harder to keep separate from the possibility of a personal God.