Oxford

Oxford recurs in C. S. Lewis’s life as more than the university town he entered for an examination and later inhabited as a student: it is a landscape of disappointed expectations, wartime interruption, philosophical argument, and finally religious surrender. Its episodes do not form a single, inevitable conversion scene. The memoir distinguishes the Christian belief awakened at Belsen, the later abandonment of that faith, the gradual reconsideration of materialism, and the theistic surrender in Magdalen in 1929 from the subsequent acceptance of Christ.

First arrival and examination

Lewis first went to Oxford late in the winter term of 1916 to sit for a scholarship examination. He had made no arrangements for a place to stay and carried only what he could hold in his hand. Eager for the promised vision of the city, he left the railway station on foot and walked through a succession of unimpressive shops, assuming each new turn would reveal the celebrated spires. Instead, he had come out on the wrong side of the station and was walking into the sprawling suburb of Botley. Only when the town gave way to open country did he turn and see the towers behind him. He returned on foot, took a hansom, and asked to be driven to somewhere he could find a week’s lodging; the improvised plan worked, and he was soon taking tea in comfortable rooms on Mansfield Road.

That first misdirection is memorable as an episode in its own right, but Lewis also retrospectively calls it an allegory of his life. He does not claim to have recognized the parallel at the time: the boy simply walked back, footsore, to the station. The distant view of the spires arrives only after he has mistaken the route, giving Oxford an early narrative association with the gap between an imagined destination and the actual way toward it.

The scholarship examination took place in Oriel Hall during a snowfall. Candidates wrote in greatcoats and mufflers, with at least their left hands gloved, while Provost Phelps distributed the papers. Lewis thought he was doing badly at classics and believed his success rested instead on general knowledge and dialectics. An essay on a quotation from Johnson let him draw on the surrounding Boswellian conversation, but he did not suppose that this or his knowledge of Schopenhauer would distinguish him. Hearing another candidate mention Rousseau’s Social Contract unsettled him because he knew nothing of it; earlier, he had innocently helped a Harrovian distinguish Sam from Ben by pointing out that Ben was spelled without an h.

Back home, Lewis told his father that he had almost certainly failed. This time his father answered with affection and reassurance rather than with warnings about expenses and hard work. Almost on Christmas Eve, they learned that University College had elected Lewis. He still had to pass Responsions, including elementary mathematics, and his last term with Kirk was overshadowed by preparation. At Easter he was plowed in the examination, unable to get his sums right despite being told to take more care. His scholarship, therefore, did not mean that every obstacle had been overcome; Oxford remained an opportunity secured alongside an academic weakness that would later cease to matter because of wartime regulations.

Oxford under wartime conditions

Lewis came into residence at University College in Trinity Term 1917, principally to enter the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps as his most promising route into the army. He began reading algebra with Mr. Campbell of Hertford while still hoping to satisfy Responsions. He never passed the examination, but after the war a decree exempted ex-servicemen, making the earlier failure no bar to his continuing at Oxford.

His first undergraduate term was cut short when his military papers arrived and he enlisted. It was an abnormal Oxford: half the College had become a hospital under the Royal Army Medical Corps, while a small group of undergraduates occupied the remainder. The roughly eight students included two not yet of military age, two unfit for service, a Sinn Féiner who would not fight for England, and several other students Lewis did not quite place. They dined in a little lecture room that later served as a passage between Common Room and Hall. Among the small community were E. V. Gordon, later a professor of English at Manchester, the Cambridge philosopher A. C. Ewing, and Theobald Butler, who could turn lurid limericks into Greek verse. Lewis enjoyed the company, but the unsettled term bore little resemblance to ordinary undergraduate life; then came the army, though his billet in a Cadet Battalion at Keble kept him in Oxford.

The prospect of war also altered the emotional weight of the scholarship examination. Lewis knew that he was suited to earn a living chiefly as a don and understood that he was staking his future on a competition few candidates won. Kirk had privately warned Lewis’s father that Lewis might become a writer or scholar but would not make anything else, and Lewis himself sometimes found this frightening. Yet the likelihood of going into the army the following year made a postwar career seem hypothetical beside the immediate possibility of death. When he tried to explain this to his father, the conversation failed: his father answered with advice about concentration and the money already spent on his education. Lewis understood the mismatch as part of their difficulty in communicating. His father wanted his confidence but could not, in Lewis’s account, silence his own thoughts long enough to make room for a different view.

Oxford and the changing grounds of belief

Oxford also belongs to the longer intellectual history through which Lewis’s religious positions changed. At Oldie’s school, the church services had made him an effective believer: he heard Christian doctrines taught by men who appeared to believe them, and began praying, reading the Bible, and trying to obey his conscience. This early belief was later relinquished. Lewis describes his apostasy as gradual and says he cannot reconstruct its exact chronology; the objections that accumulated included the treatment of pagan religion in his classical education and a pessimism that made the universe seem, in the main, regrettable. He came to hold an argument from designlessness alongside occult interests, not because he had reconciled the two, but because each worked against Christianity in different moods. He dropped his faith without feeling loss and with marked relief.

In the later Bookham period, his separation between imaginative attraction and intellectual conviction became especially pronounced: he cared for gods and heroes, the Garden of the Hesperides, Lancelot and the Grail, but believed in atoms, evolution, and military service. Reading W. B. Yeats’s prose changed the force of that division. Lewis recognized that Yeats took seriously a world of spiritual beings and the possibility of contact between that world and the material one. He had relied on scientific findings largely through authority, since he was not a scientist, and now encountered a learned, responsible writer who served as an opposing authority. Reading Maeterlinck brought him into contact with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism as well. Lewis did not assent categorically, but a tentative possibility disturbed his materialism and revived the occult lore and excitement associated with the Matron at Chartres.

The intellectual importance of Oxford became explicit in the years of argument with Owen Barfield. Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy began what Lewis called their Great War: not a personal quarrel, but years of frequent disputation by letter and face to face. Lewis later judged the exchange a turning point, though Barfield did not make him an Anthroposophist. Instead, Barfield dismantled Lewis’s chronological snobbery—the unexamined assumption that ideas discarded by the present must have been discredited—and made him ask whether they had actually been refuted or had merely gone out of fashion. That question also turned back on the present: every age, Lewis came to see, has characteristic illusions, especially assumptions so widespread that no one thinks to defend them.

Barfield also pressed a problem in the theory of knowledge. Lewis and his earlier associates had treated the sense-revealed universe as fundamental reality while continuing to make strong claims for abstract reasoning, moral judgment, and aesthetic value. Barfield convinced him that these claims sat uneasily with a purely realist account of the world. If thought were only subjective, Lewis reasoned, the claims made for logic, ethics, and aesthetics would have to be abandoned; a strictly sensory account seemed to require a behaviorist theory of them, which he found impossible to believe. He therefore gave up realism and accepted that mind could not be merely a late-arriving by-product of an otherwise independent universe. His conclusion that reality was ultimately mental, and that logic participated in a cosmic Logos, marked a major change in the terms on which he approached belief.

Magdalen and the turn to theism

By the summer of 1922 Lewis had finished Greats. With no philosophical post available to him, his father offered to support a fourth year at Oxford, during which Lewis read English as a second possible qualification. The Great War with Barfield had, he thought, begun around this time. In the English School discussion class led by George Gordon, Lewis met Nevill Coghill, whose Christianity and supernaturalism surprised him. Coghill also embodied qualities Lewis thought archaic—chivalry, honor, courtesy, freedom, and gentleness—and his presence sharpened the question Barfield had already raised: whether something had disappeared from modern life, and whether the supposedly archaic might be civilized while the modern was barbaric.

The decisive turn to theism came later, in Trinity Term 1929, in Lewis’s room in Magdalen. He describes the repeated solitude of working there and the persistent approach of the God he did not want to meet. For years he had wanted not to be interfered with, to retain ownership of himself, and to avoid suffering rather than risk it for delight. Even his attempt to live by his philosophy, he later saw, had been hedged with reservations: he expected virtue to remain within limits that would not become intolerably painful. In Magdalen, the demand ceased to be a qualified bargain. Lewis understood it as total surrender, with no assurance that God would be reasonable in the comfortable human sense.

He gave in, admitted that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He later described himself as perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in England, and interpreted the compulsion not as a denial of divine mercy but as a form of it: the convert was accepted even while resisting. Oxford in this account is not a backdrop for a sudden emotional rapture. The room, the repeated nights, and the pressure of a decision register a change in what Lewis was willing to withhold. The intellectual journey had made theism possible, but the act in Magdalen was also a surrender of the self-protective terms on which he had hoped to approach reality.

From Oxford theism toward Christianity

Lewis is careful to distinguish the Magdalen surrender from conversion to Christianity. At that point he believed in theism, not the Incarnation; the God he acknowledged was, as he describes him, sheerly nonhuman. Nor did Lewis experience an immediate reconciliation between God and the childhood Joy he had pursued. He had no hint that Joy would be connected to God, and no promise of a future life shaped his first months of obedience. His churchgoing during this period was provisional and largely symbolic. He disliked the bustle and organization of church life and hymns, and did not know whether attending church helped move him toward Christianity.

His companion in this stage was Dom Bede Griffiths, with whom he kept up a copious correspondence. Both believed in God and were willing to hear about him from pagan or Christian sources. The question had changed: rather than choosing one true religion against a thousand false ones, Lewis began asking where the intimations in pagan religion might reach maturity. Barfield’s encouragement to treat pagan myth more respectfully helped shape that inquiry. Lewis came to see Hinduism and Christianity as the remaining possibilities, but judged Hinduism to combine philosophical thought with pagan practices he considered unpurged and, unlike Christianity, to lack a comparable historical claim.

The Gospels then appeared to Lewis neither as ordinary myths nor as ordinary histories. Their apparently artless historical character carried the material of great myth, yet nothing else in literature seemed to match them. He came to understand the Christian claim as myth become fact: the Word made flesh, God become Man. He acknowledges uncertainty about precisely when every part of this reasoning took shape, but identifies the central movement as a further advance toward the concrete and the demanding. The Incarnation brought God nearer in a way he had not wanted, since each step left less room for him to keep his soul to himself.

The final change is associated with a journey to Whipsnade, not with a prolonged argument or a surge of emotion. When Lewis set out on the sunny morning, he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; when he arrived at the zoo, he did. He describes the transition as an awakening into a state already reached, and leaves its relation to freedom and necessity unresolved. The sequence gives Oxford its particular significance in the memoir: Magdalen is where Lewis acknowledged God, but the Christian conclusion was reached later, on the road away from the university, after a distinct and further change in belief.