Yugunron

Theism marks the decisive middle stage in C. S. Lewis’s account of religious change: in 1929 he admitted that God was God and began to pray, but he had not yet accepted Christianity or the Incarnation. The surrender was reluctant rather than joyful, and its first consequence was not a new doctrine about the afterlife but an attempt to obey a God understood as a Person and as the ground of reality. Lewis describes this interval as a genuine conversion with its own demands and limits, not as Christianity reached in advance.

From childhood belief through apostasy

At Oldie’s school, Lewis became what he later called an effective believer. The church he attended twice every Sunday was Anglo-Catholic. Its candles, incense, vestments, and hymns sung on their knees initially struck him as part of an alien English atmosphere; more important, he heard Christian doctrine taught by men who plainly believed it. Since he had no skepticism at the time, their teaching brought to life what he would already have said he believed. Fear for his soul accompanied this renewal, especially during blazing, moonlit nights in the curtainless dormitory. He began seriously to pray, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience.

That childhood faith did not endure. At Chartres, Lewis’s practice of trying to force a vivid emotional “realization” into every prayer made prayer a nightly torment: the effort was difficult to assess, liable to generate an infinite regress, and left him dreading bedtime. Alongside this private burden came intellectual doubts. Reading Virgil, he encountered Pagan religious ideas treated by teachers and editors as sheer illusion, while Christianity was presented as an exception without an explanation of why it deserved special treatment. Lewis wondered why it should be treated differently from the many other religions he understood as natural human errors. He also developed an intellectual pessimism that made the universe seem, in the main, regrettable.

Occultist interests and what he called the Argument from Undesign worked against Christianity in different moods, without forming a logical system. Gradually, and without a precise chronology, he became an apostate. He describes the result as relief rather than loss. His later path back did not simply restore the childhood position: it required him to reconsider the intellectual authorities and assumptions on which his unbelief rested.

The weakening of materialism

During the Bookham period, Lewis’s imaginative life and his professed beliefs diverged. He cared intensely about gods and heroes, the Garden of the Hesperides, Lancelot, and the Grail, while professing belief only in atoms, evolution, and military service. His materialism began to waver not because he wished it to, but because he met writers who treated a nonmaterial world as something more than a literary invention. W. B. Yeats’s prose showed him a poet who seriously believed in magic and in possible contact between this world and another. Lewis had treated scientific claims as authoritative partly on trust; Yeats supplied a contrary authority that he could not simply dismiss as Christian testimony.

Reading Maurice Maeterlinck widened the disturbance. Through his writing Lewis encountered Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism, and the possibility that a world existed behind or around the material one. He did not categorically assent, but a “Perhaps” entered his materialism. That opening revived his earlier occult lore and the excitement associated with the Matron at Chartres. It made room for the possibility of something beyond matter without yet directing him toward Christian theology.

The longer intellectual preparation came through Lewis’s dispute with Owen Barfield. Barfield’s attacks permanently unsettled Lewis’s chronological snobbery: the assumption that an idea is discredited merely because it has gone out of fashion. Lewis came to ask whether a position had actually been refuted, and to recognize that his own age, like earlier periods, had characteristic assumptions it might neither defend nor question. Barfield also pressed a problem in their realist account of knowledge. They treated the sensory universe as ultimate reality while claiming that logical thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience possessed more than merely subjective value. Lewis concluded that these claims did not cohere. If he retained the sensory world as the sole reality, he would have to accept a behaviorist account of logic, ethics, and aesthetics—an alternative he found literally unbelievable. He therefore felt compelled to relinquish realism and admit that mind was not a late-arriving by-product, but that the universe was ultimately mental and logic participated in a cosmic Logos. This did not by itself make him a Christian; it helped make a theistic account of reality intellectually possible.

The surrender in Magdalen

The decisive change came after Lewis recognized how much he had wanted to avoid being interfered with. He had sought to keep his soul his own, limit his liabilities, and protect himself from suffering. Even his attempt to live by a philosophy had contained reservations about how far its demands might go. Now the abstract ideal became a command, and he could no longer assume that God would be “reasonable” in the comfortable sense of permitting him to avoid pain. Lewis understood the demand not as a negotiated compromise but as total surrender.

He locates that surrender in a room at Magdalen, where night after night he felt the steady approach of the God he did not want to meet whenever his attention lifted from his work. In the Trinity Term of 1929, he gave in, admitted that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He later characterized himself as a profoundly reluctant convert. His account emphasizes the disparity between the resistance of the person being brought to faith and the mercy that, in retrospect, he discerned in God’s acceptance of him. The conversion was a surrender to theism, not yet a confession of Christian doctrine.

What theism meant

Lewis explicitly distinguishes this conversion from Christianity. At the point of surrender, he knew nothing of the Incarnation; the God he acknowledged was, as he put it, sheerly nonhuman. Nor did he connect God with Joy. He had once hoped that reality might be symbolized as a place, but found it to be a Person. He was given no sense that the Joy that had pursued him since childhood would be fulfilled in God; he feared that rejecting Joy might be the first demand God would make. The conversion was marked by submission, not by music, desire, or a consoling vision of arrival.

It also involved no belief in a future life. For several months, perhaps a year, Lewis knew God and tried to obey without raising the question of what followed death. He regarded this delay as a mercy: he had believed that goodness ceased to be disinterested if it was pursued for reward or avoided from fear of punishment, and no promises or threats were made to induce his obedience. The commands were inexorable, but they came without those sanctions.

The principle Lewis took to define this stage was that God should be obeyed because of what God is. Earlier ideas of reverence, associated first with the gods of Asgard and later with the Absolute, had prepared him to recognize that something could be owed allegiance for its own nature, not for what it might do for the worshipper. Lewis distinguishes God’s rightful sovereignty from the power that enforces it: he understood the right before the might. In his account, this distinction prevents obedience from being reduced to submission to force. Heaven and Hell enter the argument as the eventual consequences of union with or separation from God’s nature, but Lewis warns that treating either as substantial and independent of that relation can corrupt the doctrine.

Practice and the road toward Christianity

After becoming a theist, Lewis attended his parish church on Sundays and his college chapel on weekdays. He did so not because he already believed in Christianity, nor because he considered the difference between Christianity and simple theism small, but because he felt honor required an unmistakable outward sign of his belief in God. Churchgoing was therefore symbolic and provisional. He found churchmanship unattractive: the collective life, its organization and bustle, and the rites did not suit his preference for solitary prayer or small gatherings to discuss spiritual matters. He liked clergymen as distinctive people, but did not want to belong to the Church as an institution. He later said he could not tell whether attending services had helped move him toward Christianity.

His companion in this phase was Dom Bede Griffiths, with whom he maintained a substantial correspondence. Lewis and Griffiths were prepared to hear about God from Pagan or Christian sources. The question that had once seemed to be which one religion was simply true among a thousand false ones changed into a search for where religion had reached maturity, and where Pagan intimations might have been fulfilled. Lewis no longer regarded irreligion as a serious rival to the worshippers of the past, but he also rejected a return to primitive Paganism: the God he acknowledged was one and righteous, and religion had to engage intellect and conscience as well as ritual and feeling.

Lewis considered Hinduism and Christianity as the two possible answers to this search. He thought Hinduism joined philosophical reflection to Pagan practices without fully purging the latter, and he saw Christianity as making a distinctive historical claim. The Gospels, in his literary judgment, did not have the taste of myth, yet their account of Jesus carried the matter and quality of the great myths. He came to understand Christianity as the place where myth had become fact and God had become Man. That recognition was not identical with the earlier surrender to theism: accepting the Incarnation brought God nearer in a new and more concrete way, and Lewis felt resistance because it further threatened his wish to retain independence. Theism was thus both a conversion in its own right and the ground from which he approached Christianity, without making the later step automatic or erasing the reluctance that accompanied it.