Atheism

Atheism in C. S. Lewis’s memoir is a definite, defended worldview, not a blank space where religion once stood. It promises escape from the fear and authority associated with Christianity, and it appears intellectually warranted by materialism; yet Lewis’s account shows how that position is shaped by selective experience, inherited intellectual assumptions, and the desire to keep some part of the self beyond interference. Its eventual collapse proceeds by distinct steps: unsettling encounters with spiritual belief and moral seriousness, then philosophical pressure on materialist realism, followed by the separate acknowledgments of God and of Christianity.

Formation and Intellectual Sources

Lewis describes his atheism as already fully formed before his move to Bookham. Its earlier background included a period at Oldie’s school when Christianity became an effective belief: church teaching brought doctrines he had already professed to believe to life, and he began praying, reading the Bible, and trying to obey his conscience. The fear he associated with that religious period later became disproportionately prominent in his memory. By the time he rejected Christianity, he had come to regard the universe as regrettable and Christianity as a claim that brought the prospect of unbounded obligation and suffering.

Classical study supplied one conscious source of doubt. Reading Virgil exposed Lewis to religious ideas that teachers and editors treated as false, without explaining how Paganism might anticipate or be fulfilled by Christianity. Religion appeared to him as a natural human error, with Christianity arbitrarily labeled the exception. He found no grounds for treating his own inherited religion differently and was ready to stop doing so. Alongside that argument stood pessimism, now more intellectual than temperamental: the judgment that the world was, on the whole, a regrettable institution. Lewis’s later reflection insists that a boy’s judgment should not be dismissed because of his age or appearance; childhood, he argues, is itself a period of serious thought.

At Bookham, Lewis’s tutor Kirkpatrick did not campaign against religion in his presence. Lewis stresses that his atheism and pessimism preceded their association, and that Kirkpatrick’s influence supplied fresh ammunition only indirectly, through the tone of his mind and through books Lewis read. Kirkpatrick’s own atheism belonged, in Lewis’s description, to an older rationalist tradition, drawing chiefly on anthropological and pessimistic arguments; he was interested in The Golden Bough and Schopenhauer. Lewis learned from him, too, to regard intellectual consistency as a matter of honor. The resulting conviction was therefore neither simply taught by the tutor nor independent of intellectual influence: Lewis had chosen his position already, then learned to defend it with greater discipline.

A Materialist Worldview and Its Cost

Lewis’s inner life seemed divided between imaginative richness and rationalist explanation. He loved poetry and myth but believed most of what he loved to be imaginary; what he regarded as real seemed grim and meaningless. Nature, as it appeared to the senses, and certain people he loved were exceptions. He could not reconcile the beauty of the world with what he saw as its cruelty, waste, and futility, and he describes his thought at the time as approaching the conclusion that goodness was imaginary and reality evil.

The materialist account nevertheless had a powerful personal attraction: it excluded the Christian God. Lewis later connects this attraction to the fear he remembered from his earlier religious life, especially the moonlit nights in the dormitory, and to a temperament more anxious to avoid pain than to obtain happiness. Materialism seemed to limit the liabilities of existence: death ended experience, and no infinite disaster awaited beyond it. Christianity, by contrast, seemed to offer no exit. The beauty of Christian forms had made little impression on him, while his deeper objection was to authority. He wanted some inner territory he could call exclusively his own; Christianity seemed to place divine authority there most insistently.

Lewis does not reduce his atheism to wishful thinking. He recognizes that materialism suited one of his wishes—freedom from divine interference—but also demanded a price he did not want to pay. He tried to accept a universe of atoms in which beauty was only a subjective appearance and what he valued belonged to illusion. His youthful arguments with Arthur expressed the combative confidence of his new position, though he later judged much of his reasoning crude. That intellectual self-confidence sat uneasily beside the imaginative life he continued to cherish.

His position was also not a simple route into political or intellectual conformity. Lewis recalls having reasons that might have drawn him toward a familiar secular intellectual identity, including hostility to his public school and to the British Empire, and a vague socialist tendency nourished by reading Shaw and Ruskin. But he hated the Collective, and his Romanticism and pessimism about common action divided him from the intellectual type he might otherwise have resembled. He describes his outlook as caring for gods, heroes, the Garden of the Hesperides, Lancelot, and the Grail while believing in atoms, evolution, and military service. The tension between those allegiances was real, but he does not say that it alone brought about his later doubts.

Spiritual Alternatives and Renewed Doubt

The first disturbance to Lewis’s materialist confidence came through W. B. Yeats. Lewis found that Yeats’s supernatural beings were not merely poetic inventions or objects of desire: Yeats seriously believed in a spiritual world and in contact between that world and the material one. This mattered because Lewis understood his own rationalism to rest on scientific findings that he, not being a scientist, accepted on authority. Yeats therefore presented a competing authority, outside the Christian tradition Lewis thought he had already rejected. Lewis regarded him as a learned and responsible writer and could not dismiss the challenge out of hand.

Reading Maurice Maeterlinck extended the disturbance. Lewis encountered Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism, and did not accept them categorically. But the possibility that something existed beyond the material world entered his thinking. That possibility reawakened an earlier occult fascination associated with the Matron at Chartres. Lewis retrospectively distinguishes this appetite for forbidden knowledge from the longing he calls Joy: the occult promised secrecy and transgression, not the thing his deeper longing sought. He says that the lack of a teacher and his own fear limited his pursuit, while experience itself helped disclose that the occult answer was irrelevant to Joy. The episode weakened materialism without simply restoring Christianity.

Other encounters complicated the idea that atheism settled the question of goodness or religious life. During his wartime hospital stay at Le Tréport, Lewis first read G. K. Chesterton’s essays. His pessimism, atheism, and dislike of sentiment might have seemed to make Chesterton an unlikely favorite, but Lewis enjoyed his humor as inseparable from argument and admired the goodness he perceived in him. He could like Chesterton without agreeing with him. Reading Chesterton, as earlier reading George MacDonald had done, exposed him to works he later understood as capable of drawing an atheist toward questions he had not intended to face.

In his battalion Lewis also met Johnson, a fellow Oxford scholar and company commander who was moving toward theism. What mattered most to Lewis was not their religious debate but Johnson’s conscience. Johnson treated demanding virtues such as truthfulness, chastity, and devotion to duty as relevant to men like themselves—men interested in beauty and classical literature. Lewis had not seriously considered those virtues as their particular concern. Johnson’s example made the question of moral obligation harder to keep at a distance, even though Lewis says Johnson did not know the truth about his own position.

Philosophical Challenge and the End of Atheism

The decisive intellectual pressure came through Lewis’s long disputes with Owen Barfield, who had become an Anthroposophist. Lewis initially interpreted Barfield and their friends through his own attraction to occultism, but later admitted that this was mistaken and made amends for his earlier harsh judgments. Their disputes, conducted in person and by letter over years, never became a quarrel, but Lewis calls them a turning point in his life. Barfield did not make him an Anthroposophist; instead, his arguments destroyed two elements of Lewis’s thinking.

First, Barfield undermined Lewis’s chronological snobbery: the assumption that ideas become discredited simply because they belong to the past. An idea’s disappearance might indicate fashion rather than refutation, and the present age, like earlier periods, could have its own unexamined illusions. This altered how Lewis judged the intellectual authority of his own time. The challenge was not yet a conversion to religion; it was a reason to question the assumptions under which his secular certainty had seemed self-evident.

Second, Barfield showed Lewis a problem in their sensory realism. They treated the universe disclosed by the senses as ultimate reality while also claiming objective authority for abstract thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic value. Lewis came to see those claims as inconsistent: if thought were only a subjective event, it could not securely carry the truth claims they had assigned to it. A more thorough materialism would require surrendering those claims, perhaps in favor of behaviorist accounts of logic, ethics, and aesthetics—an alternative Lewis found literally impossible to believe. He therefore had to relinquish realism. He had valued a nature independent of human observation, but came to accept that mind could not be treated as a late by-product and that reality was, in the last resort, mental.

That philosophical change did not immediately make him a Christian. In 1929, alone in his room at Magdalen night after night, Lewis experienced the approach of a God he did not wish to meet. He surrendered to theism, admitted that God was God, and prayed, though he describes himself as reluctant and dejected. He understood this as an absolute surrender, not a negotiated compromise. In the next stage of his account, he explicitly distinguishes that conversion from conversion to Christianity: the God he had acknowledged was still, as he then understood Him, nonhuman, and Lewis had not yet accepted the Incarnation.

The later Christian step followed another line of reasoning. Once Lewis no longer treated religions as one true exception amid a thousand falsehoods, he asked where religious traditions had reached maturity and whether Paganism’s intimations might be fulfilled. He considered Hinduism and Christianity but found Christianity’s historical claim decisive: the Gospels did not read to him as myths, yet their historical account possessed the character of myth as well. He concluded that here myth had become fact, and that the figure presented was not merely a god but God incarnate. Lewis describes resistance to this conclusion because it brought God nearer and further threatened his desire for independence. A journey to Whipsnade marked the final change: he set out not believing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and arrived believing it. The memoir’s careful separation of childhood belief, atheism, theism, and Christian faith makes atheism a consequential stage in a changing argument, rather than a synonym for permanent indifference to religion.