Liu Yiush accepts the sacrament of confirmation and receives his first communion when he is not a believer

Lewis’s confirmation and first Communion while he was a nonbeliever mark a painful breach between religious observance and conviction. He later described the rites as an act of solemn hypocrisy: unable to face his father with his actual views, he let fear govern him, and understood only afterward how cowardice had led him from pretense toward what he called blasphemy.

Belief Before the Crisis

At Oldie’s school, Lewis had first become an effective believer. The church’s Anglo-Catholic rituals initially met his conscious resistance as part of an English atmosphere he disliked, but he heard Christianity’s doctrines taught by men who evidently believed them. Since he had no skepticism at the time, this teaching brought to life beliefs he would already have claimed as his own. He began to pray seriously, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience.

That childhood faith did not simply persist. The effort to force vivid “realizations” into every prayer became a nightly burden, leaving him exhausted and dreading bedtime. Classical study supplied a further difficulty: in reading Virgil, he encountered religious ideas treated by teachers and editors as illusion, while Christianity alone was presumed true without an explanation of why it should be exempt from the general dismissal of religion. Together with his growing pessimism, these pressures helped prepare the way for disbelief.

The Act and Its Immediate Cause

By the time of his confirmation and first Communion, Lewis says he was in total disbelief. He went through preparation, received confirmation, and took Communion while “acting a part,” fully aware that he was behaving dishonestly even though he did not then understand the act’s full religious significance. In his retrospective judgment, this was among the worst acts of his life: cowardice drove him into hypocrisy, and hypocrisy into blasphemy.

The immediate obstacle was his relationship with his father. Lewis felt unable to tell him what he really thought, not because he expected an initial outburst, but because he anticipated a conversation in which his argument would be lost amid quotations, anecdotes, reminiscences, and appeals to the beauty of the Authorized Version and of Christian tradition. He feared that continued attempts to make his position precise would end in anger: thunder from his father and, from himself, only a thin, peevish reply. He later judged that he ought to have risked that confrontation rather than proceed with the rites.

Retrospective Judgment and Contrast

Lewis invokes Johnson’s observation that, where courage is absent, other virtues survive only by accident. He does not present his fear as an excuse; he explicitly connects it to his own responsibility for the deception. His comparison with the Syrian captain who bowed in the house of Rimmon gives the act a religious gravity: he had bowed in the house of the real God while believing Him no more than Rimmon. He also acknowledges that, at the time, he could not have known the full nature of what he was doing. The distinction does not erase the lie he knew he was telling.

The episode belongs to a longer account of changing belief, but it is not itself Lewis’s later conversion. After fluctuations he could no longer reconstruct, he became an apostate and felt relief rather than loss. In 1929, alone in his room at Magdalen, he surrendered to God and knelt to pray; he stresses that this was conversion to theism, not yet Christianity. Only later did he accept the Christian claim that the Gospel story was where myth had become fact and God had become man. Against those later stages, the confirmation and first Communion stand as an early, compromised participation in Christian rites: outward observance without belief, prompted not by conviction but by fear of an honest conversation.