Trinity Term 1929

Trinity Term 1929 is the point at which C. S. Lewis gave in to theism, acknowledging God as God and kneeling to pray. Its significance lies in the distinction Lewis draws between surrender to God and conversion to Christianity: this was a reluctant, demanding threshold, not yet belief in the Incarnation or a return to the faith of his childhood.

The path to surrender

Lewis’s early religious belief had first been made effective at Belsen, where he heard Christian doctrines taught by men who believed them. The candles, incense, vestments, and hymns sung on their knees formed part of the church’s atmosphere, but Lewis judged that the decisive influence was hearing Christianity itself presented as truth. He began to pray, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. The belief did not last. At Chartres, the pressure of laborious attempts to manufacture vivid religious feeling in prayer fed an unconscious wish to escape Christianity. Classical study added a conscious intellectual challenge: the religious ideas in Virgil and other pagan writing were treated as illusion, while Christianity was declared true without explaining its relation to other traditions. Lewis came to see Christianity as one religion among a thousand, singled out without adequate grounds. His pessimistic judgment of the world and his argument from its apparent lack of design further weakened his faith; the two lines of thought worked against Christianity in separate moods. He became an apostate with relief rather than grief.

That history did not produce a simple return to belief. Lewis’s imaginative encounters with literature and myth had repeatedly opened questions that materialism could not settle. Reading Sohrab and Rustum under Octie gave him a lasting sense of distant, grave beauty, while the poem later shaped his response to Homer: he first entered European poetry through Arnold, then recognized the Iliad partly through its resemblance to Sohrab. At Chartres, a headline and an illustration by Arthur Rackham for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods suddenly restored the memory of Joy and awakened what Lewis called Northernness. Later, hearing the Ride of the Valkyries on a record at T. Edens Osborne’s shop made Wagnerian music a distinct, overwhelming kind of experience. These episodes did not themselves convert him, but they made imagination, longing, and myth part of the intellectual landscape against which materialism would later be tested.

Changing intellectual ground

Lewis’s doubts about materialism sharpened when he encountered W. B. Yeats’s prose and recognized that Yeats seriously believed in magic and a world beyond the material one. Maurice Maeterlinck’s engagement with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism widened the challenge. Lewis did not simply accept these beliefs; the important change was that an authority outside Christianity could reject materialism, making the possibility of something beyond it harder to dismiss. The resulting “Perhaps” revived the occult interests associated with Chartres, while leaving Lewis far from Christian commitment.

His friendship and long-running disputes with Owen Barfield then unsettled the assumptions underlying his realism. Barfield challenged Lewis’s chronological snobbery: the belief that ideas lose credibility merely because they are old or have fallen out of fashion. Lewis began to ask whether such ideas had actually been refuted, and to recognize that his own age, too, had characteristic illusions hidden in its accepted assumptions. Barfield also exposed a conflict in Lewis’s account of knowledge. Lewis treated the sensory universe as fundamental while granting abstract thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience a validity that could not readily be explained on that basis. If these were only subjective events, their claims to truth or value would have to be abandoned; a fully behaviorist account of logic, ethics, and aesthetics seemed to Lewis literally unbelievable. He consequently found himself compelled to give up realism and admit that mind could not be a late by-product of the universe: reality must ultimately be mental, with human logic participating in a cosmic Logos.

The moment at Magdalen

The philosophical shift became personal in Lewis’s solitary room at Magdalen. He had long wanted not to be interfered with, had sought to avoid suffering, and had kept even his ideals within limits he considered reasonable. Now the demand seemed to be not a negotiated exchange but total surrender. He describes the reality confronting him as one with which no treaty could be made. The earlier stage of resistance, he later recalled, had already been passed; what remained was the demand for everything.

Night after night, whenever his attention lifted from work, Lewis felt the approach of the God he most earnestly wished not to meet. In Trinity Term 1929 he gave in, acknowledged that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He remembered himself as perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in England. His later interpretation finds mercy, rather than triumph, in this reluctance: God accepts even the convert who struggles and searches for a way to escape. The episode’s emotional force comes from the conflict between inward resistance and an act Lewis understood as compelled, not from a sudden surge of religious feeling.

What the conversion did—and did not—mean

Lewis stresses that this conversion was to theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity. He knew nothing yet of the Incarnation, and the God he acknowledged was, as he then understood Him, sheerly nonhuman. Nor did Lewis experience the surrender as the recovery of Joy. He received no hint that God and Joy were connected; he feared that obedience might require the rejection of the longing that had mattered so much to him. The encounter brought no music or imagined orchard at the threshold, and Lewis did not then believe in a future life. For several months, perhaps a year, he attempted obedience without making immortality a central question.

Theism nevertheless changed the terms of his inquiry into religion. Lewis’s churchgoing at this stage was, by his account, merely provisional and symbolic; he disliked the collective bustle of church and felt unsuited to ritual. His close companion was Dom Bede Griffiths, with whom he corresponded extensively. Both believed in God and were willing to learn from pagan as well as Christian sources. Lewis’s question shifted from which religion alone was true while the rest were false to where religious history had reached maturity, and whether pagan traditions’ hints had been fulfilled. He considered Hinduism and Christianity as the remaining answers, but judged that Christianity made a distinct historical claim. The Gospels did not strike him as myths, yet their account of Jesus seemed to bring myth and history together: if myth had become fact, Lewis reasoned, it would be in this singular conjunction of the recognizable human person with the divine. That conclusion belonged to a later step. Trinity Term 1929 began the road toward it by ending Lewis’s resistance to God, not by completing his conversion to Christianity.