At this point in the story of C. S. Lewis, I cannot help but think about a story in the Bible. It concerns King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. “When the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions.” Solomon was famous across what was then the known world as a hugely wealthy king; yet it was not his wealth that interested the Queen of Sheba. It was his fame “concerning the name of the Lord.” Solomon’s spirituality and faith fascinated her, and she was obviously sceptical of both. When she arrived in Jerusalem and met him, her questions poured out.
Solomon answered all her questions; there was nothing so difficult for the king that he could not explain it to her; and when the Queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cup bearers, and his entry by which he went up to the House of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her. Then she said to the King: “It was a true report which I heard in my own land about your words and your wisdom. However, I did not believe the words until I came and saw with my own eyes: and indeed the half was not told me. Your wisdom and prosperity exceeds the fame of which I heard. Happy are your men and happy are these, your servants who stand continually before you and hear your wisdom! Blessed be the Lord your God, Who delighted in you, setting you on the throne of Israel! Because the Lord has loved Israel forever, therefore, He made you king to do justice and righteousness.”4
Often, when people are close to conversion, their questions are deepest. What Lewis called “The Great War” was the long dispute he had with Barfield over Anthroposophy. Lewis was arguing from the point of view of atheism, a young man deeply perplexed by many “hard questions.” Often, too, the closer people are to conversion, the harder they kick, and the more questions they ask, the closer they are to the answer. This brilliant, ever-arguing, poverty-stricken, deeply confused Ulsterman was closer to the answer than he thought. The Greater than Solomon was near.
Chapter Eleven
ON FINDING YOU ARE AWAKE
ACROSS ENGLAND IN 1924, MAY was flourishing in all her glory. The bluebell of England, known before the rose as “the flower of St. George” and worn by the Greeks as a token of remembrance, was blooming in all its loveliness.
Other seasonable plants were in flower; perhaps, next to the bluebell, the most prolific on bank and forest floor was the primrose, with its thread-like stem. The “mayflower” was also flourishing. This was the hawthorn, of course; its beautiful white flower and thorny branches develop small, apple-like fruit that ripen to bright red in the autumn. As a cardiac tonic, hawthorn has been valued since as early as the first century; hawthorn berries have even been called “food for the heart.” Hawthorn remains one of the most popularly used botanical medicines for heart conditions throughout Europe. It increases the flow of blood to and from the heart and has also been known to relieve sleeplessness caused by nervous tension.
The most delicate flower in May, with its white, purple-veined, drooping little cup had bloomed on the banks of the forests. It is less well-known than any other spring flower, and it is extremely fragile. It is called the wood sorrel, but in olden times it was called alleluya. This is a very appropriate name for the jewel-like flower now joining the rest in praise of the joyous bursting of Maytime across England.
On 20 May 1924, Albert Lewis felt like shouting alleluya. A telegram had arrived at Little Lea which read “Elected Fellow Magdalen. Jack.” Albert recorded in his diary that he went into his room and burst into tears of joy; and then he knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. In Magdalen Church tower in Oxford, the choir of Magdalen College had sung at dawn on Mayday; and over at University College a full-time job had just been offered to an Ulsterman. It could not have come at a better time for Jack. All he had to live on was his father’s allowance of £85 a year and his earnings from grading school examination papers and tutoring one student at University College. It did not amount to much for a man who had to care for a girl at school and her mother.
The Philosophy tutor at University College, Edgar F. Carritt, was going to the University of Michigan for the academic year 1924-25. He was to leave in the autumn, and Jack was asked to deputise for him. Jack’s duties were to lecture twice a week for a term of seven weeks, a total of fourteen hours of lecturing. His subject was “The moral good: its place among the values.” As far as his audience was concerned, by February 1925 it comprised wo people, one of whom was an extremely garrulous clergyman. Jack brought them to his rooms and allowed them to interrupt him any time they liked. The clergyman virtually took over!
During his year of deputising for E. F. Carritt, Jack applied for all the fellowships in philosophy and English that the Oxford Colleges were offering. It was to his absolute delight that he was elected a Fellow at Magdalen College, the very last college to which he had applied. His father may have given thanks to God, but Jack was so grateful he said he would have agreed to coach a troop of performing blackbirds in the quadrangle! Though the appointment was initially to be for five years, Jack remained a Fellow of Magdalen for thirty-six years.
It is not easy to capture adequately the history and atmosphere of the college of which Jack had now become an integral part. It was officially founded on 12 June 1458 by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England. The college has had a long line of royal visitors, including King Edward IV, King Richard III, and the illustrious Queen Elizabeth I. James I tried to make Magdalen into a Roman Catholic seminary, but he conspicuously failed. In October 1642, when Oxford supported King Charles I after the battle of Edgehill, great guns were placed in the college grove, and a battery was set up to defend the river crossings. Magdalen tower was used as a lookout, and large stones were carried to the top of the tower to throw down on any approaching enemy! When the Royalist cause was lost and King Charles, who had made Oxford his capital, had slipped out of the city dressed as a servant, the city surrendered to Parliament. In 1649, Cromwell dined at Magdalen. In more modern times, King Edward VIII, when Prince of Wales, was an undergraduate between 1912 and 1914.
Set against one hundred acres of woodlands, riverside walks, and lawns, Magdalen College has some of the most hauntingly beautiful buildings in Oxford. Standing next to the River Cherwell, the college has an atmosphere of sheer spaciousness. Former students include famous personalities ranging from Dudley Moore to Alfred, Lord Denning; from Thomas Wolsey to Ivor Novello; from Edward Gibbon to Oscar Wilde. This new Fellow and tutor of June 1925 would become particularly famous concerning the name of the Lord.
We now come to what The Times Literary Supplement of 1 October 1955 called “one of the oddest and most decisive end-games he [God] has ever played.” C. S. Lewis, in his book Surprised by Joy, likened the compulsion of God in his life to the actions of a Divine Chess Player moving in upon him until he was in a position of checkmate. In chess, of course, this is a position of check from which a King cannot escape. This compulsion began in 1922 when Jack entered the English school and began reading English Language and Literature. At this time he made a new friend, a man who came from Skibbereen in County Cork. Nevill H. K. A. Coghill was the son of Sir Egerton Coghill and Elizabeth Somerville, sister of the writer Edith Somerville of An Irish R.M. fame. Jack discovered that this tall, broad-shouldered, highly intelligent and well-read man was a Christian who believed in the intervention of God in history.
Jack had been doing his best to outmanoeuvre God; but He was not to be outmanoeuvred. Slowly, ever so slowly, Jack perceived a common trait in the material he was reading. Despite George MacDonald’s Christianity, Lewis had been greatly influenced by MacDonald and recognised his brilliance. Jack actually thought the word “Christianity” was not a very convincing name. Instead, he leaned strongly towards the term “Belief of Christianity”; i.e., belief, as against unbelief. He could plainly see that George MacDonald was a believer. As he continued reading, h
e realised that the books he acknowledged to be of substance, and that had the roughness and density of life in them, were written by such believers. As Lewis put it, they all suffered from religion: Spenser, Milton, Chesterton, Aeschylus, Virgil, even the “religious” Plato—there was something in their writing for the reader to feed on. Others entertained, but were light fayre for the heart and soul.
It is fascinating that Jack picked out Edward Gibbon as one of the writers who were merely entertaining. Gibbon was, as Lewis put it, “tinny.” Gibbon had come to Magdalen College as a fifteen-year-old. On 15 October 1764, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, the idea first arose in his mind to write of the decline and fall of that city and empire. He wrote the book not as an atheist but as a deist. A deist is one who believes the “Divine Clockmaker” wound up his clock but now allows it to work of its own accord; i.e., God created the world and then abandoned it. Gibbon’s book became one of the greatest influences in the undermining of Christian faith in the English language. As he traced the first one thousand years of Christianity, and the often-ghastly superstition, wickedness, and folly of professing Christians, he devastated the faith of many. The new tutor of Magdalen College, Jack Lewis, would empathise with Gibbon’s belief in an empty, godless universe. But the fact that some professing Christians are hypocrites does not mean that all Christians are hypocrites. Jack admitted that writers like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Voltaire should in theory have been those with whom his deepest sympathy lay; but there was something vital missing in their writing. It seemed to him a strange paradox, summed up in a perversion of Roland’s great line in La Chanson: “Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.”1
The more Jack read English literature, the more the paradox continued. Further writers like William Langland, John Donne, and Thomas Browne all showed the same characteristic of vitality; but the writer who was really used by God at this time to checkmate Jack Lewis was the clergyman and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and Public Orator there from 1620 to 1628, Herbert turned away from worldly ambition to become rector at Bemerton and Fugglestone, not far from Salisbury.
Herbert’s writing is private, subjective, and modest. His tone is conversational. Herbert believed that God was revealed in every part of his daily life, even in the humblest drudgery. His style is clear and direct. His message is pure gospel. In his poem “The Sinner,” he comes to God as just that:
Yet, Lord, restore thine image, hear my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can groan,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone.
Herbert evocatively described the process of a soul’s redemption in his poem Redemption. It powerfully expresses, in seventeenth-century English, what Jack was about to experience in facing the God who died in the incarnate person of His Son:
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
Soon, Jack would realise that the messages and sensations of joy he had experienced were but as the imprint of a wave on the shore, not the wave itself. The desire for joy began to turn to its Object: the images and sensations were only reminders of the living God.
In his second year at Magdalen College, Jack experienced God’s compulsion in a most unexpected incident. This time God used a cynic called T. D. Weldon. As God had used an atheist to teach Jack logic, He now used another one to teach him the historicity of the Gospels. As far as Jack was concerned, Harry Weldon was the cynic of all cynics and the toughest of all toughs. Jack reckoned him to be the hardest-boiled atheist he had ever known. One day Harry Weldon and Jack were sitting by the fire in Jack’s room, discussing odd events in history. Weldon pointed out that it was strange, but it looked as if the recurring story of a dying god figure in the ancient folklore of many peoples suggests that something of the sort did actually happen. Jack was shattered by this comment; and he moved in for a deeper discussion. However, his guest wanted to change the subject and, as far as Jack knew, he never again showed the slightest interest in Christianity. But the arrow had found its mark: Jack was prompted to look at the evidence, finding to his surprise that it was good. He also re-read the Gospels and could see that they were no made-up stories.
In 1929, in the midst of his busy life at Magdalen College, Jack experienced sorrow at the death of his father. Albert had retired in 1928 in poor health, and Jack spent part of nearly every holiday with him. Stationed in Shanghai, Warren was unable to help.
By August 1929 Albert Lewis was seriously ill, and Jack was to be found at Little Lea, helping his father to eat and shave, and reading to him. There is no record of what he read to Albert, but there was certainly plenty to draw from in that house of books. Here lay the man who did not go to England to see his son before or after he entered the horrors of the First World War trenches; and here was that son now caring for his father and bringing him comfort a few weeks before his death. They had both been deeply hurt by the communication barrier between them. Yet love did find a way through those labyrinthine ways. Jack attested to his father’s fortitude and cheerful spirit as he approached death.
After an operation, Albert appeared to be doing much better, and on 22 September 1929 Jack returned to his work at Magdalen. One wonders what they said to each other on parting. Jack had no sooner arrived at Oxford when he was called back to Belfast, arriving on 25 September. He made the familiar journey by train and ferry, and he entered Little Lea to discover that his father had died the previous afternoon. God had been making a powerful approach to Jack; but now the death of his father triggered, or reaffirmed, a belief in life beyond death. The heart knows its reasons.
It is worth noting that the window in St. Marks, Dundela, placed by Jack and Warren to the memory of their parents, reveals the ultimate respect the men had for them both. They honoured them in the end, and that in itself was honourable.
Looking back later on his conversion, C. S. Lewis said that he could see very clearly that he had no more taken the initiative with God, than a mouse took initiative in searching for a cat. He could see, too, that, if Shakespeare wanted to meet his creation Hamlet, the initiative would have to come from Shakespeare. Incarnation would have to be involved.
Consider, then, a double-decker bus going up Headington Hill in Oxford. Visualise the Magdalen College tutor sitting by the window, suddenly becoming conscious that he was holding out against something. He was strangely aware that he was being given a choice. It was not an emotional moment at all, yet he was convinced that if he opened the door that was before him incalculable things would happen. He felt like a melting snowman, or a fox being dislodged from the wood with the hounds just about a field behind him. Those “hounds” included Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, his new friend Tolkien, and another called Dyson. Lo and behold, there was even his sometime-acquaintance, joy!
Did Jack Lewis desire to meet God? He most certainly did not; but God desired to meet Jack Lewis. More than that, He loved him and wanted to transform his life. In the Trinity term of 1929, Jack knelt in prayer and admitted that God was God. Consider that kneeling figure—like Cornelius, the Roman centurion in the early church days, not yet a Christian but seeking God in prayer. Cornelius’s prayer “came up for a memorial before G
od,” and God sent the Apostle Peter to help him find Christ. Peter was a Jew who didn’t believe that Jews should associate with Gentiles or visit them; and Cornelius was part of the hated occupying power in Israel. God enlightened and changed Peter’s attitude; and when Peter met Cornelius Peter spoke of Christ’s death and resurrection and how that “everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His Name.”2 As it turned out, God sent help to the formerly atheistic Jack Lewis, brought up in an Ulster Protestant family, in the form of a Roman Catholic friend called J. R. R. Tolkien and an evangelical called H. V. Dyson.
Jack stated that his experience in the Trinity term of 1921 was a conversion to theism, belief in one God. He now started attending his local parish church at Headington, and also attended the college chapel on weekdays. He was not much attracted to church services: he didn’t like hymns, and he liked the organ least of all musical instruments. He felt spiritually awkward and inexperienced. He was not the first or the last to feel that many of the local church’s perpetual programmes, announcements, and crowds lacked the spirituality of what a “two-or-three” gathering should contain.
He was a believer in God. But he had a great question on his mind. There were a thousand religions across the world; but where had all these things that these religions hinted at been fulfilled? When did one awaken to discover the true and full glory of God? Jack was now convinced of the historicity of the Gospels; but whom did they depict? They depicted not a place, but a Person. Jack came to realise that that Person was lit by a light from beyond this world. Here was the God-Man: God had incarnated Himself in the person of His Son.
A Shiver of Wonder Page 12