Surprised by Joy

Lewis knew that he would soon be going to the war, and so he sat his entrance examinations to Oxford with a certain detachment. He remembers arriving in Oxford and being unimpressed, wondering where on earth the “dreaming spires” he’d heard of could be; at last, he realized he’d been walking in the wrong direction from the train station when he turned around and saw those very spires at a distance. Though he believed he’d failed his entrance exams, he was admitted to University College. However, he hadn’t been there for even a term when he was called to serve. 

Lewis remembers his time in the Army as educational. In the shared suffering of the soldiers, he learned about the ridiculousness of class divisions: The goodness and kindness he found among men of lower social station than himself made a permanent impression on him. He contracted pyrexia and spent a lot of his Army time in the hospital, where he first read the Catholic author G.K. Chesterton, whom he says he appreciated for his “goodness,” noting, “it was a liking for goodness which had nothing to do with any attempt to be good myself. […] I felt the ‘charm’ of goodness as a man feels the charm of a woman he has no intention of marrying” (191). This was, he writes, one more crack in the shield of his atheism. Another came from a fellow soldier named Johnson, “a man of conscience” who truly tried to live by his principles and who would have been Lewis’s lifelong friend if he had not been killed in action (192).

Lewis’s actual memories of the fighting, he says, don’t often come back to him, though he does describe them vividly, noting of the horrible smells, sights, and sensations: “It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant” (196).

After he was released from the Army, Lewis returned to Oxford, where his philosophy began to evolve. He attributes this evolution to the influence of three great friends: Jenkin, who taught him the joys of completely surrendering to what’s around you, even if it’s not to your taste; Barfield, with whom he bickered productively about everything; and Harwood, an unflappable man who was “the sole Horatio known to me in this age of Hamlets” (201).

While Lewis was busily rejecting anything with a whiff of the romantic or numinous—having been frightened off these qualities by the example of a tragic old priest obsessed with his own immortality and a good friend who had a psychotic break and believed devils were dragging him to Hell—these friends, one by one, adopted theistic beliefs. Lewis resisted this strenuously: “‘Why—damn it—it’s medieval,’ I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse” (206). 

Lewis began to feel himself changed by his encounters with his friends’ beliefs, however, and by his reading of Bergson, which gradually pulled him around to a worldview that allowed for “a cosmic Logos” (209), if not a personal or loving God. He remembers this stage of his belief as a good thing: “What I learned from the Idealists (and still most strongly hold) is this maxim: it is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it” (211).

After he completed his degree, Lewis couldn’t immediately find a post as a philosophy teacher, so he stayed for an extra term to pick up qualifications in English as well. During this time, the last few pieces of his belief in God fell into place. This change came in part through the influence of religious friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien, and in part through his own reading. He began to find that the authors he most loved and respected were Christians, but he justified this to himself by arguing that the “Christian myth” was just a way to imagine the deeper truth of Absolute Idealism. As his adult self notes:

[…] The implication—that something which I and most other undergraduates could master without extraordinary pains would have been too hard for Plato, Dante, Hooker, and Pascal—did not yet strike me as absurd. I hope this is because I never looked it squarely in the face (215).

In particular, he was influenced by the philosopher Alexander, who drew a distinction between “enjoyment” (of the experience of what you’re doing) and “contemplation” (of the subject of the experience). For instance, “When you see a table you ‘enjoy’ the act of seeing and ‘contemplate’ the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating the seeing and enjoying the thought” (217). This distinction made sense of his difficulty with Joy: When you were “enjoying” Joy, you weren’t contemplating it, and as soon as you began to contemplate it, you were no longer enjoying it. It wasn’t Joy he desired: Joy was the desiring of some other thing. Having made this leap in his understanding, he began to understand how Joy might connect to his Absolute Idealism: the projected, dreamed, illusionary self-longing for the wholeness of the ultimate reality.

Lewis began to feel his philosophy coming together with his imaginative life at speed, and he didn’t like it. He found that theistic idealism began to seem clearer and more sensible to him than “the mystifications” of philosophers who tried to work around the idea of the Ideal as a consciousness. More reading in Chesterton drove him further: “Now, I veritably believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible ‘apart from its Christianity’” (223).

At last, he found himself presented with a moment of strangely unemotional choice, on a bus ride up Headington Hill in Oxford: 

I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. […] I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on (224). 

He chose to unbuckle.

The final chapter briefly treats Lewis’s movement from pure theism to Christianity. This was not, for him, a matter of great emotion. After he came to believe in God, he began to attend Christian services, not because he considered himself a Christian but because he felt he should make a public declaration somehow (though he disliked services and would have preferred to pray privately, or with one or two friends). Considering the fundamental principles of all the contemporary world religions, he felt he had two options—Hinduism or Christianity—but he began to feel the Christian story as truth: 

If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson [...] yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God (236).

His final moment of conversion was almost comically matter of fact: When he got on the bus to go to the zoo one day, he was a theist, and when he got off on the other side, he was a Christian. 

In the last pages of the book, Lewis returns to Joy. While he still feels it just as often as ever, he writes, he doesn’t give it quite so much importance now. He compares the feeling to wandering in a forest. When you’re lost in the woods and find a signpost, he says, you stop and stare and are very excited about the signpost itself. When you’re confident you know where you’re going, however, you look at the signpost, but you don’t stop: You keep walking to that destination towards which the signpost points.