Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.

a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.

You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to ‘know of the doctrine’.

For the first time I examined myself with a seriously ...

And there I found what ap...

Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side? My own analogy, as I now first perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing.2 Hamlet could initiate nothing.

But now what had been an ideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one? Doubtless, by definition, God

was Reason itself. But would He also be ‘reasonable’ in that other, more comfortable, sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, was demanded.

The reality with which no treaty can be ma...

The demand was not even ‘All or nothing’. I think that stage had been passed, on the bus-top when I unbuckled my armour and the snow-man started t...

picture me alone in ...

night after night,...

the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly d...

That which I greatly feared had at last...

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and k...

I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept...

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly non-human.

slightest hint

there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy.

My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life.

There are men, far better men than I, who have made immortality almost the central doctrine of their religion; but for my own part I have never seen how a preoccupation with that subject at the outset could fail to corrupt the whole thing.

That is why, though it was a terror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because of what He is in Himself.

If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. In His nature His sovereignty de jure is revealed.

The primal and necessary Being, the Creator, has sovereignty de facto as well as de jure. He has the power as well as the kingdom and the glory. But the de jure sovereignty was made known to me before the power, the right before the might.

a diary is nothing like so useful as I had hoped. You put down each day what you think important; but of course you cannot each day see what will prove to have been important in the long run.1

I started attending my parish church on Sundays and my college chapel on weekdays;

because I thought one ought to ‘fly one’s flag’ by some unmistakable overt sign.

be in the Church

a kind of collective; a wearisome ‘get-together’ affair.

religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters.

churchgoing was a merely symbolical and provisional practice.

The Golden String)

The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, ‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’

The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion,

(The Everlasting Man

the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion’, nor ‘a philosophy’. It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to ‘Spirit’ and from ‘Spirit’ to ‘God’, had been a step towards the more concrete, the more imminent, the more compulsive.

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.