Surprised by Joy
In his book, "Surprised by Joy", C.S. Lewis chronicles what he calls his search for "Joy". I loved reading about his journey and wanted to remember how he shared his progressive faith.
C.S. Lewis shares how he had three experiences in his childhood that he called Joy. The first was "a memory of a memory." He writes how he "stood before a flowering currant bush on a summer day (and) there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. . . It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?. . . and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, and the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased." (p. 16)
His second glimpse of this "Joy" was found in a Beatrix Potter book, "Squirrel Nutkin". He called it "the Idea of Autumn". He shares how he experienced intense desire and "went back to the book, not to gratify the desire. . . but to reawaken it." He continues by writing "in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension.'" (p. 17)
"The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf": fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. . . I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with sickening intensity something never to be described . . . and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it." (p. 17)
Lewis describes these three experiences as "that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." He called it "Joy", which he distinguished "both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is." (p. 18)
During his years in school, Lewis attended services, prayed and read his Bible. But he writes that "for many years Joy. . . was not only absent but forgotten." (p. 34)
In adolescence, "the authentic "Joy". . . had vanished from my life: so completely that not even the memory or the desire of it remained." (p. 72)
Lewis then writes about reading "Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods" and seeing an illustration from it. He shares how "pure 'Northerness' engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteless, severity. . . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. . . And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say, It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to "have it again" was the supreme and only important object of desire." (p. 77)
Lewis writes about his fascination with Asgard and the Valkyries. He says "they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity." (p. 76) He goes on to share that he had been "taught in the Prayer Book to 'give thanks to God for His great glory,' as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is to know this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed." He went on to say that "sometimes I could almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself." (p. 77)
C.S. Lewis also shares how he found "a new appreciation of external nature." He soon found that "nature ceased to be a mere reminder of the books, (and) became herself the medium of the real joy." (p. 78)
He went on to say that "all Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'. But Nature and the books now became equal reminders, joint reminders, of - well, of whatever it is." (p. 78)
As Lewis continued to read about Norse mythology, he writes that he "received the stab of Joy." (p.78)
He writes that he would experience a touch of Joy and then it would vanish as fast as it came. Lewis found Christianity connected "with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry." He found that "Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer." (p. 172)
It was upon reading George MacDonald, that Lewis experienced "Holiness". He writes that "for the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives' tales. . . It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end were now speaking at my side. . . It seemed to have always been with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. . . For the first time I felt that it was out of reach not because of something I could not do but because of something I could not stop doing. If I could only leave off, let go, uncloak myself, it would be there." (p. 180)
He goes on to write that "up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert - 'The first touch of the earth went night to kill.' Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been like the return of ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the books into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow." (p. 181)
In his Oxford days, Lewis labeled Joy as an aesthetic experience and merely saw it as "valuable". (p. 205) When two of his closest friends became Anthroposophists, it "destroyed forever two elements in my own thought." These were "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to my own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." (p. 207)
As he continued to read and study, he writes that "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." He goes on to share that "the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue. But two great advances had been made. Bergson had showed me necessary existence; and from Idealism I had come one step nearer to understanding the words, 'We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.' The Norse gods had given me the first hint of it; but then I didn't believe in them, and I did believe (so far as one can believe an Unding) in the Absolute." (p. 211)
As Lewis began his fourth year at Oxford, he made a new friend who was a Christian. He also found that most of the authors he was drawn to were Christians. He wrote that "all the books were beginning to turn against me." (p. 213)
Lewis finally began to move closer to accepting Christ. He writes, "realism had been abandoned; the New Look was somewhat damaged; and chronological snobbery was seriously shaken. All over the board my pieces were in the most disadvantageous positions. Soon I could no longer cherish even the illusion that the initiative lay with me. My Adversary began to make His final moves." (p. 216)
As Lewis began to reread the Hippolytus of Euripides, he says that "all the world's end imagery which I had rejected when I assumed my New Look rose before me. I liked, but did not yield; I tried to patronize it. But next day I was overwhelmed. There was a transitional moment of delicious uneasiness, and then - instantaneously - the long inhibition was over, the dry desert lay behind, I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question of returning to the desert. I had simply been ordered - or, rather, compelled - to 'take that look off my face.' And never to resume it either." (p. 217)
The next experience "was intellectual". He read Alexander's "Space Time and Deity". Through the process of analyzing this, Lewis writes that the things he discovered "flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, 'That is it,' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find was either an image or a quiver in the diaphragm. I should never have to bother again about these images or sensations. I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy - not the wave but heaven's imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrous mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, 'It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?'" (p. 220)
Lewis goes on to write that "there was no doubt that Joy was a desire. . . .The form of the desired is in the desire. It is the object which makes the desire hard or sweet, coarse or choice, 'high' or 'low'. It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful. I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tired everything in my own mind and body; as it were asking myself, 'Is it this what you want? Is it this?' Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it 'aesthetic experience,' had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, 'You want - I myself am your want of - something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.' I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in the deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself surely objective. far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired." (pp. 210-211)
Thirdly, Lewis linked his new thinking about Joy "with my idealistic philosophy. I saw that Joy, as I now understood it, would fit in." He went on to write that "we mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as we commonly see one another, are mere 'appearances.' But appearances of the Absolute. In so far as we really are at all (which isn't saying much) we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality. And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called "we". Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we heard, but that we were, a dream. This seemed quite satisfactory intellectually. Even emotionally too; for it matters more that Heaven should exist than that we should ever get there. What I did not notice was that I had passed an important milestone. Up till now my thoughts had been centrifugal; now the centripetal movement had begun. Considerations arising from quite different parts of my experience were beginning to come together with a click. This new dovetailing of my desire-life with my new philosophy foreshadowed the day, now fast approaching, when I should be forced to take my 'philosophy' more seriously than I ever intended. (pp. 221-222)
Finally, Lewis read "Everlasting Man" by Chesterton. He writes that for the first time "I saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense." (p. 223) Then he tells of a strong atheist remarking "that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.. . 'All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. . . It looks as if it had really happened once.'" (pp. 223-224)
Lewis then writes "that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. . . I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. 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. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. "I chose," yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. you could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I had ever done. Necessity may not be the oppositive of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free, when instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do." Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back - drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling." (pp. 224-225)
He goes on to write "Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even "All or nothing." I think that state had been passed, on the bus top when I unbuckled my armor and the snowman started to melt. Now, the demand was simply "All."
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compel entrance, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Diving mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation." (pp. 228-229)
"It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity. I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly nonhuman." (p. 230)
"My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even raising that question. . . God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since, through the gods of Asgard. and later through the notion of the Absolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do to us but for what it is in itself. 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." (pp. 231-232)
Finally, Lewis reached the point where he said "The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simple false. It was rather, "Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?" With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was henceforth out of court. . . There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologized and unmoralized, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awakening?. . . There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarization of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralized and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged; the Brahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away, temple prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity. And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion - those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them -was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be 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, . . . 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. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word flesh; God, Man. This is not "a religion," nor "philosophy." It is the summing up and actuality of them all." (pp. 235-236)
"As I drew near the conclusion, I felt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to Theism. As strong, but shorter-lived, for I understood it better. Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to "Spirit" and from "Spirit" to "God," had been a step toward the more concrete, the more imminent, the more compulsive. At each step one had less chance "to call one's soul one's own." To accept the Incarnation was a further step in the same direction. It brings God nearer, or near in a new way. And this, I found, was something I had not wanted. But to recognize the ground for my evasion was of course to recognize both its shame and its futility. 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. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. "Emotional" is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous." (p. 237)
But what, in conclusion, of Joy?. . . I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. 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. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, "Look!" The whole party gathers round and stares.But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. "We would be at Jerusalem." (p. 238)
So awesome how the Lord pursues us. . .
C.S. Lewis shares how he had three experiences in his childhood that he called Joy. The first was "a memory of a memory." He writes how he "stood before a flowering currant bush on a summer day (and) there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. . . It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?. . . and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, and the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased." (p. 16)
His second glimpse of this "Joy" was found in a Beatrix Potter book, "Squirrel Nutkin". He called it "the Idea of Autumn". He shares how he experienced intense desire and "went back to the book, not to gratify the desire. . . but to reawaken it." He continues by writing "in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension.'" (p. 17)
"The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf": fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. . . I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with sickening intensity something never to be described . . . and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it." (p. 17)
Lewis describes these three experiences as "that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." He called it "Joy", which he distinguished "both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is." (p. 18)
During his years in school, Lewis attended services, prayed and read his Bible. But he writes that "for many years Joy. . . was not only absent but forgotten." (p. 34)
In adolescence, "the authentic "Joy". . . had vanished from my life: so completely that not even the memory or the desire of it remained." (p. 72)
Lewis then writes about reading "Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods" and seeing an illustration from it. He shares how "pure 'Northerness' engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteless, severity. . . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. . . And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say, It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to "have it again" was the supreme and only important object of desire." (p. 77)
Lewis writes about his fascination with Asgard and the Valkyries. He says "they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity." (p. 76) He goes on to share that he had been "taught in the Prayer Book to 'give thanks to God for His great glory,' as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is to know this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed." He went on to say that "sometimes I could almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself." (p. 77)
C.S. Lewis also shares how he found "a new appreciation of external nature." He soon found that "nature ceased to be a mere reminder of the books, (and) became herself the medium of the real joy." (p. 78)
He went on to say that "all Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'. But Nature and the books now became equal reminders, joint reminders, of - well, of whatever it is." (p. 78)
As Lewis continued to read about Norse mythology, he writes that he "received the stab of Joy." (p.78)
He writes that he would experience a touch of Joy and then it would vanish as fast as it came. Lewis found Christianity connected "with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry." He found that "Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer." (p. 172)
It was upon reading George MacDonald, that Lewis experienced "Holiness". He writes that "for the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives' tales. . . It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end were now speaking at my side. . . It seemed to have always been with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. . . For the first time I felt that it was out of reach not because of something I could not do but because of something I could not stop doing. If I could only leave off, let go, uncloak myself, it would be there." (p. 180)
He goes on to write that "up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert - 'The first touch of the earth went night to kill.' Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been like the return of ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the books into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow." (p. 181)
In his Oxford days, Lewis labeled Joy as an aesthetic experience and merely saw it as "valuable". (p. 205) When two of his closest friends became Anthroposophists, it "destroyed forever two elements in my own thought." These were "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to my own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." (p. 207)
As he continued to read and study, he writes that "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." He goes on to share that "the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue. But two great advances had been made. Bergson had showed me necessary existence; and from Idealism I had come one step nearer to understanding the words, 'We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.' The Norse gods had given me the first hint of it; but then I didn't believe in them, and I did believe (so far as one can believe an Unding) in the Absolute." (p. 211)
As Lewis began his fourth year at Oxford, he made a new friend who was a Christian. He also found that most of the authors he was drawn to were Christians. He wrote that "all the books were beginning to turn against me." (p. 213)
Lewis finally began to move closer to accepting Christ. He writes, "realism had been abandoned; the New Look was somewhat damaged; and chronological snobbery was seriously shaken. All over the board my pieces were in the most disadvantageous positions. Soon I could no longer cherish even the illusion that the initiative lay with me. My Adversary began to make His final moves." (p. 216)
As Lewis began to reread the Hippolytus of Euripides, he says that "all the world's end imagery which I had rejected when I assumed my New Look rose before me. I liked, but did not yield; I tried to patronize it. But next day I was overwhelmed. There was a transitional moment of delicious uneasiness, and then - instantaneously - the long inhibition was over, the dry desert lay behind, I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question of returning to the desert. I had simply been ordered - or, rather, compelled - to 'take that look off my face.' And never to resume it either." (p. 217)
The next experience "was intellectual". He read Alexander's "Space Time and Deity". Through the process of analyzing this, Lewis writes that the things he discovered "flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, 'That is it,' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find was either an image or a quiver in the diaphragm. I should never have to bother again about these images or sensations. I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy - not the wave but heaven's imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrous mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, 'It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?'" (p. 220)
Lewis goes on to write that "there was no doubt that Joy was a desire. . . .The form of the desired is in the desire. It is the object which makes the desire hard or sweet, coarse or choice, 'high' or 'low'. It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful. I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tired everything in my own mind and body; as it were asking myself, 'Is it this what you want? Is it this?' Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it 'aesthetic experience,' had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, 'You want - I myself am your want of - something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.' I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in the deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself surely objective. far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired." (pp. 210-211)
Thirdly, Lewis linked his new thinking about Joy "with my idealistic philosophy. I saw that Joy, as I now understood it, would fit in." He went on to write that "we mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as we commonly see one another, are mere 'appearances.' But appearances of the Absolute. In so far as we really are at all (which isn't saying much) we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality. And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called "we". Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we heard, but that we were, a dream. This seemed quite satisfactory intellectually. Even emotionally too; for it matters more that Heaven should exist than that we should ever get there. What I did not notice was that I had passed an important milestone. Up till now my thoughts had been centrifugal; now the centripetal movement had begun. Considerations arising from quite different parts of my experience were beginning to come together with a click. This new dovetailing of my desire-life with my new philosophy foreshadowed the day, now fast approaching, when I should be forced to take my 'philosophy' more seriously than I ever intended. (pp. 221-222)
Finally, Lewis read "Everlasting Man" by Chesterton. He writes that for the first time "I saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense." (p. 223) Then he tells of a strong atheist remarking "that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.. . 'All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. . . It looks as if it had really happened once.'" (pp. 223-224)
Lewis then writes "that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. . . I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. 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. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. "I chose," yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. you could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I had ever done. Necessity may not be the oppositive of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free, when instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do." Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back - drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling." (pp. 224-225)
He goes on to write "Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even "All or nothing." I think that state had been passed, on the bus top when I unbuckled my armor and the snowman started to melt. Now, the demand was simply "All."
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compel entrance, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Diving mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation." (pp. 228-229)
"It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity. I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly nonhuman." (p. 230)
"My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even raising that question. . . God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since, through the gods of Asgard. and later through the notion of the Absolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do to us but for what it is in itself. 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." (pp. 231-232)
Finally, Lewis reached the point where he said "The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simple false. It was rather, "Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?" With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was henceforth out of court. . . There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologized and unmoralized, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awakening?. . . There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarization of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralized and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged; the Brahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away, temple prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity. And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion - those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them -was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be 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, . . . 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. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word flesh; God, Man. This is not "a religion," nor "philosophy." It is the summing up and actuality of them all." (pp. 235-236)
"As I drew near the conclusion, I felt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to Theism. As strong, but shorter-lived, for I understood it better. Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to "Spirit" and from "Spirit" to "God," had been a step toward the more concrete, the more imminent, the more compulsive. At each step one had less chance "to call one's soul one's own." To accept the Incarnation was a further step in the same direction. It brings God nearer, or near in a new way. And this, I found, was something I had not wanted. But to recognize the ground for my evasion was of course to recognize both its shame and its futility. 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. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. "Emotional" is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous." (p. 237)
But what, in conclusion, of Joy?. . . I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. 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. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, "Look!" The whole party gathers round and stares.But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. "We would be at Jerusalem." (p. 238)
So awesome how the Lord pursues us. . .
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