How Myth Became Fact for C. S. Lewis

 

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

 

The subtitle of the book – “The Shape of My Early Life” – already indicates what this is about: the experiences that shaped Lewis’ thinking in his childhood and early years as an adult, up to his conversion to Christianity. It is not meant to be a complete autobiography, but somewhat of a spiritual memoir. 

I recommend reading this book shortly before or after “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” which is an autobiographically inspired allegory of someone abandoning the Christianity of his youth, going on a journey of various worldviews, and finally finding Christianity again in a whole new, surprising way. 

In both of these books, what Lewis terms “Joy” plays an important part. By that, he means a longing for and a delight in the “beyond”: the esthetic experience you might have by staring at mountains far away; the emotion one might feel by reading myths; the fascination of the numinous. 

This Joy, he experienced in pagan myths, in stories, and in nature, but not in Christianity. He describes the reason for this very well in the following passage of “The Pilgrim’s Regress.” 

When the main character, John, abandoned his belief in the Landlord (that is, God), he was “bounding forward on his road so lightly that before he knew it he had come to the top of a little hill. It was not because the hill had tired him that he stopped there, but because he was too happy to move. `There is no Landlord,’ he cried. Such a weight had been lifted from his mind that he felt he could fly. All round him the frost was gleaming like silver; the sky was like blue glass; a robin sat in the hedge beside him; a cock was crowing in the distance.

“‘There is no Landlord.’ He laughed when he thought of the old card of rules hung over his bed in the bedroom, so low and dark, in his father’s house. `There is no Landlord. There is no black hole.’

“He turned and looked back on the road he had come by: and when he did so he gasped with joy. For there in the East, under the morning light, he saw the mountains heaped up to the sky like clouds, green and violet and dark red; shadows were passing over the big rounded slopes, and water shone in the mountain pools, and up at the highest of all the sun was smiling steadily on the ultimate crags.

“These crags were indeed so shaped that you could easily take them for a castle [where John had previously believed the castle of the Landlord to be]: and now it came into John’s head that he had never looked at the mountains before, because, as long as he thought that the Landlord lived there, he had been afraid of them. But now that there was no Landlord he perceived that they were beautiful.” 

So, by abandoning the Christianity of his youth, he was free to discover beauty and delight. But none of that was lasting. No step on his journey brought the ultimate fulfillment. “Joy” always slipped away. 

Until he connected his delight in myths with Christian doctrine. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this,” writes he in “Surprised by Joy” about his gradual acceptance of the Gospels. “And nothing else in 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 (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), 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 ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.” 

For Lewis, myth had finally become fact. Joy was found in a Person who is both God and Man. 

There are many more details in “Surprised by Joy,” and he does not speak on Christianity or spiritual issues on every page, but, like I said, it’s not an autobiography as such, and readers expecting this might be disappointed by what Lewis leaves out. 

Without such expectations, though, it is a fascinating read and something that people who have enjoyed some of Lewis’ other works shouldn’t miss