C. S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955. Print.

Surprised by Joy is author C. S. Lewis’s autobiography from his early childhood up to about the age of thirty when he converted to Christianity. He is looking back some thirty years after the most recent events in the book.

The title comes from a line by Wordsworth, and Lewis tells how as a boy, youth, and young man he had occasional experiences of joy, but he found that such experiences were hard to maintain. To sum up his ideas on this, he discovers the source of joy when he finally surrenders to Christ, but all but the last few pages of the book is about how he got to that point.

Today there is a tendency for many such testimonies to be dramatic “before and after” stories like diet or bodybuilding advertisements. “Before I was a hit man for the mob, now I sing in the church choir.” Lewis is not like that. His spiritual journey was more about seeking truth than seeking relief.

His boyhood in Northern Ireland seems pleasant enough. His older brother was his best friend. His elementary education once he left home was quite severe. Later he attended a boarding school with the usual social pecking order. He attended Oxford, served in World War I, finished Oxford, and became a teacher there.

At one point in his teen years, he decided that the Christian God, or any other god, did not exist. However, he was entranced with Celtic and Nordic mythology and stories like those of George MacDonald and William Morris based on them. When he discovered that a boyhood neighbor had similar tastes, they became best friends (by then his brother was away at school). Some of these things would eventually lead to his academic interest in medieval European literature and language.

Such stories would give him joy, he said, but only some of the stories. Other experiences in nature, especially in Ireland, did as well. Still, such things appeared transient. By the way, he never cared for Disney adaptations; he calls them “simpering dolls.” (151)

As an adult, he was occasionally confronted by writing or people who maintained a belief in the Christian God. Some of the writing, like that of Spenser or Milton, was some of the best writing he read. In his teens, he had had a teacher who was a ruthless logician. After the war as a lecturer at Oxford he became influenced by Donne and Herbert. He said to himself, “Christians are wrong, but the rest are bores.” (214, his italics)

Lewis notes that as he was coming closer to God—or as the “great Angler” was drawing him in—the “hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew” admitted that the death and resurrection of Christ “almost looks as if it had really happened once.” (223, 224)

This reminded me of something from my own experience. I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during my college years. Gibbon listed several reasons for the ultimate success of Christianity in the Empire. One was that the testimony of its adherents was supported by miracles. Gibbon was not a believer, but he recognized that there were so many testimonies of miracles, many by multiple witnesses, some by people who rejected Christianity in spite of the miracles, that a good many of them had to have really happened. Gibbon was the authority, and from stories I had read about and heard about, his argument made sense.

Writing this in 2014, the contemporary reader perhaps would find interesting what Lewis wrote about sodomy. He says that it was not uncommon at the all male boarding school he attended. He does not condone it; he puts it in the same class as other types of premarital sex—a sin but not unpardonable. He notes that the boys who engaged in it were the “alpha males” who got catamites for themselves among the younger or weaker boys. Lewis supposes that if the schools had been coeducational, such boys would have cohabited with girls instead. He believed the issue was not carnal lust but lust for power. He also notes that “Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for joy.” (170)

As noted briefly already, Lewis had quite a few things to say about the uses and abuses of logic. One common criticism he encountered about both his field of study and Christianity was that such things were outmoded or old fashioned and, therefore, could not be true or relevant.

He credited his friend Owen Barfield with correcting him of this chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” (207) To be intellectually honest, Lewis says, “You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do?” (207, 208)

The problem with such ingrained assumptions is that “no one dares attack or feels it necessary to defend them.” (208) Not only that, but such a position “had left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge.” (208) Lewis begins to understand that he could not be detached from nature and reality: “I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.” (209)

Interestingly, this sounds very similar to the conclusion drawn by Eben Alexander after his near-death experience. Logos is the Greek word for word and the root of the English word logic (as well as all those words that end in -logy). It is famously used in the original Greek of the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (1:1,2) And then, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (1:14). There is order, there is logic, but that logic is the supernatural, eternal Word of God. So Lewis became a philologist (literally, “a lover of the word”) in more than one sense: A challenge to mere human logic.