Christian History Home > Issue 88 > Mind in Motion
Mind in Motion
He tasted many philosophies, but he was always stuck on reality.
J. I. Packer and Jerry Root | posted 10/01/2005 12:00AM
 1 of 4
He was an imaginative Belfast Irishman, in whom a cultivated Oxford accent replaced his father's oratorical brogue, and for whom Oxford was home.
He was a brilliant expositor and debater, whose powers of logical analysis, bright brisk narrative, and vivid illustration were stunning.
He was a heavyweight academic with a self-possessed forthrightness that unnerved some of his students. He worked hard and expected others to do the same. Woe to you if Lewis was your tutor and you were lazy!
He was a teacher of literature who seemed to have read all the literature there was in English and Europe's other main languages. He was once called the best-read man of his generation. He wrote effortlessly and brilliantly.
He was somewhat eccentric, careless about clothes and home comforts and quixotically meticulous in keeping promises and observing routines. In his fifties, he enjoyed three years of great happiness married to a crippled Jewish divorcée from America.
His clubbable, booming jollity masked shyness; his schoolboy humor masked seriousness; and his reading, teaching, writing, and endless dialectics masked a longing for deep and close relationships. "You'll never get to the bottom of him," his friend J. R. R. Tolkien once said.
Such was Clive Staples Lewis, "Jack" to his friends, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, and professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge from 1954 to 1963, who died of kidney failure on November 22, 1963, a week from his 65th birthday. It was the day Kennedy was shot.
He had become a clear-headed Christian in 1931, after almost two decades of professed atheism—that is, of denying all the realities of the high church Anglicanism in which he was reared and to which he now returned. Inwardly, his conversion turned him right around, giving him a lifelong desire to make known his recovered faith. Walter Hooper says he never knew a man who was so completely converted. Outwardly, however, his life as an Oxford don was unchanged.
His habits of mind also continued unchanged. He was already thinking the way he believed Christians should. All through his life, realism, or objectivism—that is to say, aiming always to discern and adjust to the reality that was there, both outside and within him—was the mark of his mind. "I want God, not my idea of God; I want my neighbour, not my idea of my neighbour; I want myself, not my idea of myself." Plato and common sense combined to feed his passion for reality and to arm him against the subjectivism that projects onto the world whatever one wants it to be. Lewis's powers of fantasy would offer him imaginary worlds of all sorts, but his inner demand for factuality forbade him to take up mental residence in them.
He recovered his faith primarily through argument. In 1943, he wrote: "On the intellectual side my own progress (was) from 'popular realism' [i.e., naturalism, the belief that the material order, called Nature, is all there is] to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity. I still think this a very natural road."
Yet it was not the whole story. From childhood, Lewis had known moments of what he called joy; meaning, very precisely, a sweet ache of sensing—and in that moment longing for—a reality of life, light, and beauty beyond ordinary experience. These aching moments, which he thought were common (though constantly misperceived), set a person searching for something not yet known.
In fact, these moments were wake-up calls from God, pointing to him as the ultimate reality that alone satisfies all longings. Lewis displays this autobiographically in his allegorical Pilgrim's Regress (1933) and his anecdotal Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (begun in 1948, published in 1955). He speaks of the "dialectic of desire," whereby these moments of joy critique all supposed human fulfillments, and says that in his conversion "this lived dialectic, and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seemed to have converged on one goal."
Browse More ChristianHistory.net
Home | Browse by Topic | Browse by Period | The Past in the Present | Books & Resources
| |
|
