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Lewis's journey away from the Christian faith started at an early age. Through the trauma of the death of his loved and prayed-for mother when he was nine, estrangement from his orthodox churchman father, and grim times in two supposedly Christian boarding schools, his childhood religion sickened and died.

Then two-and-a-half teen years of study with W. T. Kirkpatrick, "the great Knock," a retired headmaster and disputatious rationalist, left Lewis convinced, first, that any God who existed would be a bad God and, second, that there is no real evidence of God's existence at all. Lewis took these views into the Army (1917) and to post-war Oxford (1919), and voiced them in his first book, a slim volume of poems titled Spirits in Bondage (1919).

Yet recurring moments of joy and the sustained impact of George MacDonald's Phantastes, which Lewis said "baptized" his imagination, convinced him that there was in reality something to be sought and found.

His resultant feeling that life must be lived as an exploratory search found expression in two long poems, the unfinished "Quest of Bleheris," written at Kirkpatrick's, and Dymer, written at Oxford. By then, Lewis had looked hard at both occultism and spiritualism to see if they would help in his quest, but had concluded that they would not.

Lewis's Oxford friend Owen Barfield convinced him that if physical reality is all there is, thought itself (being a mere byproduct of matter) would lack validity and significance. To maintain his Kirkpatrick-inspired quest for a rational account of reality, Lewis saw that he must believe, as he later expressed in Miracles, that "reason is something more than cerebral bio-chemistry." Henceforth, Lewis's intellect no longer oscillated away from his imaginative questings into paths of dogmatic materialism, but sought a worldview that would somehow unite intellect and physical matter.

As a competent philosopher (he taught philosophy in his early Oxford days), Lewis now revisited the idealist view, still up and running at Oxford, which saw matter as having in some sense the nature of mind. What was then called pantheism (i.e., seeing everything as expressing some sort of divine reality; today we label this view panentheism or monism), lies at the end of that road, and Lewis's investigation went all the way. But he found the coherence and clarity that would warrant conviction lacking throughout, so he moved on.

Then, in the mid-1920s, through the impact of friends and of G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man (1926), he found himself thinking that "Christianity was very sensible apart from its Christianity." Also, as never before, he began to feel that the living, personal God of theism (so different from idealism's fuzzy, abstract, non-demanding Absolute Spirit) was tracking him down.

He became morally serious: "For the first time I examined myself … and … found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion." He felt haunted and hunted. "Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about 'man's search for God.' To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat." Finally, in 1929, "I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed."

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