Surprised by Joy
by C. S. Lewis, 1955
Souce http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/ books/lewis/surprised.htm
An autobiography describing his childhood and adulthood up to 1931, the year he logically decided to believe that Christianity was true.
Personal note: Many of you are saddened by the questions we have raised about this beloved author. But we would be disobedient to our Lord if we failed to test Lewis' messages against God's Word. Much of what C. S. Lewis writes sounds logical and true. But when the truths are mixed with error, the latter corrupts the whole message. In fact, the truths make the errors all the more deceptive!
C.
S. Lewis dedicated this autobiography to his friend Dom
Bede Griffiths,
O.S.B (a Benedictine monk). Griffiths was influenced by a Theosophist at
an early age. He founded a "Christian ashram" in India and viewed
all men -- Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim -- as brothers in Christ. O.S.B (a
Benedictine monk). Griffiths was influenced by a Theosophist at an early
age. He founded a "Christian ashram" in India and viewed all men
-- Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim -- as brothers in Christ.
Lewis' childhood:
"...at the age of seven, and eight, I was living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else."[page 15]
Discovering Joy:
"The third glimpse [of Joy] came through poetry.... I idly turned the
pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and
read, 'I heard a voice that cried, Balder
(Balder Aesir god, son of Odin and Frigg, husband of Nanna, father of Forseti.
He was killed with mistletoe thrown by his blind brother Hod. According
to Saxo Grammaticus, Hod (Hother) did it on his own; others blame Loki.
source from http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_
myth_europe_norse_gods_index.htm)
the beautiful Is dead, is dead.' ...I knew nothing about Balder,
but instantly I was uplifted.... I desired with almost sickening intensity
something never to be described....
"The
reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book
no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing
else.... I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences;
it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself
more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy,
which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from
Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed
one characteristic... in common with them; the fact that anyone who has
experienced it will want it again." [17-18]
Boarding schools.
"I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur.... Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheaters, the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. ...
"What has worn better... is ... the “scientifiction” of H. G. Wells.... 'Joy' (in my technical sense) never darted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger. The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like a lust. This particular coarse strength... is psychological, not spiritual." [35]
"But
there, too, something far more important happened to me: I ceased to be
a Christian...." [58]
"No school ever had a better Matron, more skilled and comforting
to boys in sickness, or more cheery....
"She
was floundering in the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism;
the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition.... I had never heard of such
things before; never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of
spirits other than God and men. I had loved to read of strange sights
and other worlds and unknown modes of being, but never with the
slightest belief.... [59]
"...for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might
be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might
be only a curtain to conceal huge realms unchartered by my very simple theology.
And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty
of trouble since -- the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the
passion for the Occult. Not know what I mean....
"It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the
body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem
uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than
the desire for power, which makes magicians....
"The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread -- yes, and to spread deliciously -- to the stern truths of the creed. The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) 'altering ‘I believe' to ‘one does feel.'"
"And oh, the relief of it! ... From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting." [60] [The last phrase describes the Church Growth Movement!]
"...without
knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion....
I [had] set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed
to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,'
by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections...."[61]
"...night after night, dizzy with desire for sleep and often in a kind
of despair, I endeavored to pump up my 'realizations.'...
This ludicrous burden of false duties in prayer provided of course, an unconscious
motive for wishing to shuffle off the Christian faith....
"No
one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled
Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity....."
[ 62]
"You might ask how I combined this directly Atheistical thought...
with my Occultist fancies.... They... had only this in common, that both
made against Christianity. And so, little by little... I became an apostate,
dropping my faith....
"My stay at Chartres lasted from the spring term of 1911 till the end
of the summer term 1913....
"Dear
Miss C. had been the occasion of much good to me as well as of evil. ...
Nor would I deny that in all her 'Higher Thought,' disastrous though its
main effect on me was, there were elements of real and disinterested spirituality
by which I benefited." [65-66]
Return to myth and "Joy"
"Siegfried belonged to the same world as Balder.... And with that plunge
back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory
Joy itself..."[page 73]
"I
first heard a record of the [Wagner's] Ride of the Valkyries.... To a boy
already crazed with 'the Northernness'... the Ride came like a thunderbolt....
it was ... a new kind of pleasure, if indeed 'pleasure' is the right word...."
[page 75]
"We are taught in the Prayer Book to 'give thanks to God for His great
glory.'... 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. Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false
gods there to acquire some capacity for worship...." [page
77]
Lessons for today -- notice the warnings
about seeking "thrills" and "experiences" -- a rising
threat to true faith and joy in our postmodern culture. Not mentioned is
the fact that occult or pagan thrills will often drown out genuine Christianity
among those who seek truth.
"The
history of Joy, since it came riding back to me on huge
waves of Wagnerian music and Norse and Celtic mythology several chapters
ago, must now be brought up to date." [165]
"You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious
life by a vicious subjectivism which
made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from
God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by
“maistry.” [Mastery -- a word often used in the context of spiritual
formation through human effort and mystical practices]
"With
unbelievable folly I now proceeded to make exactly the same blunder in my
imaginative life.... The first was made at the very moment when I formulated
the complaint that the 'old thrill' was becoming rarer and rarer. For by
that complaint I smuggled in the assumption that what I
wanted was a 'thrill,' a state of my own mind. And there lies deadly error.
Only when your whole attention and desire fixed on something else—whether
a distant mountain, or past, or the gods of Asgard—does
the 'thrill' arise." [168]
"To 'get it again' became my constant endeavor....
"I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. Those who think that if adolescents were all provided with suitable mistresses we should soon hear no more of 'immortal longings' are certainly wrong. I learned this mistake to be a mistake by the simple, if discreditable, process of repeatedly making it." [169] "No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly non-moral on that subject as a human creature can be." [170]
"...after Yeats I plunged into Maeterliflck.... In Maeterlinck I came up against Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism. Here once more was a responsible adult (and not a Christian) who believed in a world behind, or around, the material world....
"Two
things hitherto widely separated in my mind rushed together: the imaginative
longing for Joy, or rather the longing which was
Joy, and the ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult...."[175]
"The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known
to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction....
That the means should be Magic... appealed to the rebel in me." [176]
Imagination baptized by Phantastes -- another pagan
fantasy
"The glorious week end of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall,
I picked out... Phantastes, a faerie Romance, George
MacDonald.... That
evening I began to read my new book.... I met there all that already charmed
me in Malory, Spenser, Morris.... But in another sense all was changed....
It was Holiness." [179] [See Lilith;
a similar "faerie romance" by MacDonald. It is anything but holy!]
"That night my imagination was, in a
certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally,
took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for
by buying Phantastes." [181]
Converted to Theism - belief in the existence of some kind
of god or deity
As soon as I became a Theist I started attending my parish church on Sundays
and my college chapel on weekdays; not because I believed in Christianity,
nor because I thought the difference between it and simple Theism a small
one, but because I thought one ought to 'fly one’s flag'...."
[233]
"...my churchgoing was a merely symbolical and provisional practice....
My chief companion on this stage of the road was Griffiths, with whom I
kept up a copious correspondence. [WE] were ready to hear more of Him from
any source, Pagan or Christian. In my mind (I cannot now answer for his,
and he has told his own story admirably in The Golden String)
the perplexing multiplicity of “religions” began to sort itself
out." [234]
Since C. S. Lewis dedicated Surprised by Joy to Bebe
Griffith, this review of The
Golden String at amazon.com helps explain Lewis' fascination with his
close friend and former student:
"This book is a very truthful look at one man's struggle to find the
meaning of life. [Bebe Griffith] details his... friendship with C. S. Lewis...
his pantheistic pagan nature worship along with the poets who he was influenced
by and finally his discovery of the orthodox Christian tradition, rebellion
against rationality and journey to India. Griffiths reveals
himself to be an unusually ecumenical man, finding
wisdom in the Gita, Dhammapada and Dao de King as well as the gospels.
...
The problem of his conversion was really still a mystery after I had finished
the book -- it just didn't seem to fit somehow. Readers may do well to keep
in mind that this book was written while he was in his late 40's and that
he still had not assimilated the wisdom that he was to learn in his 40+
years in India...." www.amazon.com/gp/product
/0872431630/104-8911504-8187164?v
=glance&n=283155
"The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion
among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, “Where
has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have
the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?”
"...the
intellect and the conscience, as well as the orgy and the ritual, must be
our guide.... Paganism had been only the childhood of religion.
Where was the thing fully grown? (The
Everlasting Man was helping me here.) There were really only two answers
possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity..."
[235]
"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... with Paganism....
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 no person was like the Person it depicted; as real... yet also
numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god.... This is not 'a
religion,' nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality
of them all." [236]
Converted to Christianity - no real
testimony, little evidence of a changed heart. His love for paganism never
faded, but he became an expert in logical explanations of Biblical truth
-- whether he agreed or disagreed with certain Scriptures. (This will be
discussed on another page) See Tolkien: Truth, Myth
or 'Discovered Reality'?
"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....
"I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I
was driven [by Warnie, his brother] to Whipsnade
[Zoo] 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.... It was more like when a man, after long
sleep... becomes aware that he is now awake." [238]
"But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the
story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost
nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian...." [238]
Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).
2. Note: Higher Thought includes faith in the power of Self to control circumstances
by a mystical power within each person. No need for faith in a heavenly
God or a Source outside our being, since we can learn to manage "the
Infinite source of our own inherent power."
