quote from The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Alan Jacobs, including quotes from Lewis's book Surprised by Joy on his coming to faith:
quote:
His experience with Christianity was, as we have seen, almost completely a matter of painful and fearful duty. He struggled incessantly to form prayers that he could believe were completely valid, but he never knew whether he had achieved that goal. He was on a spiritual treadmill with no hopes of getting off.
What Miss Cowie’s* mushy spiritualism held out to him was the possibility of there being Something out there, some Higher Power, or Deeper Meaning, or Spirit World—in short, a version of the transcendent that gave richness of possibility but made no demands on anyone.
“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.”
Freed from the burdens of prayer, by the time he left Malvern Jack had ceased to be a Christian. “And oh, the relief of it!”
As he grew older the hermetic—that is, the secretive—aspects of the occult recommended themselves to him: “The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction: ‘we few’… was an evocative expression for me.”
Certainly the older Lewis felt that he had been in real danger at that time of his life: “If there had been in the neighbourhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.”
(C.S. Lewis later came to a mature understanding and a mature faith in Jesus Christ.)
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Alan Jacobs, HarperOne, 2009, page 39, Kindle edition, as of 4/9/2026
* Note: Miss Cowie was a dorm mother and nurse at Cherbourg School.
No comments:
Post a Comment