C.S. Lewis’ Surprised By Joy One Man’s search for meaning Copyright Robert Fullarton 2014

C.S. Lewis’ Surprised By Joy

One Man’s search for meaning

A review by Robert Fullarton

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2014

This is an auto-biographical book first published in 1955 and covering the early years of Lewis life and is truly in definition a “spiritual biography” of a man’s belief system from atheism to Christianity. The book begins with Lewis’ background and relatively happy upbringing in Belfast.

A theme that runs through this work is that of education. Lewis learns the hard lessons of youth, with the death of his mother from cancer at the tender age of eight, he recalls his first encounter with the adult world, the reality of hardships and disappointments that follow. Lewis is sent to boarding school in England, where he is estranged from his emotionally cold father, Albert. Lewis is privately tutored by a masterful and brilliant logician, a rationalist and atheist teacher called Kirkpatrick, who teaches Lewis all things about academia and logic, but fails to feed the former joy that emotionally emblazed him as a boy. Something is absent from Lewis’ life, the childhood innocence and the joy he shared with his older brother Warnie has long since gone. All he knows is learning, a grand scholastic education, even an indifference to life has built up within him and all great books and scores of classical music fail to match or replace the former joy that was lost when his childhood was cut-short for good. Lewis graduates from Wyvern boarding school with honours and studies English literature at Oxford University, where his great mind merges and meets other great minds of the day such as the like minded JRR. Tolkien and Owen Barfield who feed Lewis’ passion for myth and legend and are surprisingly the spark that ignite the keg in his search for answers and meaning.

 A great debate with himself concludes as Lewis goes forth on his quest for joy believing that joy itself is not the value alone that he sought, but the object of such desire is beyond the human body and into the unknown. Lewis and his college friends discuss myth, the origins of each religion and where one system of thought may be true as opposed to being mythology and Lewis called Christianity as the one “true myth”. Lewis’ heart is turned to certain aesthetic experiences of ecstasy, meaning and self-revelation, after the first experience he accepts the possibility that there is a God but has no idea what or who such a being may be. Over time and at the very end of the book, Lewis has another revelation and experiences another moment of aesthetic beauty and with that another levee breaks, with his confession that Jesus is God incarnate. The reservations of a man whose whole life had been learning and rigid academia teach him the intangible and three-dimensional depths of life’s learning experience and how we have to reach outward to something bigger, greater, far older and more powerful that ourselves. This book for me is a romance of belief and a quest for what the ancients called Agape (Divine love).

At times the book can be quite longwinded, as it seems to have been written almost entirely for academics with an acquired taste and knowledge for classical literature and romantic poetry. Lewis the poet and professor of medieval literature certainly comes out in the long discussions of different poets and writers that were spiritually appetising for his required tastes. Too much is mentioned about the public school system of the day and its various inequalities. Too little is spoken on his conversion experiences- which are left in sparse form until the final three chapters of the book. Too little is mentioned about his war-time experiences- which were brief but immensely enjoyable narratives of war. Personally the book speaks to me as a reader, a Christian and general lover of literature with its philosophical search for meaning –as each person can learn all things about the world but know nothing of the why over the scientific, the character of the person inside us dims when one fails to feel and question their own search for truth. It is true that “one is afraid not to call one’s soul, one’s own”, but each person must look outward for the answer to strike inward.