A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.” There on long rainy afternoons he and his brother read among the hundreds of books with which every room downstairs was filled. Clive began early to write stories of animals, including chivalrous mice, and finally set out to do a full, fanciful history of Animal-land complete with maps and drawings.
This happy childhood experience was cruelly broken by the death of his mother when he was ten years old. Her illness marked the first real religious experience he had. He prayed that she would be healed. But at this time he thought of God as a magician who would heal his mother’s cancer and then go away.
Afterward he was taught a more substantial notion of God in the English boarding school to which, dressed in uncomfortable shoes, bowler hat, and tight, unyielding shoes, he was sent by his father. At first he fervently hated both England and the bad food, cold beds, and horrid sanitation of the school. He described his teacher, called Oldie by the boys, as likely to come in after breakfast and, looking over the little group, say, “Oh, there you are, Rees, you horrid boy. If I’m not too tired I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon.” Yet here he did find people talking about Christianity as though they believed it, and the little boy struggled, yet unsuccessfully, to gain a realization of God. The best thing about his school life was the anticipation of the holidays—the trip home to Ireland and the long days full of play, good reading, cycling, and solitude.
Later in other English schools he learned a love of that country’s beautiful landscape and the raw and brutal tyranny of older boys over younger ones, of rampant homosexuality, of a brash and silly sophistication in ideas, clothes, and women. In short, he learned a system of education calculated, as he put it, to make genuinely uneducated prigs and highbrows. For the rest of his life he never missed an opportunity to satirize this sort of school system as one calculated to fill the country with “a bitter, truculent, skeptical, debunking and cynical intelligentsia” rather than to make good citizens.
In these days Lewis, as college students often do, was living in many different worlds. His private world was still that of “Northerness” and joy. At the same time he was now an atheist and was trying to incorporate his ideas around that pole of conviction. “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”1
Increasingly sick of college life, Lewis persuaded his father to let him prepare for the university under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick in Surrey. Almost from the minute he first met this man Lewis’s intellectual life underwent a sharp change. The tall, shabbily dressed man with Franz Joseph whiskers met the boy at the railway station, took his hand in an iron grip, and as they walked away promptly pounced upon Lewis for a passing remark about the unexpected “wildness” of the Surrey landscape. “Stop!” he shouted at the fifteen-year-old boy. “What do you mean by wildness and what ground had you for not expecting it?” After further questions, he asked, “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?”
This was the beginning of a training in logical thought the like of which had not often occurred before. The “Old Knock,” as he was called, was the very personification of reason and trained his increasingly adept student in the practice of a relentlessly logical handling of ideas. Finally the time came when the pupil could stand up to the master. Lewis found that Kirkpatrick was an atheist and was glad to have his own atheism bolstered by that of his tutor, but the time came when the Old Knock’s ubiquitous logic actually put Lewis on the road to God.
Lewis tells how on the first school day the Old Knock sat down with his pupil and without a word of introduction read aloud in Greek the first twenty lines or so of Homer’s Iliad and translated with very few explanations about a hundred lines. He told his understudy to dig in, and it was not long until Lewis was beginning to think in Greek. And so it was with Latin and other languages. Years later Lewis looked back at this time as one of the happiest periods of his life.
His childhood love of nature was continued in the intimate landscape of Surrey with its dingles, copses, and little valleys and with quiet saunters under great trees. He had a happiness that seemed of another world.
By the age of sixteen he had already begun to feel a deep-seated antipathy to the shallow “getting and spending” that occupied people’s lives, to ideas of collectivism, of modern education, of inflated desires caused by false advertising, of slanted news, of built-in obsolescence in manufacturing, and of the whole scheme of “getting ahead” in the world. Even more he began to be alarmed about modern movements such as logical positivism, Freudianism, relativism, scientism, sexual frankness that resulted only in more and worse sexual deviation, “modernism,” in religion and the contradictory idea of inevitable improvement from natural causes, and the increasing feeling of hopelessness in society. He felt that even democracy itself was taking the impossible road of trying to make men equal rather than providing a way for men clearly unequal to live together in peace.
Lewis had hardly passed his examinations for admission to Oxford when he was called into the war then raging. He enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Somerset light infantry, and on his nineteenth birthday he found himself in the frontline trenches of France. Five months later, in April 1918, he was wounded in battle and sent back to London for recuperation. But even earlier Lewis had heard the distant baying of the Hound of Heaven, and now, in a long period given almost wholly to wide reading, he had the opportunity to learn more about writers such as G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Through them the Hound drew nearer and made it clear enough that Lewis was his prey.
Early in 1919 Lewis was back at University College, Oxford. There he met men of high intelligence who were Christians, or at least theistic, in their thinking. One of them, Owen Barfield, was destined to be his lifelong friend. Barfield had read, said Lewis, all the right books but had got the wrong things out of them. Lengthy and warm debates with Barfield and others forced him to a careful reexamination of the foundations of his atheism. Meanwhile Lewis went on to highest honors, taught for a year at University College, and then was chosen a fellow of Magdalen College, a position he was to hold for thirty years.
Lewis continued to be troubled by what looked like the finger of God pointing directly at him. On the one side were Christian colleagues and on the other side one shattering experience with “the hardest boiled of all the atheists” he had known. This man sat in Lewis’s room before the fire and finally blurted out, “Rum thing. . . . All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” So a second atheist was added to the Old Knock in the process of turning Lewis toward God.
Lewis’s account of how God finally came to him must be read just as he puts it:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. . . . I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.2
The rest of his life was to consist of teaching and writing. If that seems a dull business, remember that Lewis’s adventures among ideas were as exciting as the exploits of a big-game hunter or an Alpine climber. He became one of the great teachers of his time. His lectures were always crowded. One of his students said that he had at his fingertips more knowledge than he had ever known in any other scholar, and another said that Lewis had “the most exact and penetrating mind” he had ever encountered.
Lewis’s conversion brought to him the long-sought joy, and soon he was writing books about Christianity. Millions of copies of them have been sold. Though many of his books treat their subjects directly, such as Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, perhaps his best-loved books are of the creative variety. Would you like to make a trip to hell and examine its fondest hopes and its strategy for winning souls? Would you care to know the subtleties of Satan that surround you and are intent at this moment on destroying you? Would you care to learn