'I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'This bo'I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity […] The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less 'Confession' like those of Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'A spiritual thriller' – The Sunday Times
For an atheist, unfamiliar with the experience of God, this does not read much like a conversion story at all. Indeed, it's hard to see anything much to do with religion in the first 80% of the book, and I probably would have missed all of it if I hadn't been clued in by the front cover which has the title 'Surprised by Joy' and the quote 'A spiritual thriller'. If you want to read the book as a thriller then my explaining how the extended childhood description is laying clues for the final spiritual epiphany will be a massive spoiler. So I'll leave that to the end.
If, like me, you have a morbid fascination with Edwardian English school stories then you'll probably find this a very interesting book, as it does cover a lot of Lewis's childhood. I find it astonishing how much casual cruelty was perpetrated as a matter of course.
I have seen Oldie make that child bend down at one end of the school-room and then take a run of the room's length at each stroke; but P. was the trained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until, towards the end of the torture, there came a noise quite unlike a human utterance. That peculiar croaking or rattling cry, that, and the grey faces of all the other boys, and their deathlike stillness, are among the memories I could willingly dispense with.'
I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that what was common practise a hundred years ago, we now see as obvious abuse which ought to get the perpetrator imprisoned in a mental facility. And that's before you get to the horrors inflicted by children on children, encouraged by their teachers: the utter servility of the fagging system; the open and ubiquitous quasi-prostitution; the hysterical devotion to teams, houses, and sports; the endless bullying. Lewis is particularly interesting as someone who hated every moment of it, thinks it counter-productive, and yet still feels the shame at having failed to thrive in such a system. And the oddest thing about it is that so many of the people involved seem to have been otherwise completely decent. Like the teacher Smewgy (yes, absolutely everyone in this book has a ridiculously English name or nick-name) of whom Lewis says:
'Nor had I ever met before perfect courtesy in a teacher. It had nothing to do with softness; Smewgy could be very severe, but it was the severity of a judge, weighty and measured, without taunting. [He said] 'You will have to be whipped if you don't do better at your Greek Grammar next week, but naturally that has nothing to do with your manners or mine.' The idea that the tone of conversation between one gentleman and another should be altered by a flogging (any more than by a duel) was ridiculous. His manner was perfect: no familiarity, no hostility, no threadbare humour; mutual respect, decorum. 'Never let us live with amousia' was one of his favourite maxims.'
And stranger yet, that so many of the people who passed through this sadistic house of horrors should be so admirable; consider the stoicism and decency that you find in early 20th century literature: Ford Madox Ford or Tolkien or Orwell (Orwell has also written a very good description of the hell of boarding school). So on the one hand Lewis is suffering greatly at school, and on the other he's experiencing flashes of joy that he finds at first in Norse mythology, then in Celtic and Roman myth, in Wagner's music, in the contemplation of distant mountains. He strives after joy, frustratingly finding that he cannot hold onto it. The more he studies mythology the less joy it brings him. The more he carefully sets up the correct conditions for joy, the less likely it is to appear. None of this seems to relate to Christianity, and the small amount of text given over to religion describes how his failure at childhood prayer was a contributing factor in giving up Christianity. This is interesting and insightful, especially considering the sort of Atheism that is so common nowadays (and the sort that Lewis held when he was an atheist): angry and resentful of the demands of religion. Little Lewis was told as a child 'one must not only say one's prayers but think about what one was saying.' And consequently 'I 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 'realisation', by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections.' Needless to say he soon leads himself into an insomniac cycle of trying to force a sincere feeling in every prayer, which is about as useful as trying to grasp joy, and soon leads him to feel his religion as an intolerable burden. This was combined with a natural pessimism which felt that the world was a bit rubbish really, as Lucretius says:
Had God designed the world, it would not be, A world so frail and faulty as we see.
Which Lewis seems to think is the strongest argument for atheism – I find that a bit odd. It seems a bit presumptuous to imagine that we could reliably guess what God would or wouldn't create and draw conclusions about his existence from our assumptions about what he would do if he existed.
Anyway, that's most of the book: the story of his schooldays, and his home in Ireland, interspersed with the love of mythology and nature. And then all of a sudden he converts in the final few chapters. These pass with bewildering speed, and a great deal of it went over my head. Some parts of the conversion seem utterly mystical, and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you had to be there.' And other parts are intensely philosophical and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you need a post-grad degree in philosophy to understand this.'
The mystical part begins when Lewis reads George Macdonald's Phantastes. His experience while reading the book:
'It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in an other sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time in my life the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives tales, there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me by proximity – something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it.'
There's two more pages like this. I would like to review it – I would like to have an opinion – but I have just absolutely no idea what's going on here. I know no bright shadows or siren voices, near or far. Clearly something profound is happening to Lewis, but it's incomprehensible to me. The philosophy is even further beyond me. Indeed, it makes me wonder who it was that requested Lewis tell how he passed from Atheism to Christianity. I suspect it was someone who was already familiar with all his terms, or else surely he would have explained them better? Suffice to say, if you want to follow the philosophy them you had better already have some understanding of the Noumenal and the Phenomenal self; what Bergson can tell us about Nothing, what 'life' means to Shelley compared to Goethe; what is a Steinerite; what Lewis means by Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, Pantheism, the new Psychology, Rationalism, Idealism, Realism, Materialist philosophy, Fantasy (in the Coleridgean sense, as distinct from Fantasy as psychologists understand the term); stoical monism; Hegel, Bradley and Berkeley; or Wordsworth and his lost glory. To give some idea of how swiftly Lewis takes up and dismisses these arguments:
'If one kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the senses, aided by instruments and co-ordinated so as to form 'science', then one would have to go much further – as many have since gone – and adopt a Behaviouristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. But such a theory was, and is, unbelievable to me. […] Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.
This is all bewilderingly fast for me. There is too much implied information, too many skips over steps of reasoning. What does it mean that science is in quotation marks? Why does believing that rock-bottom reality is the one we sense lead to behaviouristic aesthetics? How does one get from rejecting behaviourism to accepting that the whole universe is mental? And what does that even mean? I'm floundering – never has a book in such clear prose made me feel so stupid and ignorant. I can in part see that an argument is being made here. Each time Lewis rejects one of these philosophies, he must also reject a strut in the argument against God, and so he is innocently and unwittingly drawing closer and closer to his conversion as he casually demolishes his way through philosophy, with no idea what corner he is backing into. As he says: 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' This is thrillerish – but would probably be a lot more thrilling if one could understand the implication of each column crumbling. He does slow down to offer some explanation when it comes to Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity*, which had some profound implications for Lewis's understanding of Joy. The idea is this: you can experience 'enjoyment' and 'contemplation'. These are technical terms which roughly mean experiencing and thinking about. In Lewis's words:
'In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved's death, and, in Alexander's sense, 'enjoy' the loneliness and grief; but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology'.
The implications of this are that you cannot enjoy something at the same time as contemplating it. You enjoy your love while you contemplate your beloved. As soon as you start contemplating your love then you are enjoying your introspection. As Lewis says: 'The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction.' This gave me a little frisson of recognition, because it reminded me of Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book in which he says that if one meditates to a high level then one eventually begins to perceive how our direct experience of the world is actually not the same thing as our perception of it – but our attention moves so rapidly that we don't notice the difference between sensation and interpretation. Lewis never mentions Buddhism once, I wonder if he didn't know about it, or if he just didn't have much of an opinion of it.
Anyway, what does this have to do with God and joy? Firstly, he at last understood why he could never hold onto joy: 'I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, 'This is it' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.' But it is the next step in his reasoning that brings it all together:
There was no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, in so far as it was also simultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object. Erotic love is not like desire for food, nay, a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in the very same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from one another. […] I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. […] I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.'
Even an atheist like me can see where this is going. So this is the thriller – sorry for spoiling it. All of Lewis's childhood flashes and darts of joy were clues leading him along the path to God. He felt joy in those things because 'all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth', wherever he perceived that reflection he felt the stab of joy. Joy is the signpost, the indication that our attention is finally fixed on the utter reality.
So there it is, and I'm still unsure how to feel about it. It was an interesting and enjoyable read. It didn't quite give me what I wanted – which was to understand how and why Lewis became a Christian, so that I might either be persuaded along with him, or allowed to be comfortably certain that it was not true. Instead I'm left with a dozen clues for further reading, and the headachy feeling that the whole subject is a lot more complicated than my youthful atheism would have allowed.
*I have no idea how to feel about the fact that Alexander's book, which had such a profound influence on Lewis, is totally unreviewed on Goodreads and most often shelved under 'abandoned', and so neglected that it appears to have been credited to a completely different Samuel Alexander....more
When I was little grown-ups would say to me, 'Don't be in such a hurry to grow up. You should savour your childhood. These are the best years of your When I was little grown-ups would say to me, 'Don't be in such a hurry to grow up. You should savour your childhood. These are the best years of your life!' This is nonsense. It is obvious to anybody with half a brain that childhood is a prison. You are powerless and penniless; your entire life is designed and directed by people who are completely empowered to frustrated even your smallest desires: telling you what to eat, when to sleep, when to piss, what to do! This is true even for children like me who have fairly idyllic childhoods: loving parents, bucolic setting, all the privileges. Poor Ender is not controlled by parents and teachers. He is conscripted, at the tender age of six, into a military academy for gifted children in the hope that he will become the perfect soldier to lead the war against a genocidal alien race hell-bent on the destruction of humanity. The situation is desperate and there just isn't time for the luxury of kindness: anything that will propel Ender to greatness must be done and Ender has an education that would make a Spartan baulk. This book is a sort of distorted SF exaggeration of the worst parts of childhood. The distant and uncaring teachers fail to step in to prevent bullying, leaving Ender to fend for himself against the bigger kids. As Ender excels at the tests and challenges they give him, his only reward is harder tests and bigger challenges (and more attention from the bullies). He struggles to make friends, only to be separated from them as they grow up and graduate to different places. I've made it sound bleak – and to a certain extent it is. But the best of science fiction is here: Ender is resourceful, whip-smart and determined. No matter the challenge, he can overcome it. And the education itself is a cracking good read. Between regular lessons in academic topics suitable for military officers, the children also practise strategy in zero-gravity battles against each other. The consequences of zero-g battle have been clearly thought through, resulting in some really interesting battle scenes, and it makes for a wonderfully paced book, with the chapters alternating between edge-of-your-seat fight scenes and slower, more painful moments of Ender's personal growth or interactions with the other kids. Above all this is a surprisingly compassionate, emotionally complex book, with more psychological insight that I expect from hard SF. It would've been easy to write this same novel as Harry-Potter-in-space, where gifted kids are whisked away to a special school where they have adventures. But no, there is absolutely not flinching away from the damage done to these kids in the name of survival, and Ender's struggles to do the right thing and to be a good person, even while he's under so much pressure to win at any cost, is heart-breaking. Other children at the academy do not have Ender's strength of character, and it's clear that some of the worst bullying and misery is the result of children being given more responsibility and pressure than they are ready to take. You might think that the teachers would be set-up as the villains of the piece, but they too are represented humanely: riddled with guilt about what they're doing, and terrified that it might all be for nothing. In a few succinct interludes, their hopes and fears are sketched in surprising depth. And when all's said and done, there is plenty of consideration given to pain of healing and forgiveness....more
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