C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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       4 CONVERSION

      After all his anxiety over finding a suitable home, it is ironic that Lewis now had a far more pressing matter on his mind than moving into The Kilns. He had been fighting for years to keep God at bay and the purchase of The Kilns almost coincided with the end of this struggle. The fullest account of how this was resolved he was later to tell in Surprised by Joy, but to fit it into perspective, we must move back a few years.

      It was shortly after he had taken his finals in the English School that Lewis arrived at what he called his ‘New Look’, which involved the belief that ‘the Christian myth’ – as he called it – conveyed as much truth as most minds are able to grasp. The pleasant thing about this belief was that there was nothing to fear and – better yet – nothing to obey. Then, in 1924, while he was deputizing for E.F. Carritt at Univ., a number of things began to unsettle this comfortable ‘New Look’. A rereading of Euripides’ Hippolytus, with its world’s end imagery, threw him again into the state of intense longing, the old ‘Joy’ that he had not experienced in years. Shortly afterwards he read Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) and found there a distinction between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’ which was thereafter to play a very important part in his intellectual make-up. According to Alexander, you ‘enjoy’ the act of thinking and ‘contemplate’ whatever it is you are thinking about. For example, ‘You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible.’¹