The summer of biography ended last night as I finished reading Surprised by Joy. I managed to read three biographies this summer (including this one – and I wrote about the other two HERE and HERE). It became the summer of the Inklings – quite a contrast from last summer’s focus on the Great Awakening with Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards. But actually my choice of biography reading over the past two summers is very telling about my personality and about my general fascination with C.S. Lewis – and Surprised by Joy epitomizes this.
George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards fascinate me because they were great doctrinal preachers who emphasized the need for a personal encounter with God through Jesus Christ. The ‘encounter’ part of that equation is important for me because it is something that is not necessarily stressed as much as I would like in the Reformed ‘circles’ I’m accustomed to. The other part of the equation is doctrine. These men didn’t just comment on passages of Scripture – they exposed the doctrine(s) of the Scriptures they preached and brought them to bear on their hearers (and subsequent readers) in a weighty way. They were personifications of depth in preaching and depth in Christian experience. They wanted to experience God as fully as they could and so they dug deep into the Mind of God in the Scriptures, and probed deep into their own hearts as they applied the Scriptures. They weren’t fluff and frills kind of guys.
Though C.S. Lewis is different from them in many ways, there are striking similarities. There is a depth to Lewis’ thinking about God, a depth of application of biblical doctrine to the heart that is somewhat reminiscent of them.
I’ve heard the question raised about whether or not C.S. Lewis was a Calvinist. He certainly would have denied that he was, but you get the sense that his denial of Calvinism was really mostly a denial of a caricature of Calvinism. He was at odds with the doctrine of Total Depravity (you see this in a couple of his essays). But the doctrine of Total Depravity that he denies was not actually the Calvinistic doctrine of Total Depravity at all – it was the idea that men can do nothing good. Calvinists don’t believe that (or at least they shouldn’t). Instead we tend to believe that natural man is capable of much good – but that even this good is unacceptable to God because of man’s sinful nature, which taints everything about him and proceeding from him, and makes him spiritually incapable of making the first move toward God. The Calvinist doctrine is not that man is as bad as he can be, or that he is incapable of love or good, but that he is dead toward God, and thus in need of new birth – a new nature quickened by the Holy Spirit.
Why do I bring this up here? I bring it up because you see in Lewis’ autobiography one of the most clear examples of the doctrine known as Irresistable Grace that you will ever see. From Lewis’ expression that, as a teenager, his imagination was ‘baptized’ by George MacDonald’s Phantastees, to his ever-evolving philosophical positions, to his amiable response to Christian authors while he was an atheist, Lewis portrays himself as slowly, steadily, reluctantly being drawn to a God with whom he wanted nothing to do.
That’s all a part of the narrative, but you also get his interpretation of the narrative in words like this:
- ‘And so the Great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue’ (ch. XIII).
- ‘Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side? My own analogy, as I now first perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing. Hamlet could initiate nothing’ (Ch. XIV).
- ‘My Adversary waved the point. It sank into into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, ‘I am the Lord’; ‘I am that I am’…Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat’ (Ibid).
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…In the Trinity Term of 1929 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. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation (Ibid).
And then consider Lewis’ assessment of his own heart:
For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion (Ibid).
I’m not trying to make a case that Lewis was a Calvinist – only that as a Calvinist myself, it is easy to relate to his experience, not only doctrinally, but also from my own experience in my conversion to Christ.
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I found Lewis’ experience of Joy equally enthralling and relatable. This is old news for C.S. Lewis buffs, but it bears repeating:
…It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is (ch. I).
Lewis relates at the end of the book that he pretty much stopped considering, and longing for, Joy after his conversion to Christianity. He still experienced it to be sure, but he finally realized that this ‘stabbing’ of Joy was really God’s stabbing at him all along.
Do you ever find such pleasure in a book or work of art that you find it hard to smile or rejoice? Instead you only long, in your melancholy, that the book or art or whatever you are experiencing would continue? I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.
I have been thinking about the idea of ‘memories’ lately, meditating on 1 Samuel 7 and Samuel’s Ebenezer. It struck me that there are no truly ‘joyful’ memories. Instead memories are most often like Lewis’ Joy. Even the best, the happiest, the most treasured memories seldom do more than to create a melancholy longing that those memories could be experienced again in the present – and even that ‘longing’ is desirable, more desirable than most things.
It is all meant to point us to the everlasting Now – ‘I am who I am’ – ‘Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not. As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.’
Surprised by Joy is a wonderful book. I can’t believe I’ve just now taken the time to read it. I experienced Lewis’ Joy in my reading, and it did what it should have done – it set my mind on God and his grace, Jesus and his salvation, the Spirit and his beautiful work of wooing and compelling.
