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C.S. Lewis on Christianity: Enjoyment and Contemplation
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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:13]
B
And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with CS Lewis on Christianity. We're going on to the next lecture, enjoyment and Contemplation. I'm excited to go into this lecture because it explains something that became really important for me to understand in how Lewis views the world. And it'll be important for the next lectures on how Lewis views prayer in the Bible and suffering and death and heaven and hell. And that's the idea of the difference between, as the name of the lecture suggests, enjoyment and contemplation.
- [00:41]
A
So what you're finding about Lewis is the way he views the world is the way the various ways he views the world.
- [00:48]
B
That's right. And how things. He has a very comprehensive structure of an understanding of the world. And so things are connected. It's not just. He has this idea that's random and unconnected with everything else. And so the way he views enjoyment and contemplation affects the way he views other things like prayer.
- [01:05]
A
You see that come out in his fiction as well as his nonfiction. There's many scenes in the Narnia books or in the Space trilogy about enjoyment, reveling, celebrating feasts and celebrations, and that's all enjoyment. But there's also instances in which deep thought is required. And so it's not enjoyment versus contemplation, it's enjoyment and contemplation. They're two separate activities for different circumstances.
- [01:30]
B
Yeah. And what I love about this, the course in General, is that Dr. Michael Ward, who teaches the course, goes into writings by Lewis that are less well known even. You know, I've read most of Lewis's books, and I had never read this essay called Meditation in a Tool Shed, where he uses an image of this tool shed to explain the difference between enjoyment and contemplation. And the picture that Lewis painted points is imagine yourself in a dark toolshed. You're inside, and it's actually daytime. And so it's light outside. And you can imagine the door of the tool shed just a little bit cracked open so that there's a beam of light coming into the dark tool shed. And there's two ways that you can experience that beam of light. You can look at the beam of light as it's coming in, or you can stand right in the beam of light so that the beam hits your face, your eyes, and you're looking through the beam into the outside world where there is light. And so Lewis says that's the difference between enjoyment and contemplation. When you're looking at the beam from outside, that's contemplation. You're thinking about something when you are standing in the beam and it's hitting you and it allows you to see the outside world. That's enjoyment. You're participating in it and you can.
- [02:50]
A
See how both are good and could be useful. You might need to be looking along the beam to find the thing that it's illuminating, the thing that sent you into the tool shed, the shovel or the spade that you need to retrieve.
- [03:00]
B
That's right, both. And Lewis makes that point that you need both. It's not one or the other, it is doing both. You need to look at things and contemplate about them, but you also need to, especially in the Christian life, you need to enjoy them.
- [03:14]
A
We're pleased to bring you lessons from great men like CS Lewis and Michael Ward and the many other professors and subjects we feature in our courses. And as you know, we don't take any money from federal or state governments. We do this all based on the support of our friends. And if you are willing and able to support us, please go to Hillsdale. Edu course that's Hillsdale Edu Course to make a tax deductible donation and help us continue to spread the good word.
- [03:41]
B
And now let's turn to C.S. lewis on Christianity. This lecture, Enjoyment and Contemplation.
- [03:51]
C
In the first of these six lectures, I mentioned the importance Lewis attached to the dao and participating in the dao the Way of Being Moral. In the second of these six lectures, I talked about the importance he attached to immersing himself in the Christian story and seeing himself as a participant in the Christian drama. Now, in this third lecture, I want to talk to you about Surprised by Joy, his spiritual memoir and the importance he attached. The absolutely crucial importance he attached to enjoyment as opposed to contemplation. This is an absolutely central distinction in Lewis thought, and we'll come on to it in a moment. But first of all, Surprised by Joy, his spiritual memoir, the subtitle of which is the Shape of My Early Life. It's an account of how he became a Christian. As he says in the preface, the book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography. It gives typically autobiographical information only so that when the explicitly spiritual crisis arrives, the reader may understand what sort of person my childh and adolescence had made me.
- [05:15]
He then adds, when the build up is complete, I confine myself strictly to business, by which he means the business of telling how he finally became a Christian. The avowed focus of Surprised by Joy is Lewis's spiritual development that culminates in his acceptance of Christ. Christianity is the destination of the book. Somewhat intriguingly, however, the actual account of his specifically Christian conversion is remarkably brief. My copy of the book has 190 pages, and it's really only two pages out of those 190 that deal with the explicitly spiritual crisis to which the whole story has been moving. Two pages out of 190, which is just over 1% of the book. And the first of these two pages explains how he came to regard Christianity as the fulfillment of paganism, something I touched upon in the previous talk. Then finally, at last, comes the moment we've all been waiting for, the actual change, the moment of conversion. And I'll quote that in a moment. But first I just want us to pause and reflect upon the oddity of this situation, because here we have a whole book designed to explain how Lewis becomes a Christian. Yet the actual moment when he becomes a Christian is gone in a flash. And not only is it dealt with very quickly, it's also dealt with, so it seems, in a very perfunctory fashion, without much in the way of analysis or explanation. At least that is how it seems to some people. And one of the most notable people to say this, to critique Surprised by Joy, is a man called John Wayne, not the film actor, but a man who was tutored by CS Lewis at Oxford and later became one of the youngest members of the Inklings, the group of Lewis's friends who used to meet in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, share the books they were writing and reflecting upon. Surprised by Joy, John Wayne says.
- [07:33]
When Surprised by Joy appeared in 1955, many people turned eagerly to the account of Lewis own conversion, hoping at last to have a glimpse of the personal reasons behind it, the reasons that counted for something in the silence of his own heart. The result was disappointment. The account is as lame and unconvincing as it could possibly be. It is offered as an account of his conversion, but I don't think it is a very successful account of his conversion. A religious conversion is a very difficult thing to write about, and Lewis, I think, is not really successful in making one experience from the inside. That conversion, the key passage in which he sets out to spend the day at Whipsnade, Zoom, not a Christian, and comes back in the evening a Christian, frankly, is a failure. It doesn't come off.
- [08:29]
Now, I think that John Wayne is right about the difficulty of accounting for conversions. In general, John Henry Newman pinpointed the difficulty in his own Apologia pro vita sua. In a religious conversion, Newman said, the whole man moves paper logic is but the record of it. But just because it's difficult to describe a conversion doesn't mean that it's impossible. And Lewis is generally considered a very successful writer, very perceptive, very able to articulate states of mind and habits of soul. And even John Wayne admits that the book contains many interesting and arresting passages. Yet Wayne is also forthright in asserting that the conversion itself is presented in a lame and unconvincing fashion. I think John Wayne is 180 degrees wrong. Lewis was all about experiencing things from the inside. It's a major feature of his whole approach to Christianity, and that's what I think. He succeeds in communicating and surprised by joy, but only if you understand how it's written, what's going on.
- [09:45]
However, I do agree with John Wayne that at first sight, Lewis account of his Christian conversion is underwhelming. And I'd add that his account of his theistic conversion when he comes to believing God is rather overwhelming. When Lewis becomes a theist, it is rhetorically a big, noisy event. Here's the key.
- [10:11]
Must picture me alone in that room at 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. 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. So striking is this passage that that phrase, the most reluctant convert, has become the title of a recent movie about Lewis's conversion. A movie in which, by the way, I play a small part as Lewis's vicar. But that's by the by. The relevant thing for us to notice at this point is that Lewis is here describing his conversion to theism, not to Christianity. The kneeling and the praying is not the climax of the story. Lewis has only come to believe in God, not specifically the Christian God. And to give Lewis credit, he does make that abundantly clear. He says it must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity.
- [11:40]
He couldn't be clearer. The end is yet to come. And yet, because the description of his theistic conversion is so dramatic, so memorable, so quotable, and because the Christian conversion is so brief and so lame and unconvincing, quite a few people have managed to mistake the theistic conversion for the climax, the ultimate destination of the story.
- [12:04]
After the big noisy conversion to theism, you might well have expected Lewis to write up his Christian conversion even more memorably with even more rhetorical flourishes. Instead, what do you get? Let me quote you the passage that John Wayne is complaining about.
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I know very well when, but hardly how the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade Zoo one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And when we reached the zoo, I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought nor in great emotion. Emotional is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. And it was like that moment on top of the bus. Ambiguous freedom or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? At that maximum, a man is what he does. There's nothing of him left over or outside the act.
- [13:20]
As for what we commonly call will and what we commonly call emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much to be quite believed. And we have a secret suspicion that the Great Passion or the Iron Resolution is partly a put up job. They have spoiled Whipsnade since then. Wallaby Wood, with the birds singing overhead and the bluebells underfoot and the wallabies hopping all round, one was almost Eden. Come again.
- [13:51]
Now, I don't know whether you would describe this passage as a disappointment, but it is certainly brief. Admittedly, this is only one of the two pages dealing with Lewis's Christian conversion. But this is the more personal part. The other page, where Lewis talks about Christianity as the fulfillment of paganism is much more philosophical and intellectual, involving even less dramatic action than the passage I just quoted.
- [14:17]
Now, there's something in what John Wayne says here. Lewis did tend deliberately towards a kind of impersonality in much of his work, and it's helpful to bear that in mind when attempting to sort out what's going on or not going on in Surprised by Joy. What Lewis chose to write about was not always necessarily what most resonated with him as an individual. For instance, in Mere Christianity. His aim, he says, was to describe the broad central mainstream of the faith rather than anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or, worse still, to myself.
- [15:02]
He took the same aim in the Problem of Pain, where he attempts to assume nothing that is not professed by all baptized and communicating Christians. And if he was determined to keep his own opinions off stage in much of his work, he was equally determined as a literary critic not to treat poems and novels and plays simply as keys to their authors personalities. In a little known work called the Personal Heresy, Lewis argues that autobiographical details are irrelevant to an understanding of poetry. The poet, he says, is not a man who asks me to look at him. He's a man who says look at that points. And the more I follow the pointing of his finger, the less I can possibly see of him. Now before we turn our attention back to that work in which one would have thought self disclosure unavoidable, his conversion narrative, it would be well to pause and reflect upon the situation I've just described.
- [16:17]
Lewis's impersonality shouldn't be seen as a reason for the supposed failure of Surprised by Joy, but rather as a potential key to its success. When Lewis says don't look at me, but rather look along the way I'm pointing, he's touching upon one of the central distinctions in his whole system of thought, the distinction between enjoyment and contemplation that I mentioned at the start and it's worth spending some time on.
- [16:49]
Lewis first encountered this distinction between enjoyment and contemplation when he was in his mid-20s. He read a book called Space, Time and Deity by the philosopher Samuel Alexander, and he describes this distinction between contemplation and enjoyment as an indispensable tool of thought.
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And he regarded it so highly that he later wrote up his own version of this distinction in a little article called Meditation in a Tool Shed. This is how it I was standing today in a dark tool shed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam from where I stood. That beam of light with the specks of dust floating in it was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed and above all no beam. Instead I saw framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away. The sun, looking along the beam and looking at the beam are very different experiences. Now looking along the beam is what Samuel Alexander had called enjoyment, and looking at the beam is what he had called contemplation. For Lewis this distinction was so fundamental that he was prepared to divide our conscious Knowledge. Accordingly, instead of the twofold division into conscious and unconscious, he says, we need a threefold division, the unconscious, the contemplated and the enjoyed. Contemplation and enjoyment are two different modes of conscious knowledge, conscious experience.
- [19:06]
And like the ancient Persians who debated everything twice, once when they were sober and once when they were drunk, he says we should try out every question in both lights. The light of enjoyment and the light of contemplation. Looking at something from the outside, looking along it from the inside, Lewis remarks, the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. 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 around to look at the hope itself.
- [19:54]
Importantly, he adds, when you interrupt a hope, or for that matter, a love or even a lust, and watch yourself hoping or loving or lusting, your introspection doesn't find nothing. On the contrary, Lewis says, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of those activities. And what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or byproduct for the activities themselves. The activities themselves, the hoping, the loving, the lusting, had their own nature. The nature they have when they are interrupted is quite different, like the swell at sea, working after the wind has dropped.
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When you play musical statues at a children's party, what you observe when the music stops is not a room full of children dancing around crazily to the music, but a lot of bodies trembling with the desire to be very still.
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Or to use one of Lewis's images. What you see is not the wave, but the wave's imprint on the sand, the after effects.
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And there is one experience that, it turns out, is much less easily contemplated than enjoyed, namely the spiritual life of the Christian.
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The new identity, the transforming faith that comes to a person baptized and reborn in the Holy Spirit is like a beam of light that you look along, that you enjoy from within. And so Lewis can say, in the Christian life, you are not usually looking at the Holy Spirit.
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You have to think of the third person of the. Of the Holy Trinity as something inside you or behind you.
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You can't step outside your new Christian personality because.
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Christ's Spirit is I above me and within me and below me and all about me. That's how Lewis understands the Christian's relationship with Christ's Spirit. It's immersive, it's to be enjoyed, it's to be participated in the Christian's relationship with God is inescapably participatory, and looking along the beam of that participation means inevitably that the beam is invisible. You don't see the beam, you see that which the beam illuminates when you are looking along.
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So Lewis can say that it is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super added gift for which we give thanks when it comes. And that's all about it.
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He quotes George MacDonald approvingly where MacDonald says, the fool rejoices in his consciousness instead of the life of that consciousness.
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The Holy Spirit is the life of the Christian's consciousness.
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Knowing the Holy Spirit is incomparably more important than either knowing about the Holy Spirit or knowing about the knower yourself who knows Him. As Lewis puts it in Reflections on the Psalms, there's no question of learning a subject, but of steeping ourselves in a personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere. This same principle is to be found all over his work, an emphasis upon what the French would call connetre knowledge rather than savoir knowledge, or what the Spanish would call connoisseur knowledge as opposed to saber knowledge. Knowledge by acquaintance over against mere knowledge about.
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- [25:39]
E
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- [26:47]
C
Now, of course, Lewis thought that there was a place for contemplation, for the abstracted and external, theoretical, uninvolved, observational, scientific knowledge. But he seems to have regarded it as a subset of enjoyment. Enjoyment is the more foundational way of knowing.
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And particularly when it comes to Christian experience. The larger reality is the tasting of Christ's life, inhabiting the Holy Spirit, being inhabited by the Holy Spirit, allowing it to grasp the whole of one's being, including one's contemplative intellect. So it's of crucial importance to bear enjoyment in mind when trying to understand the way Lewis describes his conversion experience at the end of Surprise by Joy, because the sinful personality which there undergoes conversion is undergoing a conversion which is principally enjoyed, not contemplated. Lewis remarks that when he came to a belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, there was nothing of him left over or outside the act. The whole man had moved. He had, as it were, stepped into the beam of Christian knowledge. He didn't retain an angle on God. He didn't retain a neutral perspective from which to survey his new faith. Why not? Because his new faith comprised his whole vision. As he put it in an interview with the Billy Graham Evangelistic association, no part of you is outside the action.
- [28:46]
Likewise, his readers, we, as we read the Surprised by Joy, if we are properly to understand what's going on, need to read his account of it in a manner which immerses our whole attention and sympathy and imagination.
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Now, at this point, we need to recall how Surprised by Joy begins. It begins with Lewis explaining that, in a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else than joy. And by joy, Lewis doesn't just mean happiness, but eternal longing, yearning, an inconsolable pang, what the German Romantics called a Zenzucht, a stab of awareness that one is not yet united to the heart of beauty and goodness and truth. Joy, in Lewis's sense, is in this life an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. Joy, more than anything else, is what resonated deeply with Lewis at the heart of his own being. And the first chapter of Surprised by Joy is carefully constructed so as to introduce it as the major third theme. So Lewis recounts how his earliest aesthetic experiences were incurably romantic, and how once, in those early days, his brother had brought into the house the lid of a biscuit tin, which he'd covered with moss and twigs and garnished with leaves and flowers, so as to make a kind of toy garden or a toy forest. This was the first beauty Lewis says, he ever knew. He says, I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live, my imagination of paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden. Eight pages on, and Lewis returns to this toy garden. When describing his first real experience of joy, he says this. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day, there suddenly arose in me, without warning and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me. Milton's enormous bliss of Eden, giving the full ancient meaning to enormous come somewhere near.
- [31:26]
Was a sensation, of course, of desire. But desire for what? Not certainly for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor, even though that came into it, for my own past. Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time, and in a certain sense, everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. Now this is the origin of Lewis's pilgrimage, his quest for joy, or rather, as it turns out, joy's quest for him. And we should keep it firmly in mind when we reach the end of the book and hear him describe what he felt when he arrived at Whipsnade Zoo, at last believing that Jesus Christ is the son of God. This, I think, is the key sentence of the whole.
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Wallaby Wood, with the birds singing overhead and the bluebells underfoot and the wallabies hopping all around, one was almost Eden. Come again. Notice how brief this description is. Lewis could have given us pages and pages of flowery description about this enclosure at the zoo, but he gives us just one sentence. With three birds overhead, flowers underfoot, wallabies hopping all around him. There's abundant creativity in evidence on every side of him. Above, below, around him, he finds beauty and colour and life. Now recall what he says about experience of the Holy Spirit. He is above me and within me and below me and all about me, the enormous bliss of Eden. Which accompanied Lewis's first taste of joy, is now re encountered, but this time with a difference. Eden is no longer a toy garden on a biscuit tin lid that he could hold and look at from the outside.
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Rather, Eden is now a garden that holds him.
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He can step into this garden.
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So think symbolically what this all suggests. Eden, paradise has been regained. Innocence has been recovered, or at any rate almost. Almost eat and come again. Because the consummation in heaven has yet to be attained. Nevertheless, the whole man has moved under or into the divine light. There's no residual spectator separate from the experience outside the beam of Christian faith, no anxious sentinel standing at the corner of Lewis's own mind looking in on this transformation, as he says so often had happened in his earlier experiences of joy when he'd been trying to catch it. Read this way in the way which I think it must surely have been intended to be read. The account of what Lewis underwent at Whipsnade Zoo reveals itself to be actually a rather profound and moving passage. And it admits us to the core of his faith because his whole world.
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And his whole outlook upon it have begun to be recreated in Christ, the second Adam, the true possessor of Eden.
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But it is easy to overlook the significance of the moment.
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And so John Wayne can be excused, in a sense, for missing it. It's not easy to spot, not least because it's introduced with a very downbeat sentence. They have spoiled Whipsnade since then. But this downplaying is characteristic of Lewis's reticence to foreground himself.
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He was reticent for two reasons. First, because he wants his readers to follow the pointing of his finger, and the more they look at the pointer, the less they can look at where he's pointing. The second reason is that in attempting to describe his conversion, Lewis is touching upon the most important encounter of his life. The tenderest, the richest, the most beautiful thing he'd ever experienced. It was not something he was going to herald with drums and whistles.
- [36:20]
He expounds upon this hesitancy in his sermon the Weight of Glory, where he says, in speaking of this desire for our own far off country which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I'm almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you. The secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence. The secret also, which pierces with such sweetness that when in very intimate conversation, the Mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect a laugh at ourselves. The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. Lewis couldn't hide his encounter with Christ in Surprised by Joy. To record that encounter was, after all, the main reason for writing this book in the first place. On the other hand, he couldn't tell it either. It was too intimate, too deep, too precious to make overt and simple and accessible. He was not going to cast his pearls before swine. And so he constructs the account with imaginative skill, with theological intelligence, and indeed with artistic license, because he redates the whole event to late springtime, when bluebells are in flower, rather than to the autumn, when he was actually driven to Whipsnade Zoo. But he does all this, I believe, in order to communicate the nature of the experience from the inside. He gives us an enjoyable account of what happened to him, but we have to join him, as it were, in that experience. We have to step with him into Wallaby Wood. We mustn't just contemplate him making that transition, because then we won't.
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Understand what he's looking along. We must sympathize with him. We must sensitively get on his frequency.
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At the start of the book, remember, he had held a garden. Now the garden holds him. He has moved from the logic of contemplation to the logic of enjoyment.
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Surprised by Joy is a very artful story. I had read it four or five times before I began to pick up on this structure. And what gives it away is the way that the whole book is bookended with the two references to Eden. Lewis is trying to admit us to what was the most important spiritual encounter he had ever had, the hinge about which his whole life turned, one which was necessarily enjoyed, not contemplated. For Lewis to have made his discovery of Christian faith more easily contemplatable would have been to misrepresent the nature of the experience.
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The whole thrust of Surprised by Joy, remember, is towards.
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The logic of enjoyment. Lewis realizes at last that all his waitings and watchings for joy, all his vain hopes to find some mental content on which he could, so to speak, lay his finger and say, got it. This is it. All that had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.
- [40:14]
And that's not just a mistake, that is a kind of idolatry. It confuses the wave with the wave's imprint on the sand.
- [40:29]
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