A trip to the zoo that changed eternity

CS Lewis has long been my most significant intellectual mentor. His masterwork, Mere Christianity, was life-changing for me when I encountered it in high school. It was the first time I met someone who wrestled with the same intellectual questions I was asking. His struggles, responses, and encouragement meant the world to me. I still have that copy of his bestselling book, now wrapped in a rubber band because I wore out its binding with much use.

Lewis wrote forty books in his lifetime; another twenty collections of his essays, letters, and poems have appeared after his death. He wrote them all by hand, having never learned to type. His books sell two to six million copies a year today.

Since his death in 1963, hundreds of books have been written about Lewis and his writings. By the centennial of his birth in 1998, there were four major biographies of Lewis, six collections of reminiscences, eight surveys of his fiction, and six others devoted specifically to The Chronicles of Narnia. The movie Shadowlands retold the dramatic story of his marriage to Joy Davidman and her death three years later from cancer, exposing his life to a new generation.

Lewis came to faith that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God” on September 28, 1931. The anniversary of his commitment to Christ affords me an opportunity to share his life and significance with you today and then to offer two practical principles for us all.

His early life

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland). He was the second son of Albert Lewis, a lawyer, and Flora Hamilton Lewis. Warren Hamilton Lewis, known as Warnie, had been born three years earlier.

Lewis hated the name Clive Staples; at the age of four, he pointed to himself and said, “He is Jacksie,” refusing to answer to any other name. So he became Jacksie, later shortened to Jack, to his family and friends for the rest of his life.

Lewis spent his early years in a prosperous and happy home. Their house was known as Little Lea. It was large and gabled, with a multitude of narrow passages and an overgrown garden. It was also home to his father’s large library. He and his brother spent many hours playing in the garden and reading in the library. Two of his favorites were Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Here Lewis acquired his lifelong love for stories and myths. He and his brother invented their own imaginary world, with its own characters and places. We are interested in his story today in part because of Lewis’s early joyous experiences with myths and the truths they can teach.

His happy boyhood came to an early end, with the death of his mother to cancer in 1908. Lewis described its effect in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

In many ways, his father never recovered. He sent both boys to Wynyard School in Watford, Surrey, a boarding school in England. It was a disaster for Jack; he recounted it in Surprised by Joy in a chapter titled “Concentration Camp.”

The schoolmaster was so abusive that he was later sued successfully by a student’s family. The facilities lacked sanitation or hot meals. A few months before his death, Jack wrote that after half a century of effort, he had finally forgiven the man who so scarred his earlier childhood. 

Fortunately, the school closed two years later, and he was sent home. He later described his faith during this period as one of legalism, filled with doubts as to whether his prayers were good enough for God.

A year later, his father returned him to England. This boarding school was a better experience academically, but not spiritually. From 1914 to 1917, Lewis was tutored by the atheist WT Kirkpatrick as a private boarder at his home in Great Bookham, Surrey.

As a teenager, Jack mastered French, German, Italian, and Greek. He learned to love the Greek poetry of Virgil and Homer, and could read it easily in the original language. Kirkpatrick later called Lewis the most accomplished student he had ever tutored in his entire teaching career.

An Oxford scholar

In 1916, at the age of eighteen, Lewis was accepted to University College, Oxford. Oxford University is a configuration of relatively independent colleges; “Uni,” as it is known, is the oldest and perhaps the most prestigious, founded in the year 1249.

However, before he could begin his Oxford studies, Lewis volunteered for active duty in World War I. He fought as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry in the mud of northern France. In April 1918, he was wounded in the Battle of Arras near Lillers, France. He was injured on the back of his left hand, his thigh just above the knee, and his left side below the armpit. A piece of shrapnel lodged there, which was not removed until 1944, when it became a danger to his heart. Even during these terrifying days, Lewis later remarked that he “never sank so low as to pray.”

Following the war’s end, Lewis returned to Oxford. In 1919, he published his first book, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics; he was twenty-one years old. He graduated in 1925 with three “firsts” (we would say summa cum laude), one of only a handful in the history of the University to do so. He took “firsts” in Greek and Latin Literature, Philosophy and Ancient History, and English Literature.

Lewis was then elected to a prestigious teaching post in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalen (pronounced Maudlin) College, Oxford. He remained at Oxford for twenty-nine years before becoming a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge in 1954.

Lewis was a renowned and brilliant scholar in his field of medieval literature. 

The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, is a history of love literature from the early Middle Ages to Shakespeare’s time and remains a classic in the field. A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) is an excellent introduction to Milton’s epic, still widely used in the field. His scholarly masterpiece was English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama (1954).

From atheism to theism

At the time of his mother’s death, Lewis was nominally Christian. But her death was such a setback for him that his faith would not recover for decades. When he did come to personal commitment to Christ, he ended what Warnie called his brother’s “spiritual illness of long standing.”

At the age of seventeen, Lewis wrote his friend Arthur Greeves, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.” Fifteen years later, he wrote the same friend, “Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’ . . . namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.” This change was not a Damascus Road experience; it took Lewis all of those fifteen years to change his mind.

His earliest faith was legalism, reinforced by his disastrous first schooling. He then came under the influence of the atheist WT Kirkpatrick, who moved Lewis toward materialism and existentialism. Lewis came to believe that religion is not a claim to truth but an expression of psychological needs and cultural values, nothing more.

But he never forgot the joy of myth and story, which he had discovered as a child with his brother. He later looked back on this period of his life as a nearly unendurable paradox: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”

As a young Oxford scholar, Lewis moved to the philosophy of Idealism. This is a Platonic view of life which sees the world of the senses as appearance, and ultimate reality as a trans-empirical Absolute. Over time, he came to see that the joy he sought in life points to a reality deeper than itself, that this world is a means to a more significant end. He then encountered the writings of GK Chesterton and was impressed by the way he made the Christian faith so sensible and honest.

In time, he began to experience this Absolute as something or Someone more personal than an idea. In the chapter in Surprised by Joy titled “Checkmate,” he tells the story. Riding on a bus in Oxford in 1929, the pivotal moment came:

I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. . . . Then came the repercussion on the imaginary level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back–drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.

The most significant theological bus ride of the twentieth century ended with this result:

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. 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.

Now Lewis was a theist, someone who believes that God is real, but not yet a Christian, as he makes clear: “It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity. I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly nonhuman.”

From theism to Christianity

He began attending his parish church on Sundays and college chapels during the week. Not because he was a follower of Jesus, but because he felt duty-bound to make some statement about where his religious sympathies had begun to lie.

But the God to whom he surrendered was not done with him yet. Lewis’s father died of colon cancer in 1929, an event which caused him much self-examination regarding his pride and self-sufficiency. Over the next two years, Lewis became fascinated with spiritual literature, which drew him closer to the person of Jesus. George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul was especially helpful.

In February of 1930, he wrote to his friend Owen Barfield,

Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.

On September 19, 1931, Jack had a long talk about Jesus with his literary friends JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. They began their conversation just after dinner, and continued as they walked along Addison’s Walk near Jack’s rooms at Magdalen College. He did not get to bed until four in the morning.

Nine days later, on September 28, 1931, Jack rode in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle to Whipsnade Zoo. In Surprised by Joy, he recalled the event:

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade [zoo] one sunny morning. When I 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 a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

On October 1, 1931, Jack wrote to his old friend Arthur Greeves, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ–in Christianity.” He added that his “long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

Practical principles

For several years, I was privileged to teach doctoral seminars at Oxford University for Dallas Baptist University. Each time, I made time to walk on Addison’s Walk, the beautiful, tree-canopied trail behind Magdalene College where Lewis had his monumental late-night sojourn toward Christ.

I have sat in his pew at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Oxford. I have visited and lectured at his home at The Kilns and hiked in the woods where he hiked. I have seen his desk and wardrobe displayed at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois. I read from Lewis every day of every week and continue to be fascinated by his intellectual genius, literary creativity, and apologetic effectiveness.

However, I never had the privilege of meeting Professor Lewis personally. He died in 1963 (on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated), when I was five years old.

Two principles follow.

One: As with CS Lewis, we can know much about Jesus without knowing Jesus.

I would say I know more about Lewis than most people, though there are certainly scholars who have devoted their careers to studying his life and work and thus know much more about him than I do. But five minutes with the man himself would give me insight no scholar of his thought could match.

It is the same with our Lord. Knowing about him and trusting in him are not the same thing. For example, after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, a “large crowd” came to see Lazarus and to meet Jesus (John 12:9). But the chief priests, armed with the same knowledge, resolved to put them both to death because so many were coming to faith in Christ through this miracle (vv. 10–11).

Even those of us who have met Christ by faith can confuse religion for relationship. We can think that because we have been to church, read the Bible, prayed, and even read articles like this one, we must know Jesus better. That will only be true if we do all of that in his presence and the power of his Spirit. It is when we seek intimacy with the living Lord Jesus that everything else we do becomes a means to this transforming end.

Two: Those who serve Jesus faithfully are used by God to reach more people than they can possibly know.

Lewis died having never visited America, much less met me as a preschooler in Houston, Texas. He obviously could not know that I would be writing about him today. If his story helps you serve Jesus more faithfully, you are yet another example of his continued influence in our culture.

It is the same with us. As Alfred North Whitehead noted, great people plant trees they’ll never sit under. Every word you speak for God’s glory today will echo in eternity. Every prayer you offer is captured and kept as “incense” there (cf. Revelation 8:3). Your next act of obedience will alter your heart and every heart you influence.

Lewis was convinced that the difference Christ makes can make all the difference in the world. In fact, he asserted: “Holiness is irresistible. If even 10 percent of the world’s population had it, the whole world would be converted and happy before the year’s end.”

Let’s do our part to prove him right today, to the glory of God.