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Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." This book is not an autobiography. It is not a confession. It is, however, certainly one of the most beautiful and insightful accounts of a person coming to faith. Here, C.S. Lewis takes us from his childhood in Belfast through the loss of his mother, to boarding school and a youthful atheism in England, to the trenches of World War I, and then to Oxford, where he studied, read, and, ultimately, reasoned his way back to God. It is perhaps this aspect of Surprised by Joy that we—believers and nonbelievers—find most compelling and meaningful; Lewis was searching for joy, for an elusive and momentary sensation of glorious yearning, but he found it, and spiritual life, through the use of reason. In this highly personal, thoughtful, intelligent memoir, Lewis guides us toward joy and toward the surprise that awaits anyone who seeks a life beyond the expected."Lewis tempered his logic with a love for beauty, wonder, and magic . . . He speaks to us with all the power and life-changing force of a Plato, a Dante, and a Bunyan."— Christianity Today "The tension of these final chapters holds the interest like the close of a thriller."— Times Literary Supplement C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898–1963), one of the great writers of the twentieth century, also continues to be one of our most influential Christian thinkers. He wrote more than thirty books, both popular and scholarly, including The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters , The Four Loves , Mere Christianity , and Till We Have Faces .
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
C.S. Lewis
1,202 books49.8k followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,473 reviews
April 6, 2009
C.S. Lewis, the man that "thought his way to God" (according to the back of the book), isn't really all man - he's part reading machine. Everything, every sentence, in his spiritual autobiography is laden with some classical allusion to a work that the normal person hasn't read in Greek or Latin.
After the death of his mother in his youth, Lewis enters a long lasting period of atheism. Although he knew epistemologically that God didn't exist, he still felt that there was something else "out there." This is different from agnosticism though - he believed that the "something else" was not divine, but it was a Romantic quality. Lewis' life was occasionally visited by what he came to call "Joy": "that unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction." Not how you would define joy? Me neither, but this operational definition fits into his scheme of finding God. Enamored with Joy, Lewis sought to experience it as often as possible - in reading great books, listening to music, experiencing nature, etc, etc. However, he finally realized he was confusing object with product: these things could not produce joy, they were only vehicles of it from some other source. As the book draws to a close, Lewis is truly surprised by a God who cares, a "true mythology" (the Christian narrative), and the creator of joy. In his thirst for Joy, Lewis had gone to the cups, glasses, and water bottles that had satiated him before - now he had found the well of living water.
After the death of his mother in his youth, Lewis enters a long lasting period of atheism. Although he knew epistemologically that God didn't exist, he still felt that there was something else "out there." This is different from agnosticism though - he believed that the "something else" was not divine, but it was a Romantic quality. Lewis' life was occasionally visited by what he came to call "Joy": "that unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction." Not how you would define joy? Me neither, but this operational definition fits into his scheme of finding God. Enamored with Joy, Lewis sought to experience it as often as possible - in reading great books, listening to music, experiencing nature, etc, etc. However, he finally realized he was confusing object with product: these things could not produce joy, they were only vehicles of it from some other source. As the book draws to a close, Lewis is truly surprised by a God who cares, a "true mythology" (the Christian narrative), and the creator of joy. In his thirst for Joy, Lewis had gone to the cups, glasses, and water bottles that had satiated him before - now he had found the well of living water.
April 19, 2026
Easiest five stars I've ever given. A monumental autobiography! Jack Lewis - you Rock.
The Seed of Faith was deposited by fate amid the detritus and wholesale carnage of the trenches in WWI. Jack Lewis was no fool. He sensed he had survived it for a reason.
Back at Oxford, medieval allegory added fuel to the fire of conviction that we are strangers to the weird reality of heaven, a reality so hard but logical that it could only make sense to an ordinary Piers Plowman or in the hand-to-hand combat between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!
And it would become for him a Great Divorce between Good and Evil.
J.R.R. Tolkien had confided to him - while as yet an agnostic - that there was a reason for the foreign face of God.
He had doubts then that the Great Mind had created the horrific slaughter of trench warfare out of the same race that had produced the humble sacrifice of an Old Testament Ruth, a building block in the long lineage of Jesus from King David.
In other words, he had to learn that the horror of realty is only a symbol.
Objectively, its horror becomes palatable.
The world had become to him the unstable solution of Hell AND Heaven... it had erupted in brutality and genuine love at the centre of the Silent Planet, the allegory of his faith's quest. He had been shaken to the core.
He had been cornered in Tolkien's rooms by the Hound of Heaven.
Galvanized rapidly by his newfound belief, he now could become the voice of freedom against the Nazi Terror on BBC shortwave broadcasts throughout all Europe.
For the second world war and all its depredation were now part and parcel of his newfound Faith!
The Seed of Faith was deposited by fate amid the detritus and wholesale carnage of the trenches in WWI. Jack Lewis was no fool. He sensed he had survived it for a reason.
Back at Oxford, medieval allegory added fuel to the fire of conviction that we are strangers to the weird reality of heaven, a reality so hard but logical that it could only make sense to an ordinary Piers Plowman or in the hand-to-hand combat between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!
And it would become for him a Great Divorce between Good and Evil.
J.R.R. Tolkien had confided to him - while as yet an agnostic - that there was a reason for the foreign face of God.
He had doubts then that the Great Mind had created the horrific slaughter of trench warfare out of the same race that had produced the humble sacrifice of an Old Testament Ruth, a building block in the long lineage of Jesus from King David.
In other words, he had to learn that the horror of realty is only a symbol.
Objectively, its horror becomes palatable.
The world had become to him the unstable solution of Hell AND Heaven... it had erupted in brutality and genuine love at the centre of the Silent Planet, the allegory of his faith's quest. He had been shaken to the core.
He had been cornered in Tolkien's rooms by the Hound of Heaven.
Galvanized rapidly by his newfound belief, he now could become the voice of freedom against the Nazi Terror on BBC shortwave broadcasts throughout all Europe.
For the second world war and all its depredation were now part and parcel of his newfound Faith!
January 4, 2012
Okay, I started this today and finished it today, and will probably reread it. This has happened with many of Lewis' books. I've read The Four Loves several times and am getting ready to reread Miracles. There often seems to be a lot that I don't get first time through.
This is a wonderful book with some less than wonderful parts. By that I mean discourses on difficult or unpleasant events and/or topics. I won't try to go over this volume in any kind of detail. I suspect it will "strike" different readers in different ways. The book communicated to me on several levels. From surprise at the details about certain things in the British Public School system (circa early 1900s) and thankfulness that America was spared those parts to a realization that most people in the last 60 years (+or-) could be argued to have received almost no education. The book is valuable simply on the level of a biography and personal account history. (My generation, for example, was the first where Latin and what was then called "foreign languages" became "elective" classes instead of simply being required. In my generation basic math, reading, grammar skills, along with at least rudimentary knowledge of history, and social studies was "required" to pass from grade to grade and then graduate.)
Aside from this however and on deeper levels the book deals with Lewis' rejection of all things spiritual, mystical, metaphysical or religious and decision to become an atheist. It then leads us through his life and reasoning from there to theism and then to Christianity.
I could say a lot more about this book but I can't in this limited space give an account that would come close to doing it justice.
Highly recommended.
This is a wonderful book with some less than wonderful parts. By that I mean discourses on difficult or unpleasant events and/or topics. I won't try to go over this volume in any kind of detail. I suspect it will "strike" different readers in different ways. The book communicated to me on several levels. From surprise at the details about certain things in the British Public School system (circa early 1900s) and thankfulness that America was spared those parts to a realization that most people in the last 60 years (+or-) could be argued to have received almost no education. The book is valuable simply on the level of a biography and personal account history. (My generation, for example, was the first where Latin and what was then called "foreign languages" became "elective" classes instead of simply being required. In my generation basic math, reading, grammar skills, along with at least rudimentary knowledge of history, and social studies was "required" to pass from grade to grade and then graduate.)
Aside from this however and on deeper levels the book deals with Lewis' rejection of all things spiritual, mystical, metaphysical or religious and decision to become an atheist. It then leads us through his life and reasoning from there to theism and then to Christianity.
I could say a lot more about this book but I can't in this limited space give an account that would come close to doing it justice.
Highly recommended.
August 14, 2020
Many of us are familiar with The Chronicles Of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and perhaps even Mere Christianity, but I suspect few readers are acquainted with their author, C. S. Lewis, often regarded as one of the most influential writers of his day. In fact, I never knew what the initials in his name stood for. I spent three invigorating days getting re-acquainted with the early life that shaped the literary talent of Lewis, indisputably an intellectual giant of the twentieth century. This is a re-read and yet it was as if I was reading this partial autobiography for the very first time.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) was born in Belfast to a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter. He had an older brother with whom he shared a close relationship. His parents were bookish people, and Lewis developed an early love of reading. It was interesting to trace the beginnings of his literary gift. Lewis took to writing stories when he was just a child. He said, “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” and ”... in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.” Lewis had the privilege of access to excellent tutors in boarding school who provided prodigious exposure to the classics and cultivated in him a love of good literature. His happiest school years were spent under the tutelage of Kirk, affectionately known as ‘The Great Knock’, who taught him Homer, German, and Italian. That Kirk recognized Lewis’ talent was evident in this communication to the latter’s father, ”You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that.” (Apparently, Lewis was appalling at Math.) Kirk was right. In 1917, Lewis went on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, graduated with a First in Greek and Latin Literature (1920), a First in Philosophy and Ancient History (1922), and a First in English (1923). He eventually became a distinguished writer and a professor at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University.
The heart of this memoir is Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and his lifelong search for Joy. It was fascinating to read about his conversion, his apostasy, and his conversion again. Lewis became a believer when he went to boarding school in Belsen for the very first time. His tutor, Oldie was a pupil-spanking tyrant and a bit insane. In his recollection, ”Life in a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that is, it teaches one to live by hope.” Poor child. He attended a high Anglo-Catholic church. Here, he ’heard the doctrines of Christianity…taught by men who obviously believed them.’ Then followed a period of apostasy in the Preparatory School years at Wyvern when he gave up the faith and became an atheist at age 15. You have to read and find out why. Years later, his friendship with chiefly J.R.R. Tolkien and several others led him to critically examine his life and beliefs before his conversion to Theism in 1929. In Lewis’ own words, he was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." I have to admit that the systematic process in which Lewis read, argued, and figured out the existence of the Absolute and the true definition of Joy is one I could not fully fathom. His training in philosophy and dialectics seemed to have led him logically and soundly to not just Theism but eventually Christianity.
More enjoyable than the chapters that described his faith journey are those that depicted life in British Public Schools. Lewis wrote about fagging, a traditional practice whereby younger pupils were required to act as personal servants to the oldest boys. Then there were the Tarts (not dessert served at tea) at Wyvern College, which I found quite shocking. Lewis was bored and fatigued in school, the stress coming from fagging and having to pretend to like the things the in-group enjoyed like clubs and sports. His being clumsy meant he was not involved in sports and could never gain popularity. His sanctuary was the Gurney, the school library, wherein ”the meanest boy was ‘unfaggable’ once he was inside the Gurney.” Loveliest of all was the tribute Lewis paid to his teachers. I love what he said of his form master at Wyvern College, Smewgy:
”He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his lips: something between speech and song... He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude.’ ‘... to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashy spendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of things more gracious, more humane, larger, and cooler. But his teaching, in the narrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could also analyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expanded by Smewgy, became clear as day.”
I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Joy since it featured so prominently in the title of this autobiography. Here are a few quotes on Joy:
”Joy.. 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...But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
”Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
”I had been... wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my 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.”
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, if you have a penchant for elegant writing (even grandiloquent writing), a wide esoteric sweep of the classics (the references to them were astounding), or if you are interested in how an atheist with one of the most formidable minds became a convert, then this book may just turn out to be a fountain of joy.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) was born in Belfast to a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter. He had an older brother with whom he shared a close relationship. His parents were bookish people, and Lewis developed an early love of reading. It was interesting to trace the beginnings of his literary gift. Lewis took to writing stories when he was just a child. He said, “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” and ”... in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.” Lewis had the privilege of access to excellent tutors in boarding school who provided prodigious exposure to the classics and cultivated in him a love of good literature. His happiest school years were spent under the tutelage of Kirk, affectionately known as ‘The Great Knock’, who taught him Homer, German, and Italian. That Kirk recognized Lewis’ talent was evident in this communication to the latter’s father, ”You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that.” (Apparently, Lewis was appalling at Math.) Kirk was right. In 1917, Lewis went on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, graduated with a First in Greek and Latin Literature (1920), a First in Philosophy and Ancient History (1922), and a First in English (1923). He eventually became a distinguished writer and a professor at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University.
The heart of this memoir is Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and his lifelong search for Joy. It was fascinating to read about his conversion, his apostasy, and his conversion again. Lewis became a believer when he went to boarding school in Belsen for the very first time. His tutor, Oldie was a pupil-spanking tyrant and a bit insane. In his recollection, ”Life in a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that is, it teaches one to live by hope.” Poor child. He attended a high Anglo-Catholic church. Here, he ’heard the doctrines of Christianity…taught by men who obviously believed them.’ Then followed a period of apostasy in the Preparatory School years at Wyvern when he gave up the faith and became an atheist at age 15. You have to read and find out why. Years later, his friendship with chiefly J.R.R. Tolkien and several others led him to critically examine his life and beliefs before his conversion to Theism in 1929. In Lewis’ own words, he was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." I have to admit that the systematic process in which Lewis read, argued, and figured out the existence of the Absolute and the true definition of Joy is one I could not fully fathom. His training in philosophy and dialectics seemed to have led him logically and soundly to not just Theism but eventually Christianity.
More enjoyable than the chapters that described his faith journey are those that depicted life in British Public Schools. Lewis wrote about fagging, a traditional practice whereby younger pupils were required to act as personal servants to the oldest boys. Then there were the Tarts (not dessert served at tea) at Wyvern College, which I found quite shocking. Lewis was bored and fatigued in school, the stress coming from fagging and having to pretend to like the things the in-group enjoyed like clubs and sports. His being clumsy meant he was not involved in sports and could never gain popularity. His sanctuary was the Gurney, the school library, wherein ”the meanest boy was ‘unfaggable’ once he was inside the Gurney.” Loveliest of all was the tribute Lewis paid to his teachers. I love what he said of his form master at Wyvern College, Smewgy:
”He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his lips: something between speech and song... He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude.’ ‘... to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashy spendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of things more gracious, more humane, larger, and cooler. But his teaching, in the narrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could also analyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expanded by Smewgy, became clear as day.”
I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Joy since it featured so prominently in the title of this autobiography. Here are a few quotes on Joy:
”Joy.. 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...But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
”Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
”I had been... wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my 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.”
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, if you have a penchant for elegant writing (even grandiloquent writing), a wide esoteric sweep of the classics (the references to them were astounding), or if you are interested in how an atheist with one of the most formidable minds became a convert, then this book may just turn out to be a fountain of joy.
June 8, 2009
There's not much to say about this book, as it is famous, and has been reviewed many times. It's about C. S. Lewis' conversion from atheism to Christianity. He identifies a quality which he calls "Joy," which occurs in what he describes as "a stab of joy." This is the a moment of perfect happiness occasioned by . . . well, it differs. Lewis explains that he got three stabs of joy in his youth: once from the a model garden in a biscuit-tin lid that his brother had made, once while reading Beatix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin, and once catching a phrase from Longfellow's poem The Saga of King Olaf. Lewis contends that these stabs of Joy are glimpses of the divine, and that they guided him inevitably to the Christian belief that characterized his later life.
What's truly amazing about this book, to me, is how closely it follows my own life. If I could identify three stabs of Joy that I've experienced, I'd say, first of all, from Lewis' own Narnia books, particularly the episode when Lucy is reading from the magical book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; second, oddly enough, from the James Bond movies--I know that sounds weird, but something about the atmosphere of Goldfinger, especially encapsulated in the music, really caught me; and thirdly, from Star Wars--the 1977 film, not any of the subsequent movies.
Like Lewis, I subsequently fancied myself an atheist, and for much the same reasons. Lewis explains that he received a mature stab of Joy from the idea of Northernness that he got from the Norse mythology in Wagner; I, on the other hand, got that stab of Joy from T. H. White's book The Once and Future King. Lewis followed up on this by investigating Norse mythology more closely, and subsequently stopped receiving stabs of Joy from it when it became an academic investigation isntead of something he did for pure pleasure. Likewise with me and the Arthurian legend.
Like Lewis, I struggled against becoming a Christian but, like Lewis, books (in his case Chesterton and MacDonald, in mine the medieval Arthurian romances) and friends (in Lewis' case, a plethora of friends including Owen Barfield, J. R. R. Tolkien and other college friends, in my case, my wife) prevailed.
So, what really made me enjoy this book was recognizing the truth of what Lewis was saying in it. And I recognized this truth, because his story pretty closely resembled my own.
What's truly amazing about this book, to me, is how closely it follows my own life. If I could identify three stabs of Joy that I've experienced, I'd say, first of all, from Lewis' own Narnia books, particularly the episode when Lucy is reading from the magical book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; second, oddly enough, from the James Bond movies--I know that sounds weird, but something about the atmosphere of Goldfinger, especially encapsulated in the music, really caught me; and thirdly, from Star Wars--the 1977 film, not any of the subsequent movies.
Like Lewis, I subsequently fancied myself an atheist, and for much the same reasons. Lewis explains that he received a mature stab of Joy from the idea of Northernness that he got from the Norse mythology in Wagner; I, on the other hand, got that stab of Joy from T. H. White's book The Once and Future King. Lewis followed up on this by investigating Norse mythology more closely, and subsequently stopped receiving stabs of Joy from it when it became an academic investigation isntead of something he did for pure pleasure. Likewise with me and the Arthurian legend.
Like Lewis, I struggled against becoming a Christian but, like Lewis, books (in his case Chesterton and MacDonald, in mine the medieval Arthurian romances) and friends (in Lewis' case, a plethora of friends including Owen Barfield, J. R. R. Tolkien and other college friends, in my case, my wife) prevailed.
So, what really made me enjoy this book was recognizing the truth of what Lewis was saying in it. And I recognized this truth, because his story pretty closely resembled my own.
February 19, 2015
This was interesting, but considering the very lengthy and detailed set-up, the denouement was hasty and disappointing. It barely brought together any of the varied strands he'd investigated; especially, his final treatment of “Joy” is relegated to one brief paragraph on the final page, and he fails to explain how Christianity satisfies/fulfills this feeling.
He believes it does, as he says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
But he could better have explained what N. T. Wright calls "signposts" and "places where heaven and earth meet." Or, as Van Til says so well: “Christianity stands...in antithetical relation to the religions of the world, but it also offers itself as the fulfillment of that of which the nations have unwittingly had some faint desire.”
He believes it does, as he says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
But he could better have explained what N. T. Wright calls "signposts" and "places where heaven and earth meet." Or, as Van Til says so well: “Christianity stands...in antithetical relation to the religions of the world, but it also offers itself as the fulfillment of that of which the nations have unwittingly had some faint desire.”
January 19, 2018
Great. Finished yet again in November of 2017. And again in January of 2018.
March 29, 2022
My favorite work of non-fiction by C.S.Lewis used to be Mere Christianity because it played such a huge role in my conversion from Agnosticism to Christianity years ago, and I really found it fascinating how Lewis wrote about the harmony between reason, faith, imagination, and one's own personal experience all coming together by grace.
I recently re-read Surprised by Joy for the fifth time, and it has become my favorite work of non-fiction by Lewis- his personal story is more of a powerful book to me than Mere Christianity, which is a classic, and it still deeply moves me every time I read it.
Lewis writing poignantly about his childhood in Northern Ireland, the sad loss of his Mother, hellish experiences in WWI, embracing of atheism, his friendships at Oxford, intense experience of the 'Sehnshuct' mystical joy roused by Celtic and Norse mythology, George MacDonald's writings, landscape, music, and art, and his journey to embracing faith in Christ from atheism , is such a fascinating story. My favorite part in the book is when Lewis writes about his mystical experience of joy when reading the great Scottish writer MacDonald's book Phantastes, which is a very strange and beautiful fantasy book, and another favorite part is when Lewis states that his experiences as a literary scholar convinced him that the first century Gospels were historical, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth's Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection is "the true myth."
The book reminded me of my own experiences of Sehnshuct- the music of Jon Foreman, Frederic Chopin, Celtic and Nordic music, the mountain landscape of my native state North Carolina, the landscape of Oxford, England, the season of Autumn, memories made in coffee shops, bookstores, and pubs; the poetry of John Keats, Wendell Berry, the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Madeleine L'Engle, George MacDonald, and Lewis of course, and rich memories I made in Oxford, England. I already want to re-read this book again. I thank The Great Artist for giving the world such an amazing Irish writer!
I recently re-read Surprised by Joy for the fifth time, and it has become my favorite work of non-fiction by Lewis- his personal story is more of a powerful book to me than Mere Christianity, which is a classic, and it still deeply moves me every time I read it.
Lewis writing poignantly about his childhood in Northern Ireland, the sad loss of his Mother, hellish experiences in WWI, embracing of atheism, his friendships at Oxford, intense experience of the 'Sehnshuct' mystical joy roused by Celtic and Norse mythology, George MacDonald's writings, landscape, music, and art, and his journey to embracing faith in Christ from atheism , is such a fascinating story. My favorite part in the book is when Lewis writes about his mystical experience of joy when reading the great Scottish writer MacDonald's book Phantastes, which is a very strange and beautiful fantasy book, and another favorite part is when Lewis states that his experiences as a literary scholar convinced him that the first century Gospels were historical, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth's Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection is "the true myth."
The book reminded me of my own experiences of Sehnshuct- the music of Jon Foreman, Frederic Chopin, Celtic and Nordic music, the mountain landscape of my native state North Carolina, the landscape of Oxford, England, the season of Autumn, memories made in coffee shops, bookstores, and pubs; the poetry of John Keats, Wendell Berry, the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Madeleine L'Engle, George MacDonald, and Lewis of course, and rich memories I made in Oxford, England. I already want to re-read this book again. I thank The Great Artist for giving the world such an amazing Irish writer!
July 11, 2016
"Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back....everything is different."
I can easily mark this as my favorite autobiography. It didn't drone on and on as most others do. Starting out in his childhood, spreading through his years at Oxford and when he served as professor, and ending shortly after his conversion to Christianity, there was insight for almost every season of life. I've been a long-time reader of many of the classic Lewis works (Mere Christianity, Narnia, etc.) and even some lesser known works (Till We Have Faces). But after I read this intuitive book, His novels shine with a new light, and it brought my enjoyment of them to a whole new level.
FACTS ABOUT C. S. LEWIS:
-He had a certain condition as a child where he couldn't move either of his thumbs. Because of this, he wasn't able to do many things normal children do, such as using scissors, painting, building with blocks, etc. It's this condition that drove him to read.
-One of his favorite authors as a child (and adult) was George MacDonald. He was one of the very few Christian authors he read. He realized early on that there was something in MacDonald's writing that all the other books were missing. Ultimately, this author played a large part in his conversion.
See the full review (with pictures!) at my blog, Literary Cafe: http://literarycafe.weebly.com/home/s...
I can easily mark this as my favorite autobiography. It didn't drone on and on as most others do. Starting out in his childhood, spreading through his years at Oxford and when he served as professor, and ending shortly after his conversion to Christianity, there was insight for almost every season of life. I've been a long-time reader of many of the classic Lewis works (Mere Christianity, Narnia, etc.) and even some lesser known works (Till We Have Faces). But after I read this intuitive book, His novels shine with a new light, and it brought my enjoyment of them to a whole new level.
FACTS ABOUT C. S. LEWIS:
-He had a certain condition as a child where he couldn't move either of his thumbs. Because of this, he wasn't able to do many things normal children do, such as using scissors, painting, building with blocks, etc. It's this condition that drove him to read.
-One of his favorite authors as a child (and adult) was George MacDonald. He was one of the very few Christian authors he read. He realized early on that there was something in MacDonald's writing that all the other books were missing. Ultimately, this author played a large part in his conversion.
See the full review (with pictures!) at my blog, Literary Cafe: http://literarycafe.weebly.com/home/s...
November 16, 2023
📚 This slim and beautifully written volume will engage you with the beginnings of his lifelong love for books, his embrace of Anglican Christianity, and his early teaching of literature and theology - “the Queen of the Sciences”👸👑
May 6, 2021
Second book down of my 2020 reading challenge: read all of C.S. Lewis's published works.
I chose Surprised By Joy as one of the first to read this year as it is, in many aspects, essentially an autobiography. I was hoping to learn more about the author to see how his life and upbringing influenced his writing.
Jack, Jack, Jack. The more I read about him, and from him, the more I feel a connection in my soul. This dude says, in the simplest ways, things I feel personally. Even things I never realized I felt personally. He notices it, and he pins it down with ease. Lewis has an intraspection that challenges me to practice the same. And he has a bluntness I absolutely love. He wasn't given to beating around the bush- no small talk here. Again, the more I find out about him, the more I adore him.
His self-deprecation and reasoning skills are second to none. He loved God in a way that was authentic, vibrant, and organic.
"I was at this time living like so many atheists or anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating the world...I was, as you may well remember, one whose negative demands were far more violent than his positive, far more ready to escape pain than achieve happiness, and feeling it something of an outrage that I had been created without my permission."
"But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism; it was merely a "Perhaps." Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, a "something else."
"I sometimes wonder if not all pleasures are substitutes for Joy."
"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."
"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
He had an incredibly understated sense of humor.
"We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that has not yet been drawn. I have forgotten which side I took although I know I took it with great zeal."
'In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere-- "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises" as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.'
In case you didn't catch that, yes. Lewis was, at one time, an atheist. He also admitted to having a fascination with the occult before he fell in love with the Lord.
He wasn't without his quirks. He attended a boarding school where he was essentially physically and emotionally abused. He hated Disney. He had a tense relationship with his father. He loved skyscapes (which makes so much sense when you read Out of the Silent Planet, in particular). He was brutally hard on himself. And he's relatable. Books thrilled him. Tea was a simple luxury. He loved walking through the country and taking in comforting scenes.
"Some of my purchases [books] proved disappointments, and some went beyond my hopes, but the undoing of the parcel always proved a delicious moment."
"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
"Where I had expected gravel drives and iron gates and interminable laurels and monkey puzzlers, I saw crooked paths running up or down hills from wicket gates, between fruit trees and birches. By a severer taste than mine, these houses would all be mocked perhaps. Yet I cannot help thinking those who designed them and their gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest happiness."
I'd rate this book a PG.
I chose Surprised By Joy as one of the first to read this year as it is, in many aspects, essentially an autobiography. I was hoping to learn more about the author to see how his life and upbringing influenced his writing.
Jack, Jack, Jack. The more I read about him, and from him, the more I feel a connection in my soul. This dude says, in the simplest ways, things I feel personally. Even things I never realized I felt personally. He notices it, and he pins it down with ease. Lewis has an intraspection that challenges me to practice the same. And he has a bluntness I absolutely love. He wasn't given to beating around the bush- no small talk here. Again, the more I find out about him, the more I adore him.
His self-deprecation and reasoning skills are second to none. He loved God in a way that was authentic, vibrant, and organic.
"I was at this time living like so many atheists or anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating the world...I was, as you may well remember, one whose negative demands were far more violent than his positive, far more ready to escape pain than achieve happiness, and feeling it something of an outrage that I had been created without my permission."
"But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism; it was merely a "Perhaps." Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, a "something else."
"I sometimes wonder if not all pleasures are substitutes for Joy."
"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."
"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
He had an incredibly understated sense of humor.
"We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that has not yet been drawn. I have forgotten which side I took although I know I took it with great zeal."
'In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere-- "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises" as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.'
In case you didn't catch that, yes. Lewis was, at one time, an atheist. He also admitted to having a fascination with the occult before he fell in love with the Lord.
He wasn't without his quirks. He attended a boarding school where he was essentially physically and emotionally abused. He hated Disney. He had a tense relationship with his father. He loved skyscapes (which makes so much sense when you read Out of the Silent Planet, in particular). He was brutally hard on himself. And he's relatable. Books thrilled him. Tea was a simple luxury. He loved walking through the country and taking in comforting scenes.
"Some of my purchases [books] proved disappointments, and some went beyond my hopes, but the undoing of the parcel always proved a delicious moment."
"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
"Where I had expected gravel drives and iron gates and interminable laurels and monkey puzzlers, I saw crooked paths running up or down hills from wicket gates, between fruit trees and birches. By a severer taste than mine, these houses would all be mocked perhaps. Yet I cannot help thinking those who designed them and their gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest happiness."
I'd rate this book a PG.
August 9, 2021
82nd book of 2021.
Told by the lady at the desk that purchasing only the small and rather beaten Oxford Dictionary in my hands was not enough to use my card, I picked up Lewis' Surprised by Joy. At times, I've been intrigued by some of his non-fiction work such as Mere Christianity or more pressingly, Grief Observed, but this one gave itself up to me. That day, with more urgent things on my list, I began reading it.
Lewis writes surprisingly: in place of the dogmatic prose I imagined, I found warmth. The books middling rating from me is mostly reflecting its problem with proportions. Lewis uses a great deal of the book's length to describe his early years; he writes importantly on the death of his mother and a physically defective thumb which narrowed his talents in sports, but also spends a great deal of time describing the schools he attended, the boarding, the teachers, etc. Having attended English schools my whole life (including an all-boys high school), these held little charm for me. I also felt cheated by Tolkien's name being mentioned only 3 times in the 277 pages, for I am a Tolkien fan far, far above I'm a Lewis fan. In fact, I'd hardly identify myself as a Lewis fan.
What I know of him has come from reading Narnia as a boy, though I can't remember which ones, watching the movies that were about in my boyhood and more recently, hearing P. Quinn at C. University lecturing on him. Quinn being the master of fairy stories, sarcasm and tangents (he would give footnotes to his own sentences, turning his head away and speaking like Gollum to Smeagol, most of the time inaudibly to all those but the front row), a man of great cynicism, no doubt, though I didn't know him well, didn't appear to care for Lewis (though liked him better than Rowling). True or not, he berated the supposed philosophy that surfaces at the end of the Narnia books to do with Susan and Heaven. So I suppose it is down to Quinn that I entered Lewis' memoir here with caution, expecting a barrage of didactic rambling. And partly by my own feelings, having been raised a loose Christian of sorts, becoming a little more serious around my early teenage years before then turning away from it.
The little more serious manifested in my attendance of TGIF, a church youth-group. Thank God It's Friday, meetings held on Fridays. It was a fairly easy-going social construct, so I remember it, with moments to sit down and read the Bible and discuss. Anyway, tonight, finishing the last pages of Surprised by Joy in the garden, in the dark, and reading Lewis' description of the "moment", I was reminded of a moment(?) of my own one night with the TGIF group. We were at someone's house for a BBQ and it was freezing cold. I was without layers and sat in my chair shivering. However, surrounded by the bustling group, eating, talking, laughing, I felt suddenly far bigger and at the same time far smaller: being part of something bigger than myself but understanding that the thing bigger than myself was in turn still tiny compared to the universe, reality, whatever. So reading Lewis I was thinking back and asking myself if younger me felt that shiver (of both cold and of epiphany) was something religious, some understanding of Him, or simply one of those profound moments that comes from the self without any need/recognition of God. I won't count this as a spoiler because we know that Lewis becomes a Christian, but if you wish to keep his "moment" unknown, don't read the following which is Lewis' own epiphany of sorts:
Frankly, the best chapter in the memoir recounts, briefly, Lewis' time in the army from 1917 around the time he had started at Oxford. There were small and sad reflections that I found profound, 'In my own battalion also I was assailed. Here I met one Johnson (on whom be peace) who would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed', or, 'I think it was that day I noticed how a great terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me.' But even when Lewis turned his attention to belief and to 'Joy' (by his own definition), he never changes his tone, perhaps because he would be a hypocrite if he did considering he was once a young atheist, and claimed, 'I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.'
I won't spoil much more of Lewis' own thoughts. A fairly dull middle, sandwiched between an interesting start and an interesting end. I'll be reading his other works now. What I find so appealing about him is how he accepts his long and hard-lined atheism but also shares his "conversion" with as much interest and intrigue as we read about it. Lewis himself appears, still, surprised. Surprised by it, surprised by Joy. At one point in the book he writes, 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' I wonder if he is warning us here or if he is almost daring us.
Told by the lady at the desk that purchasing only the small and rather beaten Oxford Dictionary in my hands was not enough to use my card, I picked up Lewis' Surprised by Joy. At times, I've been intrigued by some of his non-fiction work such as Mere Christianity or more pressingly, Grief Observed, but this one gave itself up to me. That day, with more urgent things on my list, I began reading it.
Lewis writes surprisingly: in place of the dogmatic prose I imagined, I found warmth. The books middling rating from me is mostly reflecting its problem with proportions. Lewis uses a great deal of the book's length to describe his early years; he writes importantly on the death of his mother and a physically defective thumb which narrowed his talents in sports, but also spends a great deal of time describing the schools he attended, the boarding, the teachers, etc. Having attended English schools my whole life (including an all-boys high school), these held little charm for me. I also felt cheated by Tolkien's name being mentioned only 3 times in the 277 pages, for I am a Tolkien fan far, far above I'm a Lewis fan. In fact, I'd hardly identify myself as a Lewis fan.
What I know of him has come from reading Narnia as a boy, though I can't remember which ones, watching the movies that were about in my boyhood and more recently, hearing P. Quinn at C. University lecturing on him. Quinn being the master of fairy stories, sarcasm and tangents (he would give footnotes to his own sentences, turning his head away and speaking like Gollum to Smeagol, most of the time inaudibly to all those but the front row), a man of great cynicism, no doubt, though I didn't know him well, didn't appear to care for Lewis (though liked him better than Rowling). True or not, he berated the supposed philosophy that surfaces at the end of the Narnia books to do with Susan and Heaven. So I suppose it is down to Quinn that I entered Lewis' memoir here with caution, expecting a barrage of didactic rambling. And partly by my own feelings, having been raised a loose Christian of sorts, becoming a little more serious around my early teenage years before then turning away from it.
The little more serious manifested in my attendance of TGIF, a church youth-group. Thank God It's Friday, meetings held on Fridays. It was a fairly easy-going social construct, so I remember it, with moments to sit down and read the Bible and discuss. Anyway, tonight, finishing the last pages of Surprised by Joy in the garden, in the dark, and reading Lewis' description of the "moment", I was reminded of a moment(?) of my own one night with the TGIF group. We were at someone's house for a BBQ and it was freezing cold. I was without layers and sat in my chair shivering. However, surrounded by the bustling group, eating, talking, laughing, I felt suddenly far bigger and at the same time far smaller: being part of something bigger than myself but understanding that the thing bigger than myself was in turn still tiny compared to the universe, reality, whatever. So reading Lewis I was thinking back and asking myself if younger me felt that shiver (of both cold and of epiphany) was something religious, some understanding of Him, or simply one of those profound moments that comes from the self without any need/recognition of God. I won't count this as a spoiler because we know that Lewis becomes a Christian, but if you wish to keep his "moment" unknown, don't read the following which is Lewis' own epiphany of sorts:
I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, 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 armour 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 corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional.
Frankly, the best chapter in the memoir recounts, briefly, Lewis' time in the army from 1917 around the time he had started at Oxford. There were small and sad reflections that I found profound, 'In my own battalion also I was assailed. Here I met one Johnson (on whom be peace) who would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed', or, 'I think it was that day I noticed how a great terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me.' But even when Lewis turned his attention to belief and to 'Joy' (by his own definition), he never changes his tone, perhaps because he would be a hypocrite if he did considering he was once a young atheist, and claimed, 'I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.'
I won't spoil much more of Lewis' own thoughts. A fairly dull middle, sandwiched between an interesting start and an interesting end. I'll be reading his other works now. What I find so appealing about him is how he accepts his long and hard-lined atheism but also shares his "conversion" with as much interest and intrigue as we read about it. Lewis himself appears, still, surprised. Surprised by it, surprised by Joy. At one point in the book he writes, 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' I wonder if he is warning us here or if he is almost daring us.
July 10, 2012
Considering all the things we’ve studied at New Saint Andrews—and the way it keeps coming back to one thing—I find it highly interesting that it was essentially C.S. Lewis’ love of story that brought him to Christ. If you think about it, story is what all of his experiences of Sehnsucht have in common. Most of the Sehnsucht took place while reading poetry or literature, and if not, it was because it transported him to the places in those stories. For example, looking up at the night sky took him to the great northern expanse of Norse Mythology and Balder the god.
But why story? Our parents read us stories as children, and, once we’re old enough, we read them for ourselves. And before you know it—sometimes even before we can read or write—we’re making our own stories. There must be something fundamental about it that modern man has difficultly grasping. (Incidentally, this may explain why my generation seems to hate reading so much and why modern culture as a whole is striving to recover a love for reading in children.)
I think Lewis hit upon it when he described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” We all long for stories and enjoy them so much because we are looking for that One Story in which we are all players. That is why when Lewis realized that Christianity is a true myth—the one story that is completely and utterly true—his heart was won over and the rest of him promptly followed.
This is why Lewis is “surprised” by Joy. All his life he believed the lies too good to be true, and then finally found the truth to be even better.
But why story? Our parents read us stories as children, and, once we’re old enough, we read them for ourselves. And before you know it—sometimes even before we can read or write—we’re making our own stories. There must be something fundamental about it that modern man has difficultly grasping. (Incidentally, this may explain why my generation seems to hate reading so much and why modern culture as a whole is striving to recover a love for reading in children.)
I think Lewis hit upon it when he described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” We all long for stories and enjoy them so much because we are looking for that One Story in which we are all players. That is why when Lewis realized that Christianity is a true myth—the one story that is completely and utterly true—his heart was won over and the rest of him promptly followed.
This is why Lewis is “surprised” by Joy. All his life he believed the lies too good to be true, and then finally found the truth to be even better.
September 24, 2024
2024 Review
I think I've substituted biographies of C.S. Lewis for reading his own words, which is a shame. This is more than a memoir or a conversion experience. It is his description of joy. Instead of trying to define something so difficult to define, he places it within the context of his life. Well worth reading for both the theological and personal narratives.
I think I've substituted biographies of C.S. Lewis for reading his own words, which is a shame. This is more than a memoir or a conversion experience. It is his description of joy. Instead of trying to define something so difficult to define, he places it within the context of his life. Well worth reading for both the theological and personal narratives.
May 8, 2013
This book wasn't what I was expecting. At first, I had expected it to be the story of how Lewis met his wife, Joy, as was portrayed in the movie SHADOWLANDS with Anthony Hopkins. Upon learning that such was not the case, I then expected it to be a straight-forward autobiographical account of Lewis' life. Wrong again. Actually, SURPRISED BY JOY is a memoir about Lewis' formative years. More specifically, it deals with Lewis' early rejection of Christianity and the manner in which he eventually returned to the fold. Most of the book, however, is given to childhood reminiscences and reflections on various books that had an impact on him as a young man. All that is well and good, but I found it a bit dull. Early on in SURPRISED BY JOY, Lewis states that the best part of any biography is the stuff at the beginning, the stuff that deals with the subject in his or her youth. This is where Lewis and I differ. I'm generally not all that interested in people's childhoods and would much prefer them to get on with talking about their life's work and accomplishments. SURPRISED BY JOY doesn't really give us a glimpse into Lewis' professional life, and that was what disappointed me about it. That certainly doesn't make it a bad book--just not my style. As for the quality of the writing and the degree of insight throughout, it's every bit as brilliant as you'd expect from a writer of Lewis' caliber.
November 25, 2024
"Me Jacksie." From a young age, C.S. Lewis had a way with words, a persuasive way with words. He knew he didn't want to go through life having everybody call him "Clive," so he came up with that simple but effective sentence, no doubt startling his parents. Yet that bold communication still worked.
An intrepid communicator Jack Lewis continued to be... for the rest of his life.
To this reader of "Surprised by Joy," and also demonstrated in many other brilliant books that he wrote, C.S. Lewis had a magnificent gift for putting sacred experience into language.
Have you ever tried that, fellow Goodreaders? Then you may have learned the hard way, how difficult that is to do successfully, given the private and deeply personal nature of such experiences.
My biggest takeaway from this memoir was how Lewis described his life moving forward on two separate, unrelated tracks: Human life events on one track, spiritual life on an entirely different track.
Lewis used this distinction almost as a literary device, giving a memorable shape to his life story (technically, two life stories). What impressed me most, however, was the very process of alternation, especially the non-correspondence between outer, human events and the stirrings of sacred recognition within.
What a magnificent spiritual-and-religious reporter, that Jacksie became!
An intrepid communicator Jack Lewis continued to be... for the rest of his life.
To this reader of "Surprised by Joy," and also demonstrated in many other brilliant books that he wrote, C.S. Lewis had a magnificent gift for putting sacred experience into language.
Have you ever tried that, fellow Goodreaders? Then you may have learned the hard way, how difficult that is to do successfully, given the private and deeply personal nature of such experiences.
My biggest takeaway from this memoir was how Lewis described his life moving forward on two separate, unrelated tracks: Human life events on one track, spiritual life on an entirely different track.
Lewis used this distinction almost as a literary device, giving a memorable shape to his life story (technically, two life stories). What impressed me most, however, was the very process of alternation, especially the non-correspondence between outer, human events and the stirrings of sacred recognition within.
What a magnificent spiritual-and-religious reporter, that Jacksie became!
March 14, 2020
Surprised by Tedium! Wow.....that’s 7 hours of my life I’ll never get back! As a teen I read and reread the Chronicles of Narnia...... wonderful books everyone should read........later on I read and enjoyed the Screwtape Letters. But this tedious, boring and over inflated autobiography was painful to read. If it wasn’t a book club pick I definitely would not have finished it!
Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get all the dropped obscure literature references. I also didn’t understand the point of droning on ad nauseam about his childhood at boarding school. His long explanation of “bloods” and “fags” and his weird relationship with his father.
I found no joy whatsoever in this book. Would not recommend.
Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get all the dropped obscure literature references. I also didn’t understand the point of droning on ad nauseam about his childhood at boarding school. His long explanation of “bloods” and “fags” and his weird relationship with his father.
I found no joy whatsoever in this book. Would not recommend.
August 6, 2020
The life of C S Lewis is edifying and such a delight to read. He has substance and that's wonderful!
September 8, 2022
Lewis's autobiography is almost always a starting point when looking into his life, and I was even surprised at the level of sincerity in some places.
August 19, 2025
GoodReads reminds me that this is my third reading of the book. I did remember having read it ages ago, but not twice. So it seems that I keep coming back to this fascinating concept of Joy.
This time it was more a study than just a reading. Joy, as Lewis presents it, is that emotion of longing which, though connected to an absence (you can’t long for something present), is pleasant, promising, makes you dream and hope, and is therefore both joyful and desirable.
In Lewis’s analysis of his own itinerary of faith, Joy plays an essential role. What is surprising (I hope you don’t consider this a spoiler) is that he eventually discovers that Joy is like a signpost: very important—even essential—if you are lost; but what a mistake it would be to confuse the signpost with the goal of your journey. And once you are on the right track, the signpost remains a fond but not very important event in your life.
For many years, he tried to multiply his moments of Joy. Through his passion for “Northernness,” poetry, and the countryside, he gradually came to understand that happiness was not in them, and that Joy, though related to happiness, is a sign of its absence and, if anything, a hint pointing in a direction.
I would give it five stars out of affection, but no: the first half of the book, like most biographies, is not so engaging. The unforgettable part begins with Lewis’s meeting with “the Great Knock” (chapter IX).
Some ideas I loved (not quoted, just from memory):
- I was a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. (this one is literal)
- His false gods had taught him adoration, which was so hard to find in true religion.
- Experience is an honest thing, never trying to deceive you. If you test reality, it always rings true.
- Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores. (this too literal)
- From the beginning of my life I was told to stay away from Papists. From the beginning of my academic life I was told to avoid Philologists. … And Tolkien was both.
This time it was more a study than just a reading. Joy, as Lewis presents it, is that emotion of longing which, though connected to an absence (you can’t long for something present), is pleasant, promising, makes you dream and hope, and is therefore both joyful and desirable.
In Lewis’s analysis of his own itinerary of faith, Joy plays an essential role. What is surprising (I hope you don’t consider this a spoiler) is that he eventually discovers that Joy is like a signpost: very important—even essential—if you are lost; but what a mistake it would be to confuse the signpost with the goal of your journey. And once you are on the right track, the signpost remains a fond but not very important event in your life.
For many years, he tried to multiply his moments of Joy. Through his passion for “Northernness,” poetry, and the countryside, he gradually came to understand that happiness was not in them, and that Joy, though related to happiness, is a sign of its absence and, if anything, a hint pointing in a direction.
I would give it five stars out of affection, but no: the first half of the book, like most biographies, is not so engaging. The unforgettable part begins with Lewis’s meeting with “the Great Knock” (chapter IX).
Some ideas I loved (not quoted, just from memory):
- I was a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. (this one is literal)
- His false gods had taught him adoration, which was so hard to find in true religion.
- Experience is an honest thing, never trying to deceive you. If you test reality, it always rings true.
- Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores. (this too literal)
- From the beginning of my life I was told to stay away from Papists. From the beginning of my academic life I was told to avoid Philologists. … And Tolkien was both.
August 9, 2019
Such a wonderful read! A few thoughts and quotes:
-I was delighted to see that Edith Nesbit and Beatrix Potter had a significant impact on Lewis’ childhood.
-I appreciate Lewis’ discussion of the difference between “wonder” fantasy, and “fantasy” that’s focused on wish-fulfillment. “When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit. . . but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.” When it comes to modern fantasy novels, some fall in one category and some in the other--many of them definitely appeal to the reader’s inner desire for power.
-Wow. The HORRIBLE things that happened in British prep schools! I wouldn’t have believed in them all if they showed up in a modern novel. No wonder the British upper class had a reputation for being a little dysfunctional.
-When discussing the things that caused him to doubt Christianity as a youth, Lewis says, “One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true. The other religions were not even explained, in the earlier Christian fashion, as the work of devils. That I might, conceivably, have been brought to believe. But the impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”
-This quote struck me: “It is difficult for parents (and more difficult, perhaps, for schoolmasters) to realize the unimportance of most masters in the life of a school. Of the good and evil which is done to a schoolboy masters, in general, do little, and know less.” Honestly, I think this is a good argument against putting one’s child in a school just because the teachers are Christians/Lutherans. The other students and their families matter quite a bit, too.
-“The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” I agree, but how are we to do this? Which subjects should be tabled or cut?
-It’s startling to realize that Lewis would not have been able to attend Oxford if it weren’t for a law exempting ex-Service men from having to pass the mathematics test!
This is another book I will want to re-read in the future.
-I was delighted to see that Edith Nesbit and Beatrix Potter had a significant impact on Lewis’ childhood.
-I appreciate Lewis’ discussion of the difference between “wonder” fantasy, and “fantasy” that’s focused on wish-fulfillment. “When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit. . . but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.” When it comes to modern fantasy novels, some fall in one category and some in the other--many of them definitely appeal to the reader’s inner desire for power.
-Wow. The HORRIBLE things that happened in British prep schools! I wouldn’t have believed in them all if they showed up in a modern novel. No wonder the British upper class had a reputation for being a little dysfunctional.
-When discussing the things that caused him to doubt Christianity as a youth, Lewis says, “One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true. The other religions were not even explained, in the earlier Christian fashion, as the work of devils. That I might, conceivably, have been brought to believe. But the impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”
-This quote struck me: “It is difficult for parents (and more difficult, perhaps, for schoolmasters) to realize the unimportance of most masters in the life of a school. Of the good and evil which is done to a schoolboy masters, in general, do little, and know less.” Honestly, I think this is a good argument against putting one’s child in a school just because the teachers are Christians/Lutherans. The other students and their families matter quite a bit, too.
-“The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” I agree, but how are we to do this? Which subjects should be tabled or cut?
-It’s startling to realize that Lewis would not have been able to attend Oxford if it weren’t for a law exempting ex-Service men from having to pass the mathematics test!
This is another book I will want to re-read in the future.
October 9, 2024
Not a person you’d want to sit next to at a function, or on a bus, or anywhere.
The most interesting thing (for me) about this story is, despite being 56 years apart, I have amazing parallels in my life to C.S. Lewis. The major exception of course is, I couldn’t write a story to save my life.
Unfortunately, Clive was not a man of few words. In fact, his megasyllabic, flowery prose is quite difficult to get through without eye-glaze and mind-fog setting in quickly. Best consumed in small doses. Reading the whole book at once could mean death by neuron paralysis. More than one chapter will only require a quick visit to your local doctor for pain relief or therapy. Funny; I didn’t find The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe difficult to read.
If you don’t mind an autobiography where ten words are used instead of one, I’d give it one more star.
The most interesting thing (for me) about this story is, despite being 56 years apart, I have amazing parallels in my life to C.S. Lewis. The major exception of course is, I couldn’t write a story to save my life.
Unfortunately, Clive was not a man of few words. In fact, his megasyllabic, flowery prose is quite difficult to get through without eye-glaze and mind-fog setting in quickly. Best consumed in small doses. Reading the whole book at once could mean death by neuron paralysis. More than one chapter will only require a quick visit to your local doctor for pain relief or therapy. Funny; I didn’t find The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe difficult to read.
If you don’t mind an autobiography where ten words are used instead of one, I’d give it one more star.
February 10, 2017
C. S. Lewis, one of J. R. R. Tolkien's best friends and creator of the Narnia Chronicles, among others. Pure genius. Period.
June 18, 2026
My Quick Takes:
- 4/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Genre 📚 memoir
- Language 🤐 a few mild
- Spice ❤️🔥 none
- Content 🤔 death, themes of war
I think if I had read the description for this my expectations would’ve been more clear when starting this memoir.
I loved learning more about CS Lewis’ childhood and formative years as a boy and young man. He alludes to his time serving during the Great War and I am astounded at how well read he was (and in multiple languages no less!)
Due to CS Lewis’ own personal genius, the content did feel a bit dense at times. Honestly that seems to be more of a critique of myself as a reader and less of him as a scholar 😅
Like I said, if I had read the description for this title I think I wouldve had a better mindset going in that this is a partial memoir about the early years of his life up to his conversion. It felt like I was taken on a partial journey, diving into the weeds of his past and finally getting to the climactic moment of his conversion only to be met with the end of the narrative.
I have this title in a bind up with “The Four Loves” by CS Lewis and didn’t realize this was only a partial memoir. I definitely want to know more of his life story post conversion.
- 4/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Genre 📚 memoir
- Language 🤐 a few mild
- Spice ❤️🔥 none
- Content 🤔 death, themes of war
I think if I had read the description for this my expectations would’ve been more clear when starting this memoir.
I loved learning more about CS Lewis’ childhood and formative years as a boy and young man. He alludes to his time serving during the Great War and I am astounded at how well read he was (and in multiple languages no less!)
Due to CS Lewis’ own personal genius, the content did feel a bit dense at times. Honestly that seems to be more of a critique of myself as a reader and less of him as a scholar 😅
Like I said, if I had read the description for this title I think I wouldve had a better mindset going in that this is a partial memoir about the early years of his life up to his conversion. It felt like I was taken on a partial journey, diving into the weeds of his past and finally getting to the climactic moment of his conversion only to be met with the end of the narrative.
I have this title in a bind up with “The Four Loves” by CS Lewis and didn’t realize this was only a partial memoir. I definitely want to know more of his life story post conversion.
September 30, 2022
absolutely glorious. gently flowing and winding, and coming right back to the source that feeds it.
January 28, 2023
sometimes, a book reaches inside your heart, finds the deepest part of you--the part you were scared to tell anyone about--and rips it out, revealing it to the world. i find this most often in the memoirs of authors. The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson is another.
but surprised by joy. i knew i loved Lewis for his children's books, but what i did not know was that he is so very like me. i see myself in every single page of this book. i never took my journey of wandering as far as Lewis, but the questions. the answers. the heartache. the temporal answers. the sadness and loneliness, the swells of excitement.
this is his story. this is my story.
i too want to seek the Blue Flower.
but surprised by joy. i knew i loved Lewis for his children's books, but what i did not know was that he is so very like me. i see myself in every single page of this book. i never took my journey of wandering as far as Lewis, but the questions. the answers. the heartache. the temporal answers. the sadness and loneliness, the swells of excitement.
this is his story. this is my story.
i too want to seek the Blue Flower.
August 30, 2026
I read this almost every year and still find new things in it. It's a strange book.
October 8, 2018
Libro autobiografico in cui C.S. Lewis racconta la storia del suo passaggio dall'ateismo al cristianesimo. La sua fu una conversione lenta, sofferta, tormentata, e quando infine giunse all’ammissione dell’esistenza di Dio definì se stesso il “convertito più riluttante di tutta l’Inghilterra”.
Qui C.S. Lewis descrive il suo itinerario spirituale ripercorrendo la lunga strada della sua vita.
Affascinante, sorprendente.
Qui C.S. Lewis descrive il suo itinerario spirituale ripercorrendo la lunga strada della sua vita.
Affascinante, sorprendente.
September 1, 2026
(Heads up to any strangers who might come across this review: I’m not a Christian—though I was in the past, including the first time I read this book—and am reviewing this from a nonbeliever‘s perspective. If that’s likely to bother you, please move along. I’m not looking to debate.)
Anyway. I was raised in a pretty devout Baptist household, but when I was about 16 I did what evangelicals call “rededicating your heart to Jesus”: basically I decided that I had been backsliding and reconverted, and for the next six years or so I was a very serious Christian, albeit one who still usually felt more at home with heathens than fellow believers. I could write a whole book of my own about that period, but the main point I want to make here is that, like a lot of Christians of the more bookish sort, I considered C.S. Lewis to be my personal hero. I remember I took part in a group activity in college where we were asked who we most looked up to; while everyone else named a family member, I (like the very normal 19-year-old I was) named C.S. Lewis.
I can’t really explain this intense connection people like me (as I was then) feel with Lewis without being a little condescending about Christianity at large; but basically when you’re in that kind of environment all the time, constantly being told—if not in so many words—not to think too hard or too critically about a whole lot of things that simply don’t make any logical or even emotional or moral sense, and when you have the kind of brain that likes to think critically, or at least to have an intellectual bulwark of some kind for the things you’ve decided to accept as true, Lewis’s writings for adults feel like a literal godsend. He’s a committed thinker and more well-read than anyone you’ve ever met and writes in this beautiful, clear, elegant style (I’d still place him on my very short list of all-time favorite prose stylists) and makes being a Christian sound both very important and like the most rational, reasonable thing a person could ever do. He’s been an atheist before so he knows what it’s like to disbelieve, and even as a Christian he’s not puritanical about things like drinking or scandalized by things like sex. He has a dry sense of humor and a genuine literary imagination. The fact that most of us first encountered his writing as children, through the Narnia books, doesn’t hurt—it’s like realizing once you’ve grown up that you can now talk to your parents like an adult. In a world of really horrid “Christian literature” (per Lewis himself, “Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry”), he shows that it’s possible to take the “literature” part seriously without losing the “Christian.” Even reading him after a decade of unswerving atheism, I found it hard to resist his charms, however unconvincing I found his actual arguments. I think that’s why, until now, I haven’t dared to revisit him.
There’s not any especially interesting reason why I did choose to revisit him now—it was mostly just that my library had the audiobook available when I needed something to listen to on the bus last week. But there is a reason I chose this particular book of his, as it was one of his first I read after my re-conversion and remains one of my most pleasant and vivid reading memories—which is appropriate in an Inception kind of way, since it’s a book largely about Lewis’s own most pleasant and vivid early reading memories. That’s not what he set out to write about, necessarily (“This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about,” he tells us up front) but it quickly becomes apparent that he is one of those people, like many of us on this site, who can’t really separate his larger life, religious or otherwise, from the things he’s read. To hear it told here, it was books, far more than any other influence, that carried Lewis from the atheism of his teens and twenties to the all-encompassing Christian faith that characterized the rest of his life. (“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist,” he says, “cannot be too careful of his reading.” I personally find exactly the opposite to be true.)
Lewis chooses to refract his spiritual journey through the lens of what he calls “Joy”:
As he describes it elsewhere, Joy tends to take the form of a kind of fleeting inner pang or ache that arrives unexpectedly, goes away almost immediately, and can never be recaptured at will, as much as you may try to get it back. For the young Lewis it occurs mostly (surprise) while reading, especially books about Norse gods and goddesses. And to the older Lewis who’s writing this book, it’s important because—however unbelieving the person experiencing Joy may be at that moment—it really signifies a yearning for the presence of God, capital-G. It makes a decent throughline for a spiritual memoir—documenting the ebbs and flows of Joy as the subject gets nearer to or farther from the mark—and I think I’ve experienced something similar at a few points in my life, namely while reading C.S. Lewis books when I was younger. But coming back to this now, I find the whole premise pretty faulty. For one thing, as much as Lewis insists Joy isn’t an aesthetic experience, this is hard to take seriously when every instance of it he describes is tied specifically to a book, a piece of music, or a landscape (or, in one case, a miniature diorama of a landscape). If this feeling was really a means for God to get in touch with mortals, you’d think it might occasionally flare up in the midst of a conversation, say, or during a totally unremarkable moment when you could be sure nothing else was working on your imagination; but apparently not so for Lewis. For another thing, Joy never seems to be caused by any specifically Christian stimulus; Lewis never describes feeling it while reading a passage of scripture or saying a prayer. In fact, it’s so consistently associated with Norse myths that he sometimes calls it “the Northernness.” Lewis of course has an answer for this too—for him pagan mythology always contains some kernel of truth or rightness which has been “fulfilled” in Christianity, meaning it can point a person towards the “true” faith even when he seems to be following the “wrong” one—but it would seem to me that if the divine was constantly speaking to me while reading about Thor and not while reading about Jesus, it would be reasonable to wonder if maybe Thor was the real deal instead. But again, this consideration never seems to cross Lewis’s mind.
Regardless, this whole concept comes to very little in the end, as Lewis’s actual conversion is not really precipitated by Joy at all, and he even tells us in the penultimate paragraph that, “[to] tell you the truth, the subject [of Joy] has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. . . . I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.” The turn to faith, when it does come, is spurred more by Lewis’s reading of Christian authors like G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald, some abstract philosophical contemplations about “the Absolute” and similar ideas, and maybe most of all the fact that all of his Oxford friends seem to be becoming theists of various kinds, thus making atheism an increasingly lonely prospect. He claims to have debated for a while between Christianity and Hinduism, because every other religion is, according to him, “either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarisation of, these,” but unsurprisingly he chooses the one he was raised in and which dominates his cultural sphere. Even Catholicism doesn’t seem to have tempted him as it does so many other adult converts, including his contemporaries Waugh, Greene, and Spark. (It was also of course the creed of his good friend Tolkien.) Lewis would remain a contented Anglican for the rest of his life.
I’ve talked a lot about religion, which would please Lewis since this is meant to be a religious book. And by the end, that’s really the only way it can be read, since, as Lewis warns in the preface, “The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography . . . This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.” True to his word, once he’s into proper adulthood there’s really no autobiography at all, just a list of the mental steps he took from “there is no God” to “there is something, but it’s not God” to “God is real” to “the Christian God specifically is real.” He insists that this process has very little to do with anything happening externally, which again I find hard to believe. You’re telling me that your return from the western front and the death of your dad (your complicated relationship with whom has been one of the main concerns of this very book) didn’t sway you at all in your choice to embrace the idea of a loving heavenly father and a just and orderly universe? I have to call BS!
But despite how it may sound there is actually a lot to recommend this book even if, like me, you remain skeptical of its ultimate intentions. When he does allow himself to be a standard memoirist rather than an evangelist or an apologist Lewis is very absorbing, and in fact this is the main mode he’s in for the first three quarters or so, only making the occasional digression into preaching when (it seems) he’s remembered what the point of all this was supposed to be. Maybe unsurprisingly for someone whose most lasting legacy is as a children’s author, he has a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about childhood, and particularly about the differences between how children actually think and feel and how the adults around them imagine they think and feel. I’ve already mentioned that he writes very alluringly about the charms of the reader’s life, and he’s also very vivid about the northern Irish landscapes of his youth (I don’t think I’d realized how much Lewis continued to consider himself an Irishman at his core, despite his later English affiliations) and the series of English boarding schools he was shipped off to, most of them varying degrees of miserable. (He’s especially memorable on the infamous “fagging” system, which I will leave for other sources to explain if you’re not familiar.) It’s a very male story—two brothers raised by a widower father, spending years in various all-male academic institutions and then capping it off with the military—which I think goes a long ways towards explaining some of Lewis’s later hangups, but in other regards he tends to be very generous in his treatment of the “characters” of his life, and can even be startlingly liberal-minded (at least for a pious mid-century Oxford don) about, for instance, same-sex relationships.
I think if I’d stopped after the chapter on WWI I’d have been left with a very positive overall impression. As it is the final section did put me off pretty badly, and inclined me to think most of his other books, which are usually more rather than less overtly religious than this one, won’t have much to offer me on reread. Still, it was good to try, and a fitting capstone for a summer of reading those various convert-authors I mentioned above: Greene, Waugh, Spark, and I suppose Dostoevsky too. That wasn’t by design, but it is interesting how much more serious Lewis comes off about spiritual matters than—especially—Waugh and Greene. Their brand of Catholicism feels very decorative by comparison; more tolerable, for a non-believing reader, but also harder to buy as really important to them.
A pretty good anecdote from Wikipedia to close out this prohibitively long review:
Good to know God has a sense of humor.
Anyway. I was raised in a pretty devout Baptist household, but when I was about 16 I did what evangelicals call “rededicating your heart to Jesus”: basically I decided that I had been backsliding and reconverted, and for the next six years or so I was a very serious Christian, albeit one who still usually felt more at home with heathens than fellow believers. I could write a whole book of my own about that period, but the main point I want to make here is that, like a lot of Christians of the more bookish sort, I considered C.S. Lewis to be my personal hero. I remember I took part in a group activity in college where we were asked who we most looked up to; while everyone else named a family member, I (like the very normal 19-year-old I was) named C.S. Lewis.
I can’t really explain this intense connection people like me (as I was then) feel with Lewis without being a little condescending about Christianity at large; but basically when you’re in that kind of environment all the time, constantly being told—if not in so many words—not to think too hard or too critically about a whole lot of things that simply don’t make any logical or even emotional or moral sense, and when you have the kind of brain that likes to think critically, or at least to have an intellectual bulwark of some kind for the things you’ve decided to accept as true, Lewis’s writings for adults feel like a literal godsend. He’s a committed thinker and more well-read than anyone you’ve ever met and writes in this beautiful, clear, elegant style (I’d still place him on my very short list of all-time favorite prose stylists) and makes being a Christian sound both very important and like the most rational, reasonable thing a person could ever do. He’s been an atheist before so he knows what it’s like to disbelieve, and even as a Christian he’s not puritanical about things like drinking or scandalized by things like sex. He has a dry sense of humor and a genuine literary imagination. The fact that most of us first encountered his writing as children, through the Narnia books, doesn’t hurt—it’s like realizing once you’ve grown up that you can now talk to your parents like an adult. In a world of really horrid “Christian literature” (per Lewis himself, “Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry”), he shows that it’s possible to take the “literature” part seriously without losing the “Christian.” Even reading him after a decade of unswerving atheism, I found it hard to resist his charms, however unconvincing I found his actual arguments. I think that’s why, until now, I haven’t dared to revisit him.
There’s not any especially interesting reason why I did choose to revisit him now—it was mostly just that my library had the audiobook available when I needed something to listen to on the bus last week. But there is a reason I chose this particular book of his, as it was one of his first I read after my re-conversion and remains one of my most pleasant and vivid reading memories—which is appropriate in an Inception kind of way, since it’s a book largely about Lewis’s own most pleasant and vivid early reading memories. That’s not what he set out to write about, necessarily (“This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about,” he tells us up front) but it quickly becomes apparent that he is one of those people, like many of us on this site, who can’t really separate his larger life, religious or otherwise, from the things he’s read. To hear it told here, it was books, far more than any other influence, that carried Lewis from the atheism of his teens and twenties to the all-encompassing Christian faith that characterized the rest of his life. (“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist,” he says, “cannot be too careful of his reading.” I personally find exactly the opposite to be true.)
Lewis chooses to refract his spiritual journey through the lens of what he calls “Joy”:
For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the [experiences I have just described]; 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.
As he describes it elsewhere, Joy tends to take the form of a kind of fleeting inner pang or ache that arrives unexpectedly, goes away almost immediately, and can never be recaptured at will, as much as you may try to get it back. For the young Lewis it occurs mostly (surprise) while reading, especially books about Norse gods and goddesses. And to the older Lewis who’s writing this book, it’s important because—however unbelieving the person experiencing Joy may be at that moment—it really signifies a yearning for the presence of God, capital-G. It makes a decent throughline for a spiritual memoir—documenting the ebbs and flows of Joy as the subject gets nearer to or farther from the mark—and I think I’ve experienced something similar at a few points in my life, namely while reading C.S. Lewis books when I was younger. But coming back to this now, I find the whole premise pretty faulty. For one thing, as much as Lewis insists Joy isn’t an aesthetic experience, this is hard to take seriously when every instance of it he describes is tied specifically to a book, a piece of music, or a landscape (or, in one case, a miniature diorama of a landscape). If this feeling was really a means for God to get in touch with mortals, you’d think it might occasionally flare up in the midst of a conversation, say, or during a totally unremarkable moment when you could be sure nothing else was working on your imagination; but apparently not so for Lewis. For another thing, Joy never seems to be caused by any specifically Christian stimulus; Lewis never describes feeling it while reading a passage of scripture or saying a prayer. In fact, it’s so consistently associated with Norse myths that he sometimes calls it “the Northernness.” Lewis of course has an answer for this too—for him pagan mythology always contains some kernel of truth or rightness which has been “fulfilled” in Christianity, meaning it can point a person towards the “true” faith even when he seems to be following the “wrong” one—but it would seem to me that if the divine was constantly speaking to me while reading about Thor and not while reading about Jesus, it would be reasonable to wonder if maybe Thor was the real deal instead. But again, this consideration never seems to cross Lewis’s mind.
Regardless, this whole concept comes to very little in the end, as Lewis’s actual conversion is not really precipitated by Joy at all, and he even tells us in the penultimate paragraph that, “[to] tell you the truth, the subject [of Joy] has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. . . . I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.” The turn to faith, when it does come, is spurred more by Lewis’s reading of Christian authors like G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald, some abstract philosophical contemplations about “the Absolute” and similar ideas, and maybe most of all the fact that all of his Oxford friends seem to be becoming theists of various kinds, thus making atheism an increasingly lonely prospect. He claims to have debated for a while between Christianity and Hinduism, because every other religion is, according to him, “either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarisation of, these,” but unsurprisingly he chooses the one he was raised in and which dominates his cultural sphere. Even Catholicism doesn’t seem to have tempted him as it does so many other adult converts, including his contemporaries Waugh, Greene, and Spark. (It was also of course the creed of his good friend Tolkien.) Lewis would remain a contented Anglican for the rest of his life.
I’ve talked a lot about religion, which would please Lewis since this is meant to be a religious book. And by the end, that’s really the only way it can be read, since, as Lewis warns in the preface, “The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography . . . This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.” True to his word, once he’s into proper adulthood there’s really no autobiography at all, just a list of the mental steps he took from “there is no God” to “there is something, but it’s not God” to “God is real” to “the Christian God specifically is real.” He insists that this process has very little to do with anything happening externally, which again I find hard to believe. You’re telling me that your return from the western front and the death of your dad (your complicated relationship with whom has been one of the main concerns of this very book) didn’t sway you at all in your choice to embrace the idea of a loving heavenly father and a just and orderly universe? I have to call BS!
But despite how it may sound there is actually a lot to recommend this book even if, like me, you remain skeptical of its ultimate intentions. When he does allow himself to be a standard memoirist rather than an evangelist or an apologist Lewis is very absorbing, and in fact this is the main mode he’s in for the first three quarters or so, only making the occasional digression into preaching when (it seems) he’s remembered what the point of all this was supposed to be. Maybe unsurprisingly for someone whose most lasting legacy is as a children’s author, he has a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about childhood, and particularly about the differences between how children actually think and feel and how the adults around them imagine they think and feel. I’ve already mentioned that he writes very alluringly about the charms of the reader’s life, and he’s also very vivid about the northern Irish landscapes of his youth (I don’t think I’d realized how much Lewis continued to consider himself an Irishman at his core, despite his later English affiliations) and the series of English boarding schools he was shipped off to, most of them varying degrees of miserable. (He’s especially memorable on the infamous “fagging” system, which I will leave for other sources to explain if you’re not familiar.) It’s a very male story—two brothers raised by a widower father, spending years in various all-male academic institutions and then capping it off with the military—which I think goes a long ways towards explaining some of Lewis’s later hangups, but in other regards he tends to be very generous in his treatment of the “characters” of his life, and can even be startlingly liberal-minded (at least for a pious mid-century Oxford don) about, for instance, same-sex relationships.
I think if I’d stopped after the chapter on WWI I’d have been left with a very positive overall impression. As it is the final section did put me off pretty badly, and inclined me to think most of his other books, which are usually more rather than less overtly religious than this one, won’t have much to offer me on reread. Still, it was good to try, and a fitting capstone for a summer of reading those various convert-authors I mentioned above: Greene, Waugh, Spark, and I suppose Dostoevsky too. That wasn’t by design, but it is interesting how much more serious Lewis comes off about spiritual matters than—especially—Waugh and Greene. Their brand of Catholicism feels very decorative by comparison; more tolerable, for a non-believing reader, but also harder to buy as really important to them.
A pretty good anecdote from Wikipedia to close out this prohibitively long review:
Contrary to assumptions, the title of Surprised by Joy was not conceived as a tribute to Lewis's wife, the American poet and writer Joy Gresham. Gresham came into Lewis's life during the course of the book's writing and assisted in editing its final draft. But Joy only became Lewis's wife two years after the memoir's publication. Consequently, several of Lewis's friends and contemporaries were quick to notice the coincidence, frequently remarking that Lewis had really been "Surprised by Joy."
Good to know God has a sense of humor.
May 17, 2023
May 17, 2023 - Third or fourth readthrough. Floored every time. I think that some of Lewis’s reflections are abstract enough that if you don’t relate to them, they can’t really be grasped. However, if you do relate, it feels as if you finally have words for something you’ve always experienced, but never been articulate enough to express. So many moments of “YES, THAT is EXACTLY what that experience is like”. I think that for me, reading this book feels a lot like the feeling some have the first time they ever learn about their enneagram.
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Maybe my favorite book of all time. One of the great purposes of an autobiography (or any vulnerable introspection for that matter) is to make the reader feel less alone and more known because you've put language to something that they feel as well, yet could never put their finger on. This book changed my life as I related to it, and also happens to be written as beautifully as any other Lewis book from a syntactic standpoint.
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Maybe my favorite book of all time. One of the great purposes of an autobiography (or any vulnerable introspection for that matter) is to make the reader feel less alone and more known because you've put language to something that they feel as well, yet could never put their finger on. This book changed my life as I related to it, and also happens to be written as beautifully as any other Lewis book from a syntactic standpoint.
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