9

Phantasies is the title of a book I have just finished reading. It is a strange book that I should have read long ago. The subtitle is A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. (Notice: it is not a children’s book.) The author is a Scot writer, George MacDonald whose life (1824-1905) spanned our Civil War.

There have been lots of stories about fairies and fairy land, but this one does qualify as something special. The narrative is original, especially since it was written so long ago in 1858, and the language has a flair that is still rarely matched. In this story you find adventures at every turn. You are lost in the woods, and stumble across a little hut. Go in one door. Look around. See another door. Go out and you step out  on to the grounds of a wonderful palace. The hut vanishes. Leave the palace and you are lost in the woods. Watch out for Ash trees. They are dangerous. Let them catch you and you are dead. Next moment you are a knight fighting a giant. It is a world of faerie. If you like imaginative fantasies a little out of the routine style, you won’t lose by looking up this one. It may not stand out so much a century later in our day of Bilbo Baggins, Harry Potter, and Aslan, but it is still a singular work. It  also has a special place in modern western culture, for it was a turning point in the life of C. S. Lewis. This book brought about what may be called his first ‘conversion,’ his first awakening.

Lewis lived his first few years as a member with his family of a protestant church in Belfast, Ireland. His father was a lawyer, his mother died when he was a boy, and he had an older brother with whom he was very close all his life. He went through the  typical education of an upper middle-class youth, at different times a student in what we would call small private schools. His education was partly due to a few such schools in Ireland and a few private tutors. One tutor in particular was Kirk, a hardened atheist who had great influence on the teenage Lewis. As a young teenager—an extraordinarily learned teenager—Lewis rejected Christianity and any form of theism, yet vaguely and emotionally somehow still felt there was more to reality than a material universe.

The political status of England and Ireland is a little difficult to untangle. Ireland is not part of the United Kingdom, but there are connections, and in the years before WW I  these required Lewis and other Irish men to make a choice. They were not English but they were well aware of what was happening in Europe and what would happen if Germany conquered all of Europe. Great Britain entered the war in October 1914,  and therefore many Irish men, though they did not have to, put on the British uniform.

Lewis knew he would eventually go to war. He did, was wounded in France, came home to recover, and in time become a Fellow and Tutor at Oxford University where he went on to write The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, the Narnia stories, science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, poetry, and many other books and articles as well as give speeches, and radio broadcasts. Today he has a universal audience, and I doubt there are many present readers of Words who have not heard of Lewis or read something by him.   

It may be said that Lewis had three turning points that brought him from his atheistic youth to his place in recent years as the leading Christian writer of our day, perhaps of the entire twentieth century. We may call these turning points conversions although that word is hard to define.  The date of his second conversion or turning point in his life is in some dispute. Lewis claimed that his second conversion was during an evening walk in Oxford University in 1929 with two friends, J.R.R. Tolkien  (The Hobbit) and Hugo Dyson.  Lewis scholars now prefer a later date, September,1931.  It doesn’t matter. Lewis was always notoriously incompetent at dates. (As are certain other persons.) At the end of that evening, actually well into the morning, Lewis tells us, he had come to believe in God.  He had converted from atheism to theism. That was the second conversion or turning point.

The third conversion was in October 1931. while Lewis was being driven to the zoo in a motorcycle sidecar by his brother Warren. Lewis writes “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. When we reached the zoo, I did.”

There ae many who have undergone conversions to Christianity as Lewis did. There are many who have had different intellectual and spiritual experiences  to the same end. Some have had dramatic experiences like Louis Zamperini whose story is told in his book and in the movie Unbroken. (See Whisper #89. ) Some have had no specific moment.  Lewis is pretty clear about the key moments in his story, what we may call his second and third conversion experiences although they perhaps amount to one. But back to the first one.

C.S. Lewis’s first life-changing experience, what is above called his first conversion, long before the second and third, was unique. It was of a different kind. It occurred in October of 1914, years before the second and the third. Living as a sixteen-year-old  with a real prospect of dying on the battlefield or living in a grey, empty universe. He claimed to believe in only “atoms, evolution, and military life.”  Then in the fall of 1914. In a nearby train station he bought a used copy of a book by one George MacDonald.

Said Lewis in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, “That night my imagination was, in a certain, sense baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantasies.”