Not long afterwards, Lewis read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) and was surprised to find the whole Christian outline of history making sense. An even stronger blow at his efforts to keep God at bay came, when he wrote in Surprised by Joy,

Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thong’, he went on, ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’ To understand the shattering impact of it, you need to know the man… If he the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toucs, were not- as I would still have put it – ‘safe’, where could I turn.^

The hard-boiled atheist was probably Lewis’ colleague, Thomas Weldon, Philosopher Tutor at Magdalen, who turned up at Lewis’ rooms on the evening of 27 April 1926. In his diary for that evening Lewis wrote: ‘Just settling down… when Weldon arrived. This meant whisky and talk till 12.30, greatly to my disappointment. We somehow got on the  historical truth of the Gospels, and agreed that there is a lot that could not be explained away.^^

……………

Lewis was still thinking about myth and resurrection when, on Saturday evening, 19 September 1931, he invited Tolkien and Hugo Dyson to dine at Magdalen. Probably none of them had any idea what a momentous impact this night’s conversation was to have on Lewis, who was finally to see his beliefs about myths, paganism and Christianity cohere…. After dinner the three friends strolled up Addison’s Walk discussing myths and metaphor till a wind storm tore through the trees and drove them inside. IN Lewis’s room, they talked about Christianity till 3 a.m when Tolkien left to go home….Lewis and Dyson continued the discussion for another hour…. ON Monday, 28 September, Lewis and Warnie took a picnic lunch to Whipsnade Zoo ………

Something of far greater importance happened to Lewis on the way to Whipsnade for, as he says in Surprised by Joy: ‘When we set out I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when we reached the Zoo, I did. Yet, I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.’

He wrote to Arthur Greaves on 1 October: ‘ I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

Lewis was initially unsure if his belief in Christ was clear enough in his own mind to explain to another. He eventually wrote an account of his conversion at Arthur’s insistence on 18 October:

What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved or ‘opened salvation’ to the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g., the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e., complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’ – ‘sacrifice” – ‘the blood of the Lamb’) – expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself  to himself (cf the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) * I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it; again that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in pagan stories I was preferred to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

‘Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened; and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myth i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. There it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth^^^ are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. **

(Excerpt from C.S. Lewis The Authorised and Revised Biography. Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper (2002) pp 100; 114-116,)

^^^The term myth is derived from the Greek word mythos which expresses whatever can be delivered in the form of words.This term contrasts with ergon, a Greek term for action, deed, and work. The term mythos lacks an explicit distinction between true or false narratives.)

^C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)ch 14, p 170

^^All My Road Before Me: The Diary of CS Lewis 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991). p 379

* The Hávámal, no 138:’Nine nights I hung upon the Tree, wounded with the spear as an offering to Odin, myself sacrified to myself.’ The Hávámal, which means Sayings of the High One (i.e., Odin, chief of the Norse gods), is a ninth-century poem in Old Norse.

**Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol 1 Family Letters 1905-1931, ed Walter Hooper (2000)

(Lumix GM1. The Baptism of Christ by St John the Baptist. Baptismal font at the Cathedral of St Mary of the Angels. 2016)