Protagonist #2: Question of God

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29th, 1898 in Belfast Ireland. Lewis's Scottish mother, Florence, came from a "cooler race" as Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. Their minds were "critical and ironic who had the talent for happiness." His father, Albert, was from a Welsh family who "were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and had not much the talent for happiness."

Years later, the influences from his family would cause him to write about his "mothers cheerful and tranquil affection," and that "the ups and downs" of his father's emotional life bred in him "a certain dislike or distrust of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous."

As a young boy, Lewis remembers attending church services where his grandfather would preach highly emotional sermons often weeping at the pulpit. Him and his brother, Warren, could hardly contain themselves in embarrassment and often giggled at these services. Nicholi writes that, "these early experiences with formal religion played no small role in Lewis's later repudiation of his nominal childhood faith, his seeing the spiritual worldview as "silly" and his embrace of a materialistic alternative."

Other series of events that solidified Lewis's early skepticism to faith included the death of his paternal grandfather and mother. After numerous consultations by different doctors, they decided to attempt surgery on his mother to remove the cancer from within. The operation took place in their own home where Lewis remembers "being taken into her bedroom to observe her corpse and that his 'grief was overwhelmed in terror'." Nicholi writes that "the impact of this loss - the change in his father's demeanor and subsequently the change in his relationship to his two boys, Lewis's depression and pessimism of many years, and the 'first religious experience' of praying in vain for his mother's recovery - all were crucial."

Lewis was eventually "shipped" off to England at the age of 9 with his brother to attend a public school where he had a very difficult time adjusting. It's here that Lewis ran into another "bump in the road." His first headmaster - nicknamed "Oldie" - whipped students with a cane and had a reputation for cruelty. "Oldies" brutality was so bad, eventually the school had to close down because of a lack of students. What was worse, he was a clergyman of the Church of England, which made a lasting impression upon Lewis.

However, not all of Lewis's early childhood experiences would be proved negative. Nicholi talks about Lewis's autobiography where he writes, "Life in a vile boarding school...teaches one to live by hope. Even in a sense, by faith; for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far off that it is as hard to realize them as to realize heaven."

Lewis began to have his framework of skepticism loosened by his new school matron at Cherbourg, Miss Cowie. Supposedly, Miss Cowie was still in her "spiritual immaturity" and "floundering" in many different cults, which she discussed with Lewis. Lewis writes, "Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges of my belief. The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread..."

Lewis believes the impression he got from Miss Cowie was that religion, though utterly false, was birthed from man, whom, tended to make a blunder out of it. He also began to be sick of the turbulent atmosphere the educational system seemed to be in. He wrote, "I have never seen a community so competitive, so full of snobbery and flunkeyism, a ruling class so selfish and so self-conscious, or a proletariat so fawning, so lacking in all solidarity and sense of corporate honor." Lewis adds that, "For the last thirty years or so England has been filled with a bitter, truculent, skeptical, debunking, and cynical intellisgentsia."

Finally, Lewis's foundation in logic and critical thinking was fostered under the tutelage of William T. Kirkpatrick. The "Great Knock" as Lewis called Kirkpatrick was a militant atheist and logician. He instilled in Lewis a love of reading and writing. Both the "Great Knock" and Lewis based their atheism on anthropological studies such as Frazer's Golden Bough, as Nicholi points out. Like Freud in many respects, Lewis believed "religion" was man's own invention and believed Christianity was like other pagan religions. Eventually, Lewis discovered George MacDonald's "Phatastes" where his imagination was "baptized" and where he would later take numerous quotes from for his own books. Nicholi notes that, "Little did Lewis know that MacDonald was writing about the spiritual worldview that he, Lewis, would embrace some fifteen years later."

Blessings,

Joe