- Hey, they're ready for you Max.
- Oh, good.
- It is black. Extra strong. - Thank you.
- Okay. We're on our way.
- Okay, one minute till we shoot.
Thank you guys. Let's be ready.
- There we go.
- Final check- - Is this my chair?
- Let's have a red light bell, please.
- Where's my phone?
Who has my phone?
- Sound.
Camera.
- All right. How's my hair?
How's my hair?
- It's looking good. Looking good.
- Nice and quiet, please.
Ready for a take.
Cameras are rolling.
Set.
- One take one. - Mark it.
Quiet.
Stand by and...
Action.
- When I was an atheist, if you had asked me,
why do you not believe in God?
I would've answered, look at the universe we live in.
Mostly empty space, completely dark.
Unimaginably cold.
Most scientists think it improbable
that any planet in our solar system sustains life
and Earth herself existed without life for millions of years
and may exist millions more
after life has once again left her.
And what is life?
So arranged that creatures live only by preying on another.
In the lower forms, this means only death.
In the higher forms something called consciousness
enables the living to experience pain.
Creatures are born in pain,
live by inflicting pain and mostly die in pain.
In the most complex of all creatures, man,
another quality appears, reason.
And by reason we can foresee our own pain.
This we call suffering.
We can foresee our own death
while keenly desiring to go on living.
Reason enables humans to invent hundreds of ingenious ways
of inflicting a great deal more pain
than we could have done as irrational creatures.
This power we have exploited to the full.
History's our record of crime, war, disease, terror,
with just enough happiness to give us
an agonized fear of losing it.
And when lost, the poignant misery
of remembering how good it felt.
Every now and then our condition is improved
by what we call civilization.
But all civilizations pass away.
That our own civilization will pass away is surely probable,
and even if it should not pass away,
we're all doomed, the universe is doomed.
The astronomers hold out no hope
that this planet is permanently inhabitable.
The physicists hold out no hope that organic life
is a permanent possibility in any part
of the material universe.
Not only this earth, but the whole show.
All the suns of space are to run down.
Nature is a sinking ship.
So if you asked me to believe all this I've just described
as the work of an omnipotent, benevolent God,
I would have laughed and said
the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Either there's no God behind the universe,
a God indifferent to good and evil,
or worse, an evil God,
Never dreamed of raising the question
if the universe is so bad, or even half so bad,
how on Earth did humans ever come to attribute
it to the work of a wise and good creator?
Oh men are fools!
But not so foolish as that,
to direct inference from black to white,
from evil flower to virtuous root,
from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise.
Staggers belief.
No, I did not believe God existed.
I was angry at God for not existing.
Why should creatures have the burden of existence
forced upon them without their consent?
I lost my mother to cancer.
Had an estranged relationship with my father
that I regret even now.
Was in the trenches during the Great War,
the hell where youth and laughter go
only to see horribly smashed men
still moving about like crushed beetles.
A mortar shell that wounded me, killed the man next to me,
splattering shrapnel,
some of which I carry my body to this day.
When I returned to Oxford after the war in 1919,
I read the minutes to my college's last meeting in 1914,
nothing made me realize more thoroughly
the absolute waste of those years.
I was asked "Were you much frightened in France?"
"All the time," I said,
"but I never sank so low as to pray."
Some people have got the impression from my books
that I was raised in a strict and vivid puritanism.
This is untrue.
- Mr. Lewis.
- Roger, usual please.
You? Make that two.
I'll get these.
Edel will find us a table.
- You can have this one.
There you go. All done.
- No, religious experience did not occur in my family.
Was taught the usual things, made to say my prayers,
in due time taken to church.
Can't remember feeling much interest in it.
Cheers!
Father was a solicitor in Belfast, Ireland.
He was Welsh by blood, passionate, rhetorical,
laughed and cried a great deal.
Had almost no talent for happiness.
Mother was of a cooler race.
She was tranquil, affectionate.
She had a talent for happiness. Went straight for it.
As an experienced traveler
goes for the best seat on a train.
I lived in a large house that to a small boy
seemed like a city.
I am a product of long corridors,
empty sunlit rooms, attics explored in solitude,
distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes.
The noise of wind under the tiles
and endless books.
Books readable and unreadable,
books suitable for a child and books emphatically not.
Nothing was forbidden.
In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons
I almost literally read my way through the house.
- Jack.
You'll never guess what I found!
Quick!
- Hey wait for me!
Hey wait!
- Catch up.
- Hey Jack, now stop! Don't disturb your father!
- Boys!
Boys!
- Boys.
- Happy days.
My brother Warnie and I enjoyed them to the full.
Until the great loss that befell our family.
One night, my father in tears came into my room
to convey to my terrified mind
things I'd never conceived of.
My mother had cancer.
- The doctor said, we can't-
- I don't think children suffer
less than their elders, they suffer differently.
- So we have to be strong.
- And as our whole existence changed
into something alien and menacing.
- Your mother loves you very much.
- The house became full of strange smells,
midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations.
- We need some fresh bandages quickly.
- My brother Warnie and I
lost our mother gradually as she was slowly withdrawn
from our life into the hands of nurses,
delirium and morphea.
- Oh Doctor. Thank goodness.
- The disease followed the usual course,
an operation, they operated in the patient's house
in those days, an apparent recovery,
the return at the disease, increasing pain, death.
When mother died, all settled happiness
disappeared from our lives.
A great continent had sunk.
It was only sea and islands now.
My father never recovered.
Under the pressure he spoke wildly, acted unjustly,
as this unfortunate man was losing his sons
as well as his wife.
My brother Warnie and I had already begun to lie to him.
We were two frightened urchins,
huddled for warmth in a bleak world.
Mother's death occasioned, what some might say at the time,
my first religious experience.
When my mother's case was pronounced hopeless
I remembered what I had been taught,
that prayers offered in faith would be granted.
Accordingly, I set myself to produce in prayer
a firm belief for her recovery.
When she died, I shifted ground.
I worked myself into belief that there was to be a miracle.
Oh, I approached God.
Not as savior or as judge, but as magician.
I simply wanted him to restore the status quo.
And when he had done what was required of him,
he would simply go away.
The prayer hadn't worked.
Oh, I was used to things not working,
thought no more about it.
Mother's death among other things,
produced in me a deeply ingrained pessimism.
Oh, I was by no means unhappy,
but I had definitely formed the opinion that the universe
in the main was a rather regrettable institution.
Father's melancholy was a contributing factor.
A prosperous man who by our present tax-ridden standards
would be described as incredibly secure.
Expressed adult life as one unremitting struggle.
Best one could hope for, according to him,
was to avoid the workhouse.
This only by extreme exertion.
Never thought to check his highly colored comments
against the obvious fact
that we were living very uncomfortable lives.
Temperamental widower still grieving the loss of his wife
must be very wise to raise two noisy school boys
who reserve their confidence only for each other.
The same scene, reenacted time after time.
- Well?
- When he opened his mouth to reprove us
he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal
to our common sense.
- Have you nothing to say in your defense?
- But alas, he had been a public prosecutor,
long before he had become a father.
Words came to him and intoxicated him as they came.
- Never in all my born days
have I come across such recalcitrant behavior.
Disobedience.
Deliberate disobedience and willfulness,
such as would dismay the very founders of our civilization.
- What happened was a small boy who left the bathroom
in a pickle, found himself attacked like Cicero on Catiline.
Simile on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical
question, the flash of an orator's eye,
the gestures, the cadences...
The pauses.
The pauses were the chief danger.
- Well?
- One was so long
that my brother, assuming the denunciation to have ended,
humbly picked up his book and resumed reading,
a gesture which my father, who had only made
a rhetorical miscalculation of about a second and a half
described as-
- Cool, premeditated, insolent!
- The disproportion between the tirades
and what prompted them was ludicrous.
From the wilderness of words,
emerged ideas I took literally.
- Perhaps I should board up the house.
Keep you both in school all year round.
- And that we should be-
- Sent to the colonies to end in misery
the career of crime on which you have both already embarked.
- Such was the effect of my father's rhetoric,
until I began to perceive him as ridiculous.
At 14, I ceased to be a Christian.
At that age one barely notices.
At school, all the teachers and book editors
took it for granted that religion was some sort of endemic
nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder.
In the midst of a thousand false religions,
stood our own, the thousand and first,
labeled completely true.
On what grounds I asked, why was it treated so differently?
I was eager not to, if Adonis could be explained away,
then why not Christ?
So little by little, I became an apostate
dropping my faith with no sense of loss
and with the greatest relief.
Oh, there was no faith, hope or charity in my religion.
I feared not God, but hell,
and heaven was only the lesser of two intolerable evils.
Oh, I became a vigorous debunker and argued
there's no proof for any religion
and that Christianity is not even the best.
Religion was invented to explain things
that terrified primitive man, thunder, pestilence, snakes.
What could be more natural than to suppose
they were animated by spirits and that by singing songs
and making sacrifices, one might appease them.
Great men such as Hercules and Odin were thought to be gods.
After their death, hence after the death
of a Hebrew philosopher, Yeshua,
whose name we have corrupted into Jesus,
a cult sprang up and Christianity began,
just another mythology among many.
Oh the superstitions always held by common people,
but educated thinking was always stood outside it,
conceding to it only out of convenience.
And I was not prepared to believe in a bogey man
who would torture me forever
because I failed to live up to an impossible standard.
With my deliberate withdrawal from divine protection,
I underwent a successful assault of sexual temptation.
Part of it was the age I had reached.
The electric effect was a dancing mistress.
She was the first woman to speak to my blood
whom I looked upon to lust after.
- Good morning, boys.
- Good morning Miss.
- This was of no fault of her own.
A gesture, tone of voice
has unpredictable results in these matters.
As it happened, the school room was decorated for dance.
She came in and said.
- I love the smell of bunting.
- And I was undone.
- Now, let us begin.
Follow my every move.
Thank you Elsie.
Up.
And down.
And up.
And dainty toes.
Dainty toes, very good.
Dainty toes.
And around sway.
Sway.
- This was not a knight devoting himself to a lady,
more like a Turk looking at a Circassian woman
he could not afford.
I knew what I wanted.
You might think this produced guilt.
Guilt was not a thing I knew.
- Well done boys. Well done.
- I had been a tender-hearted boy,
but now I labored hard to become a fop, a cad, a snob.
I was at that time as non-moral
as a human creature could be.
- Oh Lewis.
Do enjoy the holidays won't you?
- Yes, miss.
- Oh, there you are. Where have you been?
- Sorry Father. - Come on, come on.
It won't wait you know. Thank you.
- I could not tell my father
my change of belief.
He was no fool. He even had a streak of genius.
But for a man who was formidable in court
and I presume efficient in his office,
he had more power for confusing an issue
than any man I have ever known.
Oh, the first barrier to communication
was having asked the question,
he would not stay for the answer.
Tell him that a boy called Churchwood had caught a mouse
and kept it as a pet.
He would ask-
- Whatever became of young Chickweed
who was so afraid of rats?
- Who sir?
- Chickweed.
- Oh, I think you mean Churchwood.
It was a mouse, not a rat.
And he wasn't afraid of it, at all.
- Attempts to correct his version produced an incredulous.
- That's not the story you used to tell, my boy.
- All this explains, though does not excuse,
one of the worst acts of my life.
I allowed myself to prepare for confirmation.
To be confirmed, make my first communion,
all in total disbelief,
acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation.
I knew I was acting a lie.
I simply could not tell my father my real views.
Not that he would have stopped.
Let's talk the whole thing over, he would have said.
But the thread would have been lost at once.
His arguments.
I would not have valued a straw,
the beauty of the authorized version,
the Christian tradition.
Oh, it was all sentiment.
And if I tried to make by exact points clear,
there would have been thunder from him
and a thin peevish rattle from me,
Nor could the subject ever have been dropped.
All this I ought to have dared
rather than the thing I did.
It seemed impossible at the time,
cowardice drove me to hypocrisy
and hypocrisy to blasphemy.
The years passed, then the most fortunate thing happened.
- A bit more to the right, please.
- My father had declared
that he would send my brother to a tutor
in Surrey, south of London.
- That's it. Thank you.
- In a surprisingly short time,
this tutor had so rebuilt the ruins of Warnie's education,
that he passed into Sandhurst
and received a prize army cadetship.
For some time, my own schooling had been going nowhere.
It had neither engaged my mind nor my heart,
but seeing my brothers progress,
I finally plucked up the courage to ask.
- Jack! Jack! Are you up there?
Come on boy. Well get your coat.
We're 10 minutes late already.
- Papa, you know, when you send Warnie off to Surrey
to your old tutor Mr. Kirkpatrick.
- Yes.
The Great Knock we used to call him.
- Warnie seemed to benefit from him greatly.
- He did.
He did. He's a fine teacher.
- I've been thinking.
Might it not be good to send me to Surrey too?
- Well, there'll be no other boys.
You won't be able to play your games.
- I tried to look grave, no other boys.
Never to play games.
I was transported.
Ah yes, this is the day
the rest of my life really began to happen.
I was still in my teens when I made my way over to England
and down to Surrey to meet my new tutor.
I wasn't sure what to expect.
At first sight he seemed decent enough.
- Hello, lovely to meet you.
- William T. Kirkpatrick. The Great Knock.
- His grip was like iron pincers.
- Follow me!
- I remember feeling the need to make conversation
in the deplorable manner
I felt necessary to use with my father.
- I was quite surprised by the scenery of Surrey, sir.
It's really much wilder than I expected.
- Stop! What do you mean by wildness?
And on what grounds have you based your expectations?
On the flora and geology of Surrey?
Was it maps, photographs, books?
- Sorry, sir.
- As answer after answer was torn to shreds
Kirk concluded that my comment was meaningless
and that I had no right to have
any opinion whatsoever on the subject.
It never occurred to me that my thoughts
needed to be based on anything.
That conversation lasted three minutes
and set the tone for my two years in Surrey.
Kirk's ruthless dialectic was the only way he spoke.
It was an astonishment to Kirk
that you should not want to be corrected.
Kirk lived with his wife in a comfortable
and secluded cottage on the edge of the village.
It was all rather wonderful.
- Welcome! Welcome!
Now you put your case down there.
- I felt welcomed as soon as I stepped inside,
the whole place was stuffed with books.
I had come home.
- And this is my wife, Louisa.
- Pleased to meet you Mrs. Kirkpatrick.
- Pleasure's ours entirely.
- We'll show you up to your room.
- I have it all prepared.
- You come down when you're ready,
and we'll start knocking that mind of yours into shape.
- There you are. I hope you like it.
Oh, and by the way, don't worry about my husband.
He likes to argue, a lot.
- Most boys would have cowered at all this.
I loved the treat, but it was red beef and strong beer.
After a few knockdowns,
I began to put on some intellectual muscle
and became a bit of a sparring partner to my new tutor.
If I could please myself, I'd always live as I lived here.
breakfast at eight, at my desk by nine
to read and write to precisely one, then lunch.
- That was absolutely delicious.
Thank you, Mrs. Kirkpatrick.
- Fine.
- Oh yes. I was encouraged to eat, as well as to think.
Off for a walk by two, not with a friend.
Walking and talking are two great pleasures,
but it is a mistake to combine them.
Our noise blocks out the sounds and silences
of the outer world.
- Thank you.
- My return and the arrival of tea
would coincide at exactly four, taken in solitude.
Eating and reading are two pleasures
that combine admirably.
Work till seven, deep into the classics,
not sparing the horses.
Good talk all evening, all challenging,
brain-rattling stuff.
In bed by 11, unless you're making a night of it
at the pub with your cronies.
- Passable. You're still a little shaky on accuracy.
And I fear you've missed my point
about the classics entirely.
He that neither knoweth nor will be taught
by the instruction of the wise,
this man is not Herodotus.
He knew a thing or two.
- That's not Herodotus.
It's Hesiod.
- Prove it.
- It's from his poem "Days in work."
I have it somewhere.
Here.
- Good lad!
- My work was mostly Latin and Greek.
Homer first. Oh still relish the brightness and music of it.
Then the two great bores,
Cicero and Demosthenes could not be avoided.
Followed by Lucretius. Oh, the glory!
Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides.
Had no taste for Virgil.
In the evening we mastered French, Italian and German
plunging into the likes of Voltaire, Faust in the inferno.
Kirk was my great teacher.
My debt remains to this day.
As for religion, he was a Presbyterian atheist.
On Sundays, he gardened in nicer clothes.
Among the poets I was reading at the time,
one stood apart, William Butler Yeats.
He believed that there was a world
beyond the material curtain
and that contact with that world was possible.
Oh, I regarded Yeats as a learned responsible writer.
Later when I met him, I was awed by his personality
and he rejected the whole
materialist philosophy out of hand.
If Yeats had been a Christian, I would have discounted him.
I had Christians placed, disposed of for ever.
Yeats offered something else, a perhaps.
And through this perhaps,
a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my materialism
and introduced me to something
I've had trouble with ever since,
a ravenous desire for the supernatural.
Or to put it bluntly, the occult.
I once tried to describe it in a novel.
It's a spiritual lust and like the lust of the flesh
has the fatal power of making everything else
seem uninteresting while it lasts.
Oh I loved the vagueness of it.
Circles, pentangles, Ouija boards, seances,
all seemed able to raise a spirit.
Oh, this magic!
No connection of my atheism swayed me in different moods.
And that it was scorned by both Christians and rationalists
appealed to the rebel in me.
My descent was from eccentricity to perversity.
The world and the flesh had made their appearance.
Now came the devil.
Had there been an elder in the neighborhood
who dabbled in dirt,
oh they have a nose for potential disciples,
I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.
Then, in the super abundance of mercy,
came that event which I have attempted
to describe in many of my books.
I was in the habit of walking a few miles
to Leatherhead Station and taking the train back to Kirk's.
While waiting for the train I rummaged in
the second hand bookstore and picked out
an unusual title, "Phantastes" by George MacDonald.
It looked a little unusual.
I hadn't the faintest notion of what I'd let myself in for.
- This one please.
- A tuppence, please sir.
Thank you very much sir.
- Sorry.
- As I began to read my new book, I was electrified.
I felt like a miner who had struck gold.
In those pages I met all that had charmed me
in Yeats and others.
Yet, everything was changed.
The bright shadow coming out of this book,
transformed everything
and it would affect my own writing forever.
It was as if I had died in the old country
and come alive in the new,
all my occult and erotic fantasies began to feel sordid.
Disarmed, what I really wanted was just out of reach.
Not because of something I could not do,
but because of something I could not stop doing.
Oh, if I could only let go, unmake myself.
I did not know the name of this new quality.
Oh I do now. Holiness.
That night as I read "Phantastes"
my imagination was baptized.
The rest of me took a little longer.
I first met it as a memory that would arise suddenly
without warning from the depth of not years, but centuries.
The memory was from childhood
when my brother brought the lid of a biscuit tin
garnished with twigs and flowers to make a toy garden.
It was the first beauty I had ever known,
a sensation of desire.
But before I knew what I desired, the desire was gone,
withdrawn, the world turned common again.
Since then my constant endeavor was to get it again,
in reading every book, going on every walk,
listening to every piece of music.
Occasionally the sky would turn.
Far more often, I frightened it away by my greed to have it.
I call this desire, joy,
which must be distinguished very sharply
from happiness or pleasure,
except that anyone who has ever experienced joy
will want it again.
Apart from that, it might be called
a particular kind of grief,
but then it's the kind we want.
It is the scent of a flower we have not found,
the echo of a tune we've not heard.
News from a country we have not yet visited.
Oh, I doubt that anyone who has ever tasted joy
would exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.
But joy is never in our path. And pleasure is.
At 18, I arrived at Oxford,
the fabled cluster of towers and dreaming spires
had never looked more beautiful.
Less than a term later, like most of my generation,
I enlisted in the army,
was sent to the front lines in France,
on my 19th birthday to be exact.
First bullet I heard brought not fear,
but the thought, this is war.
This is what Homer wrote about.
Five months later, I was wounded and sent home.
In between, I had the good luck
to fall sick with trench fever.
Compared to the trenches,
a hospital bed and a book were heaven itself.
- And how are you tonight Lieutenant Lewis?
- Fine. Thank you nurse.
- Well Stanley. Time for your inspection, I think.
- Yes nurse.
- Except that the night nurse
was conducting a furious affair with my roommate.
I was too sick to be embarrassed,
but the sound of two lovers whispering in the nighttime
is a tedious noise.
It was here I first read G.K Chesterton. Never heard of him.
Had no idea what he stood for,
nor could I understand why it made such a conquest of me.
His humor was the kind I like.
No, not jokes, still less a tone of flippancy.
Oh that I cannot endure.
Rather his humor was the bloom of his argument.
Strange as it seems I liked him for his goodness.
Oh not that it had anything to do with being good myself.
I did not have the cynics nose for hypocrisy and smugness
so common among my peers.
In Chesterton, as in 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.
After my convalescence, I returned to the front lines.
- Wait.
- Turn off the light!
The moment I was hit and found that I was not breathing
I concluded this is death.
I felt no fear, no courage, just the thought,
here lies a man who died.
It wasn't even interesting.
The fruit of this experience
is there appeared a fully conscious I,
whose connection with me was coming to an end.
And I, whoever that may be, cared not two farthings.
Oh, it was more than an abstraction.
I tasted it.
As for the rest of the war, the cold, the fear, the fright.
The corpses.
It was a ghastly interruption to rational life.
Now it feels like it happened to someone else.
Except for the recurring nightmares.
When I returned to Oxford, I put on a new look,
which meant to act with the greatest good sense,
and to have no more flirtations with the supernatural.
Directly after the war, I spent a fortnight
with a man I'd dearly loved, who was going mad.
I held him as he wallowed on the floor
and screamed "Devils are tearing me apart.
I'm falling into hell."
I knew this man had flirted
with all sorts of occult ideas as I had.
Oh, perhaps there was no connection,
but I took it as a warning to stay on the beaten track,
the approved material center of the road with the lights on.
The early days of my new look were quite happy,
busy engaged in my studies of classics, philosophy.
At that time we were all swept up by Freud
and his new psychology.
By my mid 20s, I was elected a fellow at Magdalen College,
hence my career as a scholar and tutor began.
- After you dear boy.
- The answer of course, is that .
- They even provided rooms for me here,
to read, to write for my tutorials.
I had arrived.
I felt like I'd found a home
with some of the finest scholars I would ever meet.
We were young, clear-headed, invincible.
Then one day, my very dear friend, Owen Barfield,
who satisfied my hunger for debate and rational opposition
announced that he had changed his views.
He was no longer a materialist and had become a theist.
I was shocked. I thought Barfield was safe.
He came from such a free-thinkig family.
He'd barely even heard of Christianity.
Barfield bought up all the abominations:
God, spirit, afterlife.
I said, "Dammit Owen, it's medieval."
- Dammit Owen, it's medieval.
- You may say that Jack, but the medieval world
has a lot to teach us.
- You mean that the world is flat.
- Oh come on Jack, be serious. Open your mind.
- I have.
And as a wise man once said to me, he that neither knoweth-
- This started our great war,
our philosophic disputation that lasted for years.
I remember Barfield asking:
- Jack, do you believe that logic and reason
bring forth indisputable truth?
- I do.
- And are your moral and aesthetic judgments
valid and meaningful?
- They are.
- Well then materialism must be abandoned.
There is a hopeless discord between what our minds
claim to be and what they really must be
if materialism is true.
We claim our minds to be reason-perceiving
universal intellectual principles, moral laws,
and possessing free will.
But if materialism is true, our minds must in reality,
be merely chance arrangements of atoms in skulls.
- I of course, argued back.
- We are to accept reality as it is revealed to us
by our senses and the findings of science have concluded
that human reason is merely cognitive maps
resulting from natural selection,
with random mutations over millions of years
to confer on humans a reproductive advantage
over other species.
- I had to say something.
I'd been defending materialism for years.
- Look.
If my clearest reasoning tells me
that my mind is nothing more than the accidental result
of atoms colliding in skulls, there must be some mistake.
How should I trust my mind when it tells me
that my most profound thoughts are merely mental patterns
resulting from heredity and physics?
- Barfield's notion that if materialism is true
my conscious mind is nothing more
than atoms colliding in skulls.
This was simply unbelievable to me.
I could not force my thought into that shape
any more than I could scratch my ear with my big toe.
It was as final as a physical impossibility.
Mind, reason, imagination, consciousness
must be more than mere biochemistry.
It must be a real participation.
Something further up, further in.
Rock-bottom reality had to be intelligent.
It's astonishing I've not seen this before.
Willful blindness, I suppose.
And I was careful not to attach rock-bottom reality to God,
my skepticism would not allow me to go that far.
Rather I attached it to the universe itself.
Still it had immense potency.
Behind the material curtain lay the hidden glory.
Barfield and I began to talk religiously about an absolute.
Of course, this was a religion that cost nothing.
It wasn't personal.
It wouldn't do anything.
It wouldn't lead to dark places where men scream
they're being dragged into hell.
It was there.
Never come here. Make a nuisance of itself.
Within the faculty, I befriended Hugo Dyson
and J.R.R. Tolkien, both Christians.
Oh these queer people were popping up on every side.
There was a wider disturbance.
All my books were turning against me.
I must've been as blind as a bat,
not to have seen this before.
George McDonald had done more to me than any other writer.
Of course he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity.
He was good in spite of it.
Spenser, Dante, Milton had it too.
I thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive,
apart from his Christianity.
I was beginning to think that Christianity
was quite sensible apart from its Christianity.
On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer religion
and with whom my sympathies ought to have been complete:
Shaw, Wells, Gibbon, Voltaire, seemed thin, tinny.
Oh, they were all entertaining, especially Gibbon,
but hardly more.
The roughness and density of life
did not appear in their books.
I concluded that those with untrained philosophic minds
could come near the notion of an absolute being
by believing in a God.
And I distinguished my belief very sharply
from the God of popular religion.
Oh there was no possibility of being
in a personal relation with him.
I could no more meet him than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare.
And I did not call him God, either.
I called him Spirit.
One must fight for one's remaining comforts.
About this time one of my fellow tutors,
the hardest boiled atheist I'd ever known,
sat in my rooms other side of the fireplace and remarked
"The evidence for the historicity of the gospels,
surprisingly good.
Rum thing, all that mythology about the dying god.
Rum thing, looks as if it really happened once."
I was shattered.
If he the cynic of cynics, who's never since
shown any interest in Christianity
were not as I still would have thought him, safe,
where can I turn?
Before God closed in on me
I was in fact offered a moment of free choice.
I was sitting on a bus going up Headington Hills
thinking I was wearing a suit of armor,
trying to keep something out.
I could unbuckle the armor or, keep it on.
The choice felt momentous.
I chose to unbuckle.
Did not seem impossible to do the opposite.
The initiative did not lie with me.
If Hamlet and Shakespeare could ever meet,
it would have to be Shakespeares doing,
he could write himself into the play.
What I called Spirit began to show
an alarming tendency to become personal.
Into my mind, crept a horrible novelty.
I really believed something.
And now that I had blundered into that
I knew I could play at philosophy no longer.
It was time something should be done.
The absolute had arrived.
Making a nuisance of itself, issuing a command.
All my acts and desires were to be brought in line
with this absolute spirit that I now believed.
For the first time I examined myself
with a serious practical purpose.
What I found appalled me.
Depth after depth of pride, self admiration,
a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions,
a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatred.
Oh, my name is legion.
Amiable agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God,
may as well talk of the mouse's search for the cat.
All I ever wanted was not be interfered with,
to call my soul my own.
Keep out, private. This is my business.
But no one talked glibly of the comforts of religion.
Is it a small thing to give yourself blindly to a guide
when his own showing may very well
be leading you to poverty, ridicule, death?
Oh, I knew I would not allow myself
to do anything intolerably painful.
I would be reasonable.
Would it be reasonable?
No assurance was offered.
It was all or nothing.
As the dry bones shook in Ezekiel's dreadful valley,
the absolute spirit began to stir and heave
and throw off its grave clothes.
He said, "I am the Lord.
I am that I am.
I am."
You must picture me alone in my room at Magdalen,
night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted,
even for a second, from my work,
the steady unrelenting approach of him
whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.
That which I greatly feared had at last come found me.
In the Trinity term, 1929, I gave in.
And admitted that God is God.
Knelt and prayed perhaps that night,
the most dejected, reluctant convert in all England.
I did not then see the divine love
that would accept a prodigal on such terms.
Kicking, struggling, resentful,
darting his eyes in every direction,
looking for a chance to escape.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man.
His compulsion is my liberation.
You must understand that the conversion I just described
was only to theism, pure and simple, not Christianity.
I knew nothing of the incarnation,
the God to whom I surrendered was not human.
I had no belief in an after life.
That to me, felt like a bribe.
My argument against God was that the universe
was so cruel and unjust,
but where had I got this notion of cruel and unjust?
I call a line crooked
because I have some idea of a straight line.
What was I comparing the universe with,
when I called it cruel and unjust.
If the whole universe has no meaning,
I should never have known it has no meaning.
All of my reasonable mind was convinced
that the universe cannot explain itself,
that God is behind the universe,
that he has purposes.
And is to be obeyed simply because he is God.
I suppose my religion was like that of the Jews.
As soon as I became a theist,
I started attending my parish church on Sunday.
College chapel during the week.
Not because I believed in Christianity,
but because I thought one should fly one's flag.
Church was an unattractive affair.
I like clergy as I like bears, but I have no more wish
to be in church as to be in a zoo.
Church to me meant ugly architecture, bleed music,
bad poetry, hymns are extremely disagreeable to me.
And the botheration of it all, the crowds, the notices,
the perpetual organizing.
- Before our final prayer, a quick announcement,
if you would like to join Edith on the flower rota,
she's desperate for volunteers,
do please speak to her at the back by the font afterwards.
Let us pray.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee oh Lord
and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils
and dangers of this night,
for the love of Thy only son, our savior Jesus Christ.
Amen.
- My new conviction in a higher being
did not exactly make me a paid-up member
in the Church of England.
But now that I believed in God,
I wanted to know more of him,
from any source, pagan or Christian.
The question was no longer to find the one true religion
among many, but where had the thing grown up.
Paganism was the childhood of religion.
Where had it reached maturity?
As for the materialists, their view was out of court.
If reason is only the accidental result of atoms
colliding in skulls, I could see no reason
to believe that one accident
should give the correct account for all other accidents.
My allegiance was now with the mass of humanity
who danced, sang and prayed, worshiped.
There isn't really an infinite variety
of religions you know.
To me, the only ones worth considering
are Christianity and Hinduism.
Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies.
Buddhism's only the greatest of the Hindu heresies.
All that is best in Judaism and Plato
survives in Christianity
and Hinduism bears no historical claim.
That had been put into my head by that hard-boiled atheist,
who said, "All that mythology about a dying God
looks as if it really happened once."
One day Tolkien and I took a stroll on Addison's walk.
As we talked, I said.
- Tollers, I have, with considerable resistance,
come to believe in God, but not Christianity.
- Oh Jack.
- I cannot believe something I do not understand.
How can the life and death of someone else,
whoever he was, 2000 years ago, help us in the here and now.
- When you meet a God sacrificing himself in a pagan story
like Dionysus, Balder, Osiris or even in a fairy tale,
you like it very much and are mysteriously moved by it.
Provided you meet it anywhere except in the gospels.
Well the story of Christ is a myth,
working on us in the same way as other myths,
with one tremendous difference in that it really happened.
- Suddenly a rush of wind interrupted us, startling me.
So many leaves fell to the ground I thought it was raining.
I held my breath.
- Come on, Jack. You're too slow to catch a cold.
You know Dyson hates sitting on those steps
waiting to be let in.
- I don't know if Tollers remembered that moment.
I did. His words hit home.
No matter how unwilling, I was beginning to move.
Tollers and I talked deep into the night.
Hugo Dyson joined us.
- Beef. Sensational pie.
- You make a mess with that.
Now this stuff will put hairs on your chest.
- Here she is.
Make space would you.
There we go.
- Look, I may be prepared to accept Jesus
as a great moral teacher,
but I simply cannot accept his claim to be God.
- Oh, come on Jack.
How could a mere man be called a great moral teacher
and say the sort of things Jesus said?
- Such as?
- That he always existed.
- That he was coming again to judge the world.
- Such men are judged frauds, lunatics.
- In spite of my resistance,
they convinced me that nothing else in all literature
is just like the gospels.
Myths are like it in one way with its stories
of the miraculous, histories like it in another
with its attention to minute details,
but nothing is simply like it.
And no person is like the person depicted.
- I'm sure there are many people
who believe themselves to be God.
Our hospitals are full of them.
- Oh, come on Jack be serious.
No great moral teacher has ever made that claim
except Jesus, and you know it.
- And he went on and on and on.
- What do you mean?
- Well, claiming to forgive sins
and that he himself is the injured party
in every transgression.
Look, in anyone else this would be thought silly.
- Suppose you told me that two of your colleagues
had lost you a top professorship
by telling lies about your character.
And I replied "Freely forgive them both."
Would you not think this sheer lunacy?
- It would be sheer lunacy.
- Yet, even those who opposed Jesus
admitted that he expressed moral truth of depth and purity
full of wisdom and shrewdness.
- Wisdom and shrewdness.
You make him sound like Solomon the great.
- On the contrary,
history repeatedly calls him humble and meek.
- Not that you want to notice that of course Jack.
Humility and meekness are the last things one would ascribe
to someone who makes claims worthy of being a megalomaniac.
- The Great Knock taught me to shame inconsistency.
If Jesus' statements are false.
Christianity is of no importance.
If true, it is of infinite importance,
but one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
- So what are you saying?
- Simply that either this man was, and is, the son of God
or else he is a liar, a lunatic or a fraud,
but all this patronizing nonsense
about him being some great moral teacher,
it's not an option to us, nor was it intended to be.
- I felt a resistance to this
almost as strong as my resistance to theism.
Every step from the absolute to spirit to God
was a step toward the more concrete.
And now to accept the incarnation that God became man
was a further step in the same direction.
Oh, this too was something I had not wanted.
I remember very well when, but hardly how,
the final step was taken.
I was being driven by my brother Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo
in the sidecar of a motorcycle one Sunday morning
in the autumn of 1931.
When we set out, I did not believe
that Jesus Christ is the son of God.
When we reached the zoo, I did,
I had not spent the journey in thought, or great emotion.
It was more like a man who, after a long sleep,
has become aware he is now awake.
My conversion shed new light on my search for joy.
The overwhelming longings that emerged from "Phantastes"
and my brother's toy garden were merely signposts
to what I truly desired.
They were not the thing itself.
I concluded that if I find in myself a desire
that no experience in this world could satisfy,
the most probable explanation, I was made for another world.
At present we're on the outside of that world,
the wrong side of the door.
We cannot mingle with the splendors we see,
but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumor that it will not always be so.
One day, God willing, we shall get in.
Meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown
and tomorrow is another morning.
A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of this world,
and we have been invited to follow our great captain inside.
Following him is of course the essential point.
- That Christmas, I took the short walk to my parish church.
That walk marked the end of one journey
and the beginning of another.
- As I looked around, I thought not only
of my own potential glory hereafter,
but also that of my neighbor's glory.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods
and goddesses, to remember that the dullest,
most uninteresting person you meet may one day
be a creature that if you saw it now,
you would be strongly tempted to fall down and worship
or else a horror or a corruption such as you now meet,
if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long, we are helping each other
to one or the other of these two destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities
that I should now conduct all my dealings.
There are no ordinary people.
I've never met a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, civilizations, these are mortal.
Their life is to ours as that of a gnat.
It is immortals whom we joke with, work with,
marry, snub, exploit.
The weight or burden of my neighbors glory
should be laid daily on my back.
A load so heavy, only humility can carry it.
And the backs of the proud will be broken.
- Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
Therefore let us keep the feast.
The body of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- Unlike my first communion, 17 years earlier.
I now believed.
- Okay. Thanks very much.
That's a cut there. Thank you.
Thank you Max.
- Thank you.