The final significant point of explanation C. S. Lewis offers in Surprised by Joy concerning his path away from faith and into unbelief is related to the pessimism I discussed in my post on Tuesday. Jack’s father, Albert, had been in the habit, as perhaps many working men are, of repeatedly lamenting the hardness of the world and the difficulty of making ends meet. It had reinforced Jack’s own pessimistic outlook and encouraged him to think of life as “an unremitting struggle in which the best I could hope for was to avoid the workhouse by extreme exertion” (64). Even while at Cherbourg, Jack had already boiled all of life down to unavoidable drudgery. As he said he described it to a friend, all they had to look forward to was “Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we all die” (65).
Albert Lewis, Father of C. S. Lewis
Lewis later saw the same strand of laughable unreality in all this that he also saw in his general pessimism. His father was quite comfortably and securely well off, especially by “our present tax-ridden standards” (64). Really, he had no more business complaining about the difficulty of the universe than Jack did about the existence of Eton collars.
Of course, it’s easy to lose focus on the objective reality of what’s really going on around us when we’re submerged in the day-to-day grind of even generally enjoyable work. That is especially true if that work begins to take on unreasonable proportions. It devours your time, drains you, and leaves you feeling as if you have the weight of a very unfair world on your shoulders, particularly when it may seem that you have no recourse for relief. I know I catch myself snapping unexpectedly at my family due to the stress I have had to deal with at work over the past year. Even when I’m not being snippy, I find that I want to talk about the problems I face ad nauseum, because there is something in me that wants everyone to understand my plight and to sympathize. Of course, I’m not so benighted as to think that there aren’t people out there who have it far worse than I, but it doesn’t always lessen my own particular burden to know that someone else’s is heavier.
We also have a tendency to overstate points to our children–I know I do. We are so concerned that a stranger might kidnap Little Susie that we instill a pathological fear of all strangers in them when they are young. (Not that it’s a bad thing…) I suspect that at least some of Albert’s colorful descriptions of “real” life probably had their origins in a similar, kindly-meant motive.
Whatever the case, it is a reminder to me to take more care about what I say in front of children. From Albert’s perspective, it was probably just a small thing–some complaining about work and a few strong words about the value of work–but it contributed to the complete loss of his son’s faith. It prepared the ground for Jack’s pessimism, and his pessimism laid him open for what Jack himself calls atheism’s strongest siren song: The “Argument from Undesign.” He thought Lucretius put it well.
Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratm
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa
Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see. (65)
And so, Jack Lewis, feeling that he had never truly met God in all of his forcibly manufactured prayers and certain that no good God could exist in such a universe, melted into a warm, contradictory haze of atheism, “dropping [his] faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief” (66).
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The Inklings (the writers group that meets at our house, patterned after the original) are incoming tomorrow night for the sixth annual “Dessert for Dinner” episode. Presuming I survive the sugar and caffeine fueled antics, I’ll try to blog a little tomorrow too. After that, I’ll see everyone again on Monday.
Mere Lewis 