If he only knew how "surprised by Joy" he eventually would be....
The next step in C. S. Lewis’s fall into atheism discussed in Surprised by Joy actually predated and undergirded his encounters with his school matron (discussed in my previous post). For quite some time, Jack had been wrestling with what it meant to know that his prayers and beliefs were effective. That is the sort of thing that I would venture to guess that most Christians have wrestled with at one time or another. How do I know that God is listening to my prayers? How do I know that He’s answered them? Am I really believing or am I failing miserably? Many of us immediately jump to the (false) conclusion that the only way we could “know” any of this is by the observable, measurable presence of some emotional reaction to the process that produces some vague mystical experience. Frankly, entire denominations of the Christian faith have been based on this one answer to this one problem. As Jack himself put it:
No clause of my prayer was allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a “realization,” by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of a very mediocre spiritual value. (61)
Lewis himself notes that it was a brilliant ploy of the Enemy–similar to one I saw a debate student pull on several other non-debate panel members in one of my classes today. In that case, the student clearly and forcefully posed an answer to a hypothetical question (in his case dealing with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and then just as forcefully refused to accept anything but concrete evidence to the contrary. The trouble was that the scenario in question was entirely abstract and therefore there was no concrete evidence that could be offered. In short, he presented them with a question that, if they accepted it on his terms, was impossible to answer. Jack put himself in a similar bind. He notes that he demanded of his will power one thing that will alone could never deliver. The result, not surprisingly, was repeated failure.
Jack’s response was to reinforce that failure. If he could not find that feeling, it must simply be that he wasn’t trying hard enough. So, he would spend hours up at night, repraying the same prayers over and over and hoping that this time he would get it right. It was an incredible burden, especially for a thirteen year old boy. He found that as time went on he “dreaded bed time” and that had it gone on for much longer, “I think I should have gone mad.” (63)
All of that built up in his mind over time and as a result, not only did he feel like he could slip away from his faith, in fact he wanted to do so. It made him “desperately anxious to get rid of my religion.” Atheism, then, came as a release.
My wife and daughter got me this...but its on cassette tape! 😦
I also find it interesting to see bits of Screwtape showing up in this section. Somewhere–I believe it was in the prologue to The Screwtape Letters–Lewis remarked that he did not need to delve into any diabolic sources to research Screwtape. He simply knew what worked with him. He seems to be facing precisely that sort of attack that one might expect Screwtape himself to mastermind, and (at least in 1955) he understands what had happened to him. In his descriptions I can almost see Jack’s infernal companion whispering in the young man’s ear, kneeling by his bed in the deep shadows of the night, a solitude broken only so often by the ticking of a clock and a sliver of moonlight. The patient was tired, but the demon kept whispering his encouragement–“Keep at it! Maybe this time! Did you really mean that prayer? Was that feeling real enough?”
And so it would go, with Jack’s best, most earnest efforts leading him farther into the darkness, into the halls of infernal Noise, perhaps to one day become the prey of Undersecretary of the Infernal Lowerarchy himself.
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