An Evening Stroll Down Adders
In September 1931, C.S.Lewis took an evening stroll at Magdalen College, Oxford, with his dinner guests Hugo Dyson and J.R.R.Tolkien. Their conversation went on into the early hours, leading them around Addison’s Walk, a path that circles Magdalen’s capacious water meadow and private deer enclosure. Pipe in hand, Lewis had trod Addison’s dusty walk countless times, since becoming a fellow of English literature at Magdalen in 1925. However, on this night, Addison’s played host to a conversation that marked a turning point in Lewis’ life — a moment that was ingrained on his memory many years later and shaped the man whom we remember today.
Although Lewis is now widely revered as a Christian apologist and the imagination behind Narnia, he was not a Christian when he arrived to study classics at University College (‘Univ’) in 1917. Indeed, Lewis had by then long-abandoned his parent’s Ulster faith, and was a convicted atheist. From an early letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, we glean that the young Jack Lewis considered Christianity as merely another iteration of the myth of ‘dying and rising gods,’ ubiquitous in antiquity. This refrain may have been enticing to young Lewis, absorbed in myths. But why, Lewis posed, should Christianity be considered any more true than these other widely recognised fictions?
Although Lewis had given up on God, the ‘Hound of Heaven’ remained in pursuit of Lewis. In a series of conversations in the 1920s with his solicitor friend Owen Barfield, Lewis waged a war to defend the atheism of his adolescence. Yet with Barfield — Lewis’ clear intellectual equal and future Inkling — as his sparring partner, this ‘Great war’ — as he remembered it — was one that Lewis’ worldview could not endure. At first, Lewis moved on from atheism to the deeper things of ‘idealism.’ But after being distracted in his room at Magdalen, ‘night after night, by the steady unrelenting approach of Him [he] so earnestly desired not to meet,’ Lewis surrendered to theism. He called himself ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’
Still, none of this had compelled Lewis to adopt the Christianity that came to define the rest of his life. Lewis maintained his adolescent conviction that Christianity was just one religion of many. How could Christianity be exclusively true, when it contained the same fundamental idea of other myths: death and resurrection?
That night on ‘Adders,’ as Lewis knew it, Tolkien provided a compelling answer to Lewis’ question. Tolkien persuaded Lewis that a commitment Christianity does not require the flat-out negation of these myths. Indeed, Tolkien accepted that Christianity is itself a type of myth, if myth is taken to mean that which provides a window into reality, inaccessible via other means. The difference between Christianity and the pagan myths lies not in their status as myth. Rather, it lies in the point that Christianity is not less than, but more than, myth. Whereas all other myths are set in the distant past, which no man has witnessed, the Incarnation took place on the stage of history. Christianity, then, is the historical instantiation of the imaginative yearnings of men’s souls, expressed in their myth-making. This is what sets it apart.
Christianity, then, is the historical instantiation of the imaginative yearnings of men’s souls, expressed in their myth-making.
This was a watershed for Jack. As a trained classicist who had immersed himself in pagan myths from his youth, Lewis knew that the Gospels were of a far higher historical quality than their surrounding pagan counterparts — he had been convinced of just this point by a colleague at Magdalen. Just nine days after this conversation with Tolkien, Lewis realised that he had come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was, indeed, the Son of God; that the Incarnation was the ‘myth became fact.’ Once again he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, but this time to tell him: ‘I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ — in Christianity.”
Reading Lewis’ radio talks for War-Time Britain — adapted in 1952 as Mere Christianity - at age seventeen sparked for me an intense interest in theology. I could not imagine then that I would one day study where Lewis taught, or live a stones-throw from where Lewis had that life-changing conversation with his friends. This past year, however, Lewis’ Addison’s Walk has become a place where I too have wandered in the evenings, discussing theology and life’s great questions with my friends — where I, too, have been gripped by the myth became fact. It is an experience I know I will cherish forever.
