The man who argued himself into faith

C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898 and lost his mother to cancer when he was nine. He was sent to a series of English boarding schools, most of which he hated, and arrived at Oxford already disposed against the faith his childhood had offered him. By his early twenties he was a committed and confident atheist.

What makes his trajectory unusual is that his conversion was primarily intellectual. He was not reached by an emotional experience, a personal crisis, or a compelling sermon. He was reached, slowly and against his will, by the failure of his own arguments. The materialist position he held was, he concluded, philosophically unsustainable. The experience of joy, a recurring inconsolable longing he had felt since childhood, pointed somewhere his materialism could not account for.

His friends at Oxford included J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, both Christians, who engaged him in long conversations about mythology, meaning, and the nature of story. The conversation that is most often cited took place in 1931, during a late-night walk in Oxford. Tolkien argued that the story of Christ was not like other myths. It was the myth that had actually happened. Lewis found the argument unexpectedly compelling.

He became a Christian in 1931 and an apologist almost immediately. Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, and a dozen other books followed over the next three decades. He reached readers who had never set foot in a church and readers who had left one, because he wrote from a position of having been outside and having come back with a reason.

His later years brought fresh suffering: the death of his wife Joy to cancer in 1960, which he wrote about in A Grief Observed under a pseudonym. The book is as honest about the darkness of that year as anything he wrote. It did not resolve neatly. He stayed. That is the part of Lewis's story that tends to land hardest for people who have read everything else.