Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography

3. The Psychology of Conversion in G. K. Chesteron and C. S. Lewis

3 zyxw The Psychologyof Conversion in G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis “A YOUNG MAN who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” C. S. Lewis makes this remark in zyx Surprised by Joy (191), just at the point where he describes his reading of Chesterton. At the time, Lewis was a nineteen-yearold second lieutenant in the British infantry recovering in 1917 from trench fever in a hospital at Le Trepart. Although Lewis disagreed with Chesterton’s essays at the time, he admits that the humor, paradox, and goodness of the author made “an immediate conquest.” In fact, the book led him to regard Chesterton as “the most sensible man alive ‘apartfrom his Christianity’ zyxw ” (223).Nine years later, while teaching philosophy and English back at Oxford, Lewis read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Mm. This book led him to affirm “that Christianity itself was very sensible ‘apart from its Christianity’ ” (223).Thus, at two crucial periods in his life-the first during a moral conversion in World War I, the second during his final conversion to belief in God-Lewis read G. K. Chesterton . Any study of the psychology of conversion in their religous autobiographies might well search out the similarities and differences in their respective stories of the journey from unbelief to Christian faith. By “psychology of conversion,” of course, I do not mean to reduce the authentic religious transformations of Lewis or Chesterton to mere psychic or emotional phenomena. Lewis himself was the first to recognize and discard any merely Freudian interpretation of his experiences. As he puts it, “If [Freud] can say that it Boy] is sublimated sex, why is it not open to me to say that sex 82 CIRCUITOUS JOURNEYS is sublimated It?” (W. Griffin 64-65). Likewise, he was aware of Jungian and archetypal interpretations but did not see these as incompatible with historical and realistic interpretations of Christian experiences.Just as he found Christianity to be a myth but a true myth, so his own experiences were perhaps archetypal but nonetheless valid. A more helpful approach to understanding Lewis (as it was in reading Merton) is to use some of the broader and friendlier categories of developmental psychology to explore the stages of the faith journeys of these two British autobiographers . Whatever the method, the use of psychological categories does not necessarily preclude a theological interpretation; in fact, as Emilie Griffin has shown in her excellent study of conversion experiences, zyxwvuts Tzrvnit~g, any theology in which grace builds on and transforms nature calls for a natural psychologcal pattern to be present in the development of the religious self. Here is the burden of the present chapter. I will begin by discussing the similar routes (through other genres) taken by Lewis and Chesterton to the writing of their autobiographies. Next, I will examine four common literary elements within their autobiographies proper: namely, zyxwv (a) the circularjourney form of their narratives; (b) the directional images and emotions of each author; (c) the influence of family and deaths; (d) the mediation of friends and books. In the final section, I will provide a preliminary examination of Lewis’s autobiography as a movement through the five levels of conversion identified in religious development: the levels of imaginative, affective,moral, intellectual, and religious conversion . Chesterton once said: “If [autobiography] is really to tell the truth, it must zyxwvu . . . at all costs profess not to. . . . [A] touch of fiction is almost always essential to the real conveying of fact . . .” (Dickeizs139-40). The similarityin the use of “a touch of fiction” in various genres for autobiographicalpurposes by Chesterton and Lewis (as also by Merton, Day, and Wakefield) deserves a separate study, for the similarity is too remarkable to be merely coincidental . Both Chesterton and Lewis first wrote the story of their intellectual and religious conversions around age thirty-three in allegorical form-The M m W z o Was Thrsday (1908) and Pilgrim ’s Regress (1935),respectively.The use of such a form suggests, perhaps, similar psychologcal insecurity about revealing their G, zyxwvutsrqp K. CHESTERON AND zyxwvuts C . zyxwvu S. LEWIS zyxwvut 83 deepest personal transformations in direct first-person autobiography , but italsoreveals the intensity of theirconvictions about theirconversions. Theirnext attempts werethrough a second literary form, the argumentative essay; for Chesterton in zyxw Orthodoxy (1908), for Lewis in a series of short books begmning with The Problem $Pain (1940...