“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else,” C.S. Lewis once wrote. However this was not a statement made lightly by the lifelong skeptic.
Despite not liking the obviously Christ-like characteristics of the main character of Aslan of The Chronicles of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkien was a great friend of C.S. Lewis.
More than the average friend, Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity in one night after a walk along Adison’s Walk in Oxford, England one night in 1939.
C.S. Lewis’s Struggle With God
In C.S. Lewis’s work, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Lewis quotes Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. Lewis gives this poem as the greatest argument for atheism.
Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam. Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa. This translates to – “Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see.”
See the image below, a manuscript of De Rerum Natura by Titus Carus in the Cambridge University Library collection, Oxford, England.
In that same work Lewis gives an account of his reluctance to be converted to Christianity, albeit he does end up doing so in the end. This is actually thanks to another author and friend of Lewis, R.R. Tolkien, author of the Hobbit.
C.S. Lewis Converted To Christianity
In C.S. Lewis’s work, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Lewis writes about his final struggle with Christianity. Lewis reluctantly converted in 1931, heavily influenced by the arguments made by his friend R.R. Tolkien.
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
C.S. Lewis, originally a theist, made the decision to convert to Christianity, came after a night’s walk with Tolkien along Adison’s Walk near Magdalen College, Oxford, England.
See the image below of Adison’s Walk.
J.R.R. Tolkien Hated The Chronicles Of Narnia
In 1920 Tolkien left military service, having served in the First World War.
Despite their mutual support for one another and long lasting friendship, J.R.R. Tolkien disliked The Chronicles of Narnia for several reasons:
- Tolkien was a devout Catholic and preferred not to explicitly breathe any of the Trinity into his Middle Earth. Lewis did not have this inhibition.
- Tolkien’s detail in the making of his Middle Earth was so complete that he felt as though Narnia was incomplete and lacking in structured construction.
In one of his letters, Tolkien writes – “The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.” How then could he be pleased with Lewis’s obvious “Christification” of the main character in The Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan?
The Rise of Christian Apologetics
After his conversion, C.S. Lewis became one of history’s most influential writers of Christian Apologetics, the defense of Christianity through reasoning. His book, Mere Christianity is considered a staple of the Apologetics classics.
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