Surprised by Joy

The story of Lewis’s approach to his religion is the story of a slow, methodical humbling. Lewis is both funny and honest about the ways in which he (like most people, and certainly most writers) likes to feel apart, private, special, and separate from humanity. The greatest wish of his childhood, he writes, was to be left alone and not meddled with. He also recounts his struggles with his own arrogance after he discovered that he had, through no effort but his own natural likes and dislikes, developed what could be considered “good taste”—a good taste that could make him feel superior to the Bloods who dominated his school. 

Lewis’s pilgrim’s progress involves acknowledging his pride as a fundamental fact of his personality and trying to remain aware of it. This relationship to pride often appears in his logical reasoning, in which he tries to give a fair hearing even to those positions he feels obvious distaste for, and in his self-effacing humor, in which he points out his own arrogance and limitations, past and present. This struggle also has a sunnier face. Lewis’s many friends and teachers often reveal to him something that he could not have seen on his own. The process of learning from others, relinquishing his own automatic taste, and learning to appreciate things that don’t come naturally to him enriches his life.

Keeping an eye on issues of pride and humility becomes particularly important to Lewis as he approaches Christianity—a religion which strikes him as ludicrous during his young adulthood. Just at the threshold of his conversion, Lewis notes the arrogance of his last position of safety—the idea that Christianity was just a story you could tell to understand the truth of Absolute Idealism: 

The implication—that something which I and most other undergraduates could master without extraordinary pains would have been too hard for Plato, Dante, Hooker, and Pascal—did not yet strike me as absurd. I hope this is because I never looked it squarely in the face (215).

To be humble, in Lewis’s worldview, is to examine oneself and one’s foibles with honesty and rigor, and to remember that the world contains many people who are not oneself. It is to attempt to see with clearer eyes and not to be blinded to great goods by the petty fears and desires of one’s ego.