By Martina Jurickova

David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis’ Journey to Life and Faith, Wipf and Stock, 2004.

Although the first look at the table of contents suggests this book is just another retelling of Lewis’s conversion journey trying to capitalise on mere paraphrasing of his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), it is not so. In fact, Downing does a good job of contextualising Lewis’s experiences as described in his autobiography within the world history, the history of his own family, and the evolution of philosophy, as well as pointing out how the varied beliefs he acquired on the spiritual journey are reflected in his later fictional and non-fictional writings.

Downing’s book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. As he states in the Introduction, the aim of this book is “to trace Lewis’s inward pilgrimage” (p. 14) and quest for Joy in a mostly chronological manner, from his childhood and mother’s death, through complicated teens and twenties marked by estrangement from his father as well as from the Church, to his adult reconciliation with both in adulthood, even briefly skimming upon his death and lasting legacy. However, besides dissecting the different stages of Lewis’s growth (in both literal and spiritual meaning), each of the chapters puts focus on specific themes Lewis was preoccupied with at those stages. And by analysing passages from books lewis wrote in the age of his spiritual maturity to show how “the man would eventually critique the philosophical arguments and emotional attitudes” (p. 16) of his adolescent self, Downing provides an innovative juxtaposition I have not encountered in any other Lewis’s biography so far. Another unique quality of Downing’s research is that he draws attention to Lewis’s special usage and definitions of certain terms, such as childhood, boyhood, truth, reality, interference, solitude, joy, puritanism, magic, and some others.

A leitmotif that runs throughout the whole book is Lewis’s relationship to his parents, mainly his father, and how it, in Freudian interpretation, influenced his attitude to religion and faith. Although Lewis demented such explanations of his spiritual struggles, I appreciate Downing’s efforts to shed some light on the psychological background of the writer’s journey. Indeed, already in the first chapter he points out how little Lewis asserted his identity and eagerness to choose his own path towards things rather than accepting what had been imposed on or handed to him, by picking a preferred name different from those his parents gave him. Indeed, this four-year-old boy’s act of self-determination kind of foreshadowed that he might not accept the faith of his parents indiscriminately either; more so when, as Downing informs, Lewis’s parents had different approaches to religion with his father endorsing politicalised Protestantism and the mother being more open-minded and compassionate even to Christians. In describing them, Downing does not adopt the rigid and somewhat prejudiced approach of some other scholars, exaggerating on Lewis’s own depiction of them in Surprised by Joy, showing the father as only strict, cold, and distant and the mother as a mere fragile memory of near sainthood, but paints a more sympathetic picture drawing from Lewis’s personal correspondence. In addition, he takes into consideration how the overall religious situation in Ireland during Lewis’s childhood as well as the role of Anglicanism influenced his estrangement from his cradle faith after he moved to England for studies.

The second chapter of Downing’s book centres on the alienation of schoolboy Lewis both from his father and his cradle faith due to not only the death of his mother, but mainly due to the pressure and bullying he was experiencing both externally and internally after his relocation to an English boarding school. The external bullying came from the insensitive teachers and classmates he encountered there, the internal he inflicted on himself by trying to be too rigorous in his prayers. Besides the progressive forsaking of his cradle faith, this resulted in him understanding the term boyhood rather negatively as a time of duties, suffering, and possibly even religious hypocrisy, in contrast to the carelessness of childhood. 

In the third and four chapter, Downing then maps Lewis’s turn to materialism and atheism in his adolescence, pointing out how it contradicted his love of tales and myths, which inspired some kind of otherworldly longing in him, causing him to oscillate between these two beliefs rather intensely. As mentioned previously, it is in this chapter that Downing starts contrasting Lewis’s youthful belief and philosophies as presented in his personal correspondence and diaries with his later writings to show how he eventually came to disprove these with mature reasoning. And he was able to disprove them because he was so well familiar with them in his youth. Another asset of Downing’s book is that it does not use only Lewis’s published works to show these contrasts, but in length discusses even his unfinished and unpublished materials, such as “The Quest of Bleheris”, and how they reflect Lewis’s spiritual journey/state at the time of their writing.

Downing carries on the exploration of Lewis’s belief dualism into chapter five, showing how this issue slowly started to resolve in the aftermaths of World War I and the beginning of his career in the rather irreligious setting of academia. Downing here again foregrounds the importance of Lewis’s relationship to his father, particularly the father’s inability to respond to the need for support of his war-injured son, which Lewis came to supplant by taking with Mrs. Moore, the mother of his dead friend, as practically his adoptive mother. It might have been the disillusionment with his father, as well as with the whole humanity for the crimes it did during the war that led Lewis to acknowledge the existence of spiritual, non-material entities, firstly Satan, whom he associated with matter and materialism. And it is no surprise that Lewis’s belief in Satan preceded his belief in God, in the light of the war events.

Now having acknowledged the existence of spiritual, mainly evil beings, there was but one ideology for Lewis to overcome — occultism — which Downing focuses on in the sixth chapter. The strength of this chapter is that Downing explains here all the occult and spiritualist philosophies Lewis acquainted himself with during his life, from theosophy, Rosicrucianism, through the works of H. Blavatsky, M. Maeterlinck, F. W. H. Myers, O. Lodge, W. Barret, and C. W. Sanders, so readers do not have to go research these elsewhere to understand Lewis’s stance on the matter. Particularly in detail Downing describes Lewis personal acquaintance with the poet William Butler Yeats, who became the decisive figure behind his ultimate rejection of occultism. Witnessing his mental degradation and prolapse into a state of madness likely scared Lewis, as an aspiring poet himself, that he might end up the same way and compromise his writing career. While still not openly embracing Christianity, this led to Lewis adopting a very Christian-like approach to life, as evidenced by a passage from a letter to his friend that Downing quotes on p. 117. This show that afterwards Lewis took care to avoid excessive psychoanalytical introspection and brooding as well as daydreaming, and wallowing in self-pity and fears, which echoes the Christian belief that one should not worry about anything, neither make self the centre of attention, but rest all hopes in God who will resolve everything and do what is best for you.

In the last two chapters, Downing describes Lewis’s return to Christianity through idealism, pantheism, and theism during his Oxford encounters with the Inklings. Similar to the previous chapter, Downing provides here a concise overview of all the related philosophical influences, from the ancient philosophers, through G. Berkeley, F. H. Bradley, to B. Russel and H. Bergson. And once again he reiterates the significance of Lewis’s relationship to his father at the end of the father’s life, when they were finally able to bridge the distance between them and resolve their issues, after which he was able to find a way back to God as well. Or maybe it was thanks to Lewis finding his way to God that he was able to forgive and reconcile with his father. Either way, it seems to validate the above-mentioned Freud’s theory.

As for the writing style, Downing’s book reads easily and thanks to the explanations of background theories, it is accessible even to the general public not yet well familiar with Lewis’s philosophy. The text flows smoothly, without any interruptions by foot- or endnotes, which, however, other scholars may find missing. Downing does provide a notes section at the end of the book, mainly listing the sources of citations as they appear on the pages of the book, but since the citations are in no way marked in the text itself, it can be quite annoying to go back and forth after each direct quotation or each page to look it up. Moreover, the notes section lists even sources for information that is not directly quoted in the text, only paraphrased, so the reader may not even know when to go look for the sources. That is the only problem I had with this book (besides a rather fragile binding of the paperback edition). So I can but recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of Lewis’s spirituality, anchored in its cultural and historical context better than it is in Surprised by Joy or other Lewis’s biographies.