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(gentle music)

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- Hey, they're ready for you Max.

- Oh, good.

- It is black. Extra strong. - Thank you.

- Okay. We're on our way.

- Okay, one minute till we shoot.

Thank you guys. Let's be ready.

- There we go.

- Final check- - Is this my chair?

- Let's have a red light bell, please.

(bell ringing)

- Where's my phone?

Who has my phone?

- Sound.

Camera.

- All right. How's my hair?

How's my hair?

- It's looking good. Looking good.

- Nice and quiet, please.

Ready for a take.

Cameras are rolling.

Set.

- One take one. - Mark it.

(slate clacks)

Quiet.

Stand by and...

Action.

- When I was an atheist, if you had asked me,

why do you not believe in God?

I would've answered, look at the universe we live in.

Mostly empty space, completely dark.

Unimaginably cold.

Most scientists think it improbable

that any planet in our solar system sustains life

and Earth herself existed without life for millions of years

and may exist millions more

after life has once again left her.

And what is life?

So arranged that creatures live only by preying on another.

In the lower forms, this means only death.

In the higher forms something called consciousness

enables the living to experience pain.

Creatures are born in pain,

live by inflicting pain and mostly die in pain.

In the most complex of all creatures, man,

another quality appears, reason.

And by reason we can foresee our own pain.

This we call suffering.

We can foresee our own death

while keenly desiring to go on living.

Reason enables humans to invent hundreds of ingenious ways

of inflicting a great deal more pain

than we could have done as irrational creatures.

This power we have exploited to the full.

History's our record of crime, war, disease, terror,

with just enough happiness to give us

an agonized fear of losing it.

And when lost, the poignant misery

of remembering how good it felt.

Every now and then our condition is improved

by what we call civilization.

But all civilizations pass away.

That our own civilization will pass away is surely probable,

and even if it should not pass away,

we're all doomed, the universe is doomed.

The astronomers hold out no hope

that this planet is permanently inhabitable.

The physicists hold out no hope that organic life

is a permanent possibility in any part

of the material universe.

Not only this earth, but the whole show.

All the suns of space are to run down.

Nature is a sinking ship.

So if you asked me to believe all this I've just described

as the work of an omnipotent, benevolent God,

I would have laughed and said

the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Either there's no God behind the universe,

a God indifferent to good and evil,

or worse, an evil God,

Never dreamed of raising the question

if the universe is so bad, or even half so bad,

how on Earth did humans ever come to attribute

it to the work of a wise and good creator?

Oh men are fools!

But not so foolish as that,

to direct inference from black to white,

from evil flower to virtuous root,

from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise.

Staggers belief.

No, I did not believe God existed.

I was angry at God for not existing.

Why should creatures have the burden of existence

forced upon them without their consent?

(soft pensive music)

I lost my mother to cancer.

Had an estranged relationship with my father

that I regret even now.

Was in the trenches during the Great War,

the hell where youth and laughter go

only to see horribly smashed men

still moving about like crushed beetles.

A mortar shell that wounded me, killed the man next to me,

splattering shrapnel,

some of which I carry my body to this day.

(car hoots)

(bicycle bell rings)

(church bell tolls)

When I returned to Oxford after the war in 1919,

I read the minutes to my college's last meeting in 1914,

nothing made me realize more thoroughly

the absolute waste of those years.

I was asked "Were you much frightened in France?"

"All the time," I said,

"but I never sank so low as to pray."

Some people have got the impression from my books

that I was raised in a strict and vivid puritanism.

This is untrue.

- Mr. Lewis.

- Roger, usual please.

You? Make that two.

I'll get these.

Edel will find us a table.

- [Edel] You can have this one.

There you go. All done.

- No, religious experience did not occur in my family.

Was taught the usual things, made to say my prayers,

in due time taken to church.

Can't remember feeling much interest in it.

Cheers!

Father was a solicitor in Belfast, Ireland.

He was Welsh by blood, passionate, rhetorical,

laughed and cried a great deal.

Had almost no talent for happiness.

Mother was of a cooler race.

She was tranquil, affectionate.

She had a talent for happiness. Went straight for it.

As an experienced traveler

goes for the best seat on a train.

(pensive music)

I lived in a large house that to a small boy

seemed like a city.

I am a product of long corridors,

empty sunlit rooms, attics explored in solitude,

distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes.

The noise of wind under the tiles

and endless books.

Books readable and unreadable,

books suitable for a child and books emphatically not.

Nothing was forbidden.

In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons

I almost literally read my way through the house.

- Jack.

You'll never guess what I found!

Quick!

- Hey wait for me!

Hey wait!

- Catch up.

- Hey Jack, now stop! Don't disturb your father!

- Boys!

Boys!

- Boys.

- Happy days.

My brother Warnie and I enjoyed them to the full.

Until the great loss that befell our family.

(somber music)

One night, my father in tears came into my room

to convey to my terrified mind

things I'd never conceived of.

My mother had cancer.

- [Father] The doctor said, we can't-

- [C.S. Lewis] I don't think children suffer

less than their elders, they suffer differently.

- So we have to be strong.

- [C.S. Lewis] And as our whole existence changed

into something alien and menacing.

- Your mother loves you very much.

- [C.S. Lewis] The house became full of strange smells,

midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations.

(Mother coughing)

- [Nurse] We need some fresh bandages quickly.

- [C.S. Lewis] My brother Warnie and I

lost our mother gradually as she was slowly withdrawn

from our life into the hands of nurses,

delirium and morphea.

- Oh Doctor. Thank goodness.

- The disease followed the usual course,

an operation, they operated in the patient's house

in those days, an apparent recovery,

the return at the disease, increasing pain, death.

(door closing)

When mother died, all settled happiness

disappeared from our lives.

A great continent had sunk.

It was only sea and islands now.

(somber music continues)

(father sobbing)

My father never recovered.

Under the pressure he spoke wildly, acted unjustly,

as this unfortunate man was losing his sons

as well as his wife.

My brother Warnie and I had already begun to lie to him.

We were two frightened urchins,

huddled for warmth in a bleak world.

Mother's death occasioned, what some might say at the time,

my first religious experience.

When my mother's case was pronounced hopeless

I remembered what I had been taught,

that prayers offered in faith would be granted.

Accordingly, I set myself to produce in prayer

a firm belief for her recovery.

When she died, I shifted ground.

I worked myself into belief that there was to be a miracle.

Oh, I approached God.

Not as savior or as judge, but as magician.

I simply wanted him to restore the status quo.

And when he had done what was required of him,

he would simply go away.

The prayer hadn't worked.

Oh, I was used to things not working,

thought no more about it.

(pensive music)

Mother's death among other things,

produced in me a deeply ingrained pessimism.

Oh, I was by no means unhappy,

but I had definitely formed the opinion that the universe

in the main was a rather regrettable institution.

Father's melancholy was a contributing factor.

A prosperous man who by our present tax-ridden standards

would be described as incredibly secure.

Expressed adult life as one unremitting struggle.

Best one could hope for, according to him,

was to avoid the workhouse.

This only by extreme exertion.

Never thought to check his highly colored comments

against the obvious fact

that we were living very uncomfortable lives.

Temperamental widower still grieving the loss of his wife

must be very wise to raise two noisy school boys

who reserve their confidence only for each other.

The same scene, reenacted time after time.

- Well?

- [C.S. Lewis] When he opened his mouth to reprove us

he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal

to our common sense.

- Have you nothing to say in your defense?

- But alas, he had been a public prosecutor,

long before he had become a father.

Words came to him and intoxicated him as they came.

- Never in all my born days

have I come across such recalcitrant behavior.

Disobedience.

Deliberate disobedience and willfulness,

such as would dismay the very founders of our civilization.

- What happened was a small boy who left the bathroom

in a pickle, found himself attacked like Cicero on Catiline.

Simile on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical

question, the flash of an orator's eye,

the gestures, the cadences...

The pauses.

The pauses were the chief danger.

- Well?

- [C.S. Lewis] One was so long

that my brother, assuming the denunciation to have ended,

humbly picked up his book and resumed reading,

a gesture which my father, who had only made

a rhetorical miscalculation of about a second and a half

described as-

- Cool, premeditated, insolent!

- The disproportion between the tirades

and what prompted them was ludicrous.

From the wilderness of words,

emerged ideas I took literally.

- Perhaps I should board up the house.

Keep you both in school all year round.

- And that we should be-

- Sent to the colonies to end in misery

the career of crime on which you have both already embarked.

- Such was the effect of my father's rhetoric,

until I began to perceive him as ridiculous.

(kettle whistling)

At 14, I ceased to be a Christian.

At that age one barely notices.

At school, all the teachers and book editors

took it for granted that religion was some sort of endemic

nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder.

In the midst of a thousand false religions,

stood our own, the thousand and first,

labeled completely true.

On what grounds I asked, why was it treated so differently?

I was eager not to, if Adonis could be explained away,

then why not Christ?

So little by little, I became an apostate

dropping my faith with no sense of loss

and with the greatest relief.

Oh, there was no faith, hope or charity in my religion.

I feared not God, but hell,

and heaven was only the lesser of two intolerable evils.

Oh, I became a vigorous debunker and argued

there's no proof for any religion

and that Christianity is not even the best.

Religion was invented to explain things

that terrified primitive man, thunder, pestilence, snakes.

What could be more natural than to suppose

they were animated by spirits and that by singing songs

and making sacrifices, one might appease them.

Great men such as Hercules and Odin were thought to be gods.

After their death, hence after the death

of a Hebrew philosopher, Yeshua,

whose name we have corrupted into Jesus,

a cult sprang up and Christianity began,

just another mythology among many.

Oh the superstitions always held by common people,

but educated thinking was always stood outside it,

conceding to it only out of convenience.

And I was not prepared to believe in a bogey man

who would torture me forever

because I failed to live up to an impossible standard.

(school bell ringing)

(door closing)

With my deliberate withdrawal from divine protection,

I underwent a successful assault of sexual temptation.

Part of it was the age I had reached.

The electric effect was a dancing mistress.

She was the first woman to speak to my blood

whom I looked upon to lust after.

- Good morning, boys.

- [Boys] Good morning Miss.

- This was of no fault of her own.

A gesture, tone of voice

has unpredictable results in these matters.

As it happened, the school room was decorated for dance.

She came in and said.

- (sighs) I love the smell of bunting.

- And I was undone.

- Now, let us begin.

Follow my every move.

Thank you Elsie.

(gentle piano music)

Up.

And down.

And up.

And dainty toes.

Dainty toes, very good.

Dainty toes.

And around sway.

Sway.

- This was not a knight devoting himself to a lady,

more like a Turk looking at a Circassian woman

he could not afford.

I knew what I wanted.

You might think this produced guilt.

Guilt was not a thing I knew.

- Well done boys. Well done.

- I had been a tender-hearted boy,

but now I labored hard to become a fop, a cad, a snob.

I was at that time as non-moral

as a human creature could be.

- Oh Lewis.

Do enjoy the holidays won't you?

- Yes, miss.

(men speaking indistinctly)

- Oh, there you are. Where have you been?

- Sorry Father. - Come on, come on.

It won't wait you know. Thank you.

(expectant music)

(train whistling)

- [C.S. Lewis] I could not tell my father

my change of belief.

He was no fool. He even had a streak of genius.

But for a man who was formidable in court

and I presume efficient in his office,

he had more power for confusing an issue

than any man I have ever known.

Oh, the first barrier to communication

was having asked the question,

he would not stay for the answer.

Tell him that a boy called Churchwood had caught a mouse

and kept it as a pet.

He would ask-

- Whatever became of young Chickweed

who was so afraid of rats?

- Who sir?

- Chickweed.

- Oh, I think you mean Churchwood.

It was a mouse, not a rat.

And he wasn't afraid of it, at all.

- Attempts to correct his version produced an incredulous.

- That's not the story you used to tell, my boy.

- All this explains, though does not excuse,

one of the worst acts of my life.

I allowed myself to prepare for confirmation.

To be confirmed, make my first communion,

all in total disbelief,

acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation.

I knew I was acting a lie.

I simply could not tell my father my real views.

Not that he would have stopped.

Let's talk the whole thing over, he would have said.

But the thread would have been lost at once.

His arguments.

I would not have valued a straw,

the beauty of the authorized version,

the Christian tradition.

Oh, it was all sentiment.

And if I tried to make by exact points clear,

there would have been thunder from him

and a thin peevish rattle from me,

Nor could the subject ever have been dropped.

All this I ought to have dared

rather than the thing I did.

It seemed impossible at the time,

cowardice drove me to hypocrisy

and hypocrisy to blasphemy.

(anticipatory music)

The years passed, then the most fortunate thing happened.

- A bit more to the right, please.

- [C.S. Lewis] My father had declared

that he would send my brother to a tutor

in Surrey, south of London.

- That's it. Thank you.

- [C.S. Lewis] In a surprisingly short time,

this tutor had so rebuilt the ruins of Warnie's education,

that he passed into Sandhurst

and received a prize army cadetship.

For some time, my own schooling had been going nowhere.

It had neither engaged my mind nor my heart,

but seeing my brothers progress,

I finally plucked up the courage to ask.

- Jack! Jack! Are you up there?

Come on boy. Well get your coat.

We're 10 minutes late already.

- [Jack] Papa, you know, when you send Warnie off to Surrey

to your old tutor Mr. Kirkpatrick.

- [Father] (chuckles) Yes.

The Great Knock we used to call him.

- [Jack] Warnie seemed to benefit from him greatly.

- [Father] He did.

He did. He's a fine teacher.

- I've been thinking.

Might it not be good to send me to Surrey too?

- Well, there'll be no other boys.

You won't be able to play your games.

- I tried to look grave, no other boys.

Never to play games.

I was transported.

(expectant music)

(train chuffing)

Ah yes, this is the day

the rest of my life really began to happen.

(train whistles)

I was still in my teens when I made my way over to England

and down to Surrey to meet my new tutor.

I wasn't sure what to expect.

At first sight he seemed decent enough.

- Hello, lovely to meet you.

- William T. Kirkpatrick. The Great Knock.

- His grip was like iron pincers.

- Follow me!

- I remember feeling the need to make conversation

in the deplorable manner

I felt necessary to use with my father.

- I was quite surprised by the scenery of Surrey, sir.

It's really much wilder than I expected.

- Stop! What do you mean by wildness?

And on what grounds have you based your expectations?

On the flora and geology of Surrey?

Was it maps, photographs, books?

- Sorry, sir.

- As answer after answer was torn to shreds

Kirk concluded that my comment was meaningless

and that I had no right to have

any opinion whatsoever on the subject.

It never occurred to me that my thoughts

needed to be based on anything.

That conversation lasted three minutes

and set the tone for my two years in Surrey.

Kirk's ruthless dialectic was the only way he spoke.

It was an astonishment to Kirk

that you should not want to be corrected.

Kirk lived with his wife in a comfortable

and secluded cottage on the edge of the village.

It was all rather wonderful.

- Welcome! Welcome!

Now you put your case down there.

- [C.S. Lewis] I felt welcomed as soon as I stepped inside,

the whole place was stuffed with books.

I had come home.

- And this is my wife, Louisa.

- Pleased to meet you Mrs. Kirkpatrick.

- Pleasure's ours entirely.

- We'll show you up to your room.

- I have it all prepared.

- You come down when you're ready,

and we'll start knocking that mind of yours into shape.

- There you are. I hope you like it.

Oh, and by the way, don't worry about my husband.

He likes to argue, a lot.

- Most boys would have cowered at all this.

I loved the treat, but it was red beef and strong beer.

After a few knockdowns,

I began to put on some intellectual muscle

and became a bit of a sparring partner to my new tutor.

If I could please myself, I'd always live as I lived here.

Breakfast at eight, at my desk by nine

to read and write to precisely one, then lunch.

- That was absolutely delicious.

Thank you, Mrs. Kirkpatrick.

- Fine.

- Oh yes. I was encouraged to eat, as well as to think.

Off for a walk by two, not with a friend.

Walking and talking are two great pleasures,

but it is a mistake to combine them.

Our noise blocks out the sounds and silences

of the outer world.

- Thank you.

- My return and the arrival of tea

would coincide at exactly four, taken in solitude.

Eating and reading are two pleasures

that combine admirably.

Work till seven, deep into the classics,

not sparing the horses.

Good talk all evening, all challenging,

brain-rattling stuff.

In bed by 11, unless you're making a night of it

at the pub with your cronies.

- Passable. You're still a little shaky on accuracy.

And I fear you've missed my point

about the classics entirely.

He that neither knoweth nor will be taught

by the instruction of the wise,

this man is not Herodotus.

He knew a thing or two.

- That's not Herodotus.

It's Hesiod.

- Prove it.

- It's from his poem "Days in work."

I have it somewhere.

Here.

- Good lad! (laughs)

- My work was mostly Latin and Greek.

Homer first. Oh still relish the brightness and music of it.

Then the two great bores,

Cicero and Demosthenes could not be avoided.

Followed by Lucretius. Oh, the glory!

Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides.

Had no taste for Virgil.

In the evening we mastered French, Italian and German

plunging into the likes of Voltaire, Faust in the inferno.

(sighs) Kirk was my great teacher.

My debt remains to this day.

As for religion, he was a Presbyterian atheist.

On Sundays, he gardened in nicer clothes.

(pensive music)

Among the poets I was reading at the time,

one stood apart, William Butler Yeats.

He believed that there was a world

beyond the material curtain

and that contact with that world was possible.

Oh, I regarded Yeats as a learned responsible writer.

Later when I met him, I was awed by his personality

and he rejected the whole

materialist philosophy out of hand.

If Yeats had been a Christian, I would have discounted him.

I had Christians placed, disposed of for ever.

Yeats offered something else, a perhaps.

And through this perhaps,

a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my materialism

and introduced me to something

I've had trouble with ever since,

a ravenous desire for the supernatural.

Or to put it bluntly, the occult.

(eerie music)

I once tried to describe it in a novel.

It's a spiritual lust and like the lust of the flesh

has the fatal power of making everything else

seem uninteresting while it lasts.

Oh I loved the vagueness of it.

Circles, pentangles, Ouija boards, seances,

all seemed able to raise a spirit.

Oh, this magic!

No connection of my atheism swayed me in different moods.

And that it was scorned by both Christians and rationalists

appealed to the rebel in me.

My descent was from eccentricity to perversity.

The world and the flesh had made their appearance.

Now came the devil.

Had there been an elder in the neighborhood

who dabbled in dirt,

oh they have a nose for potential disciples,

I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.

Then, in the super abundance of mercy,

came that event which I have attempted

to describe in many of my books.

I was in the habit of walking a few miles

to Leatherhead Station and taking the train back to Kirk's.

While waiting for the train I rummaged in

the second hand bookstore and picked out

an unusual title, "Phantastes" by George MacDonald.

It looked a little unusual.

I hadn't the faintest notion of what I'd let myself in for.

- This one please.

- A tuppence, please sir.

Thank you very much sir. (conductors whistle blows)

- Sorry. (man grumbles indistinctly)

- As I began to read my new book, I was electrified.

I felt like a miner who had struck gold.

In those pages I met all that had charmed me

in Yeats and others.

Yet, everything was changed.

The bright shadow coming out of this book,

transformed everything

and it would affect my own writing forever.

It was as if I had died in the old country

and come alive in the new,

all my occult and erotic fantasies began to feel sordid.

Disarmed, what I really wanted was just out of reach.

Not because of something I could not do,

but because of something I could not stop doing.

Oh, if I could only let go, unmake myself.

I did not know the name of this new quality.

Oh I do now. Holiness.

That night as I read "Phantastes"

my imagination was baptized.

The rest of me took a little longer.

(gentle music)

I first met it as a memory that would arise suddenly

without warning from the depth of not years, but centuries.

The memory was from childhood

when my brother brought the lid of a biscuit tin

garnished with twigs and flowers to make a toy garden.

It was the first beauty I had ever known,

a sensation of desire.

But before I knew what I desired, the desire was gone,

withdrawn, the world turned common again.

Since then my constant endeavor was to get it again,

in reading every book, going on every walk,

listening to every piece of music.

Occasionally the sky would turn.

Far more often, I frightened it away by my greed to have it.

I call this desire, joy,

which must be distinguished very sharply

from happiness or pleasure,

except that anyone who has ever experienced joy

will want it again.

Apart from that, it might be called

a particular kind of grief,

but then it's the kind we want.

It is the scent of a flower we have not found,

the echo of a tune we've not heard.

News from a country we have not yet visited.

Oh, I doubt that anyone who has ever tasted joy

would exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

But joy is never in our path. And pleasure is.

At 18, I arrived at Oxford,

the fabled cluster of towers and dreaming spires

had never looked more beautiful.

Less than a term later, like most of my generation,

I enlisted in the army,

was sent to the front lines in France,

on my 19th birthday to be exact.

First bullet I heard brought not fear,

but the thought, this is war.

This is what Homer wrote about.

Five months later, I was wounded and sent home.

In between, I had the good luck

to fall sick with trench fever.

(gentle music)

Compared to the trenches,

a hospital bed and a book were heaven itself.

- And how are you tonight Lieutenant Lewis?

- Fine. Thank you nurse.

- Well Stanley. Time for your inspection, I think.

- Yes nurse.

- Except that the night nurse

was conducting a furious affair with my roommate.

I was too sick to be embarrassed,

but the sound of two lovers whispering in the nighttime

is a tedious noise.

It was here I first read G.K Chesterton. Never heard of him.

Had no idea what he stood for,

nor could I understand why it made such a conquest of me.

His humor was the kind I like.

No, not jokes, still less a tone of flippancy.

Oh that I cannot endure.

Rather his humor was the bloom of his argument.

Strange as it seems I liked him for his goodness.

Oh not that it had anything to do with being good myself.

I did not have the cynics nose for hypocrisy and smugness

so common among my peers.

(nurse giggling)

In Chesterton, as in MacDonald, I did not know

what I was letting myself in for.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist

cannot be too careful of his reading.

After my convalescence, I returned to the front lines.

- Wait.

- Turn off the light! (gunshots blasting)

(men yelling)

(explosions booming)

The moment I was hit and found that I was not breathing

I concluded this is death.

I felt no fear, no courage, just the thought,

here lies a man who died.

It wasn't even interesting.

The fruit of this experience

is there appeared a fully conscious I,

whose connection with me was coming to an end.

And I, whoever that may be, cared not two farthings.

Oh, it was more than an abstraction.

I tasted it.

(somber music)

As for the rest of the war, the cold, the fear, the fright.

The corpses.

It was a ghastly interruption to rational life.

Now it feels like it happened to someone else.

Except for the recurring nightmares.

(expectant music)

When I returned to Oxford, I put on a new look,

which meant to act with the greatest good sense,

and to have no more flirtations with the supernatural.

Directly after the war, I spent a fortnight

with a man I'd dearly loved, who was going mad.

I held him as he wallowed on the floor

and screamed "Devils are tearing me apart.

I'm falling into hell."

I knew this man had flirted

with all sorts of occult ideas as I had.

Oh, perhaps there was no connection,

but I took it as a warning to stay on the beaten track,

the approved material center of the road with the lights on.

The early days of my new look were quite happy,

busy engaged in my studies of classics, philosophy.

At that time we were all swept up by Freud

and his new psychology.

By my mid 20s, I was elected a fellow at Magdalen College,

hence my career as a scholar and tutor began.

- After you dear boy.

- The answer of course, is that (indistinct).

- They even provided rooms for me here,

to read, to write for my tutorials.

I had arrived.

I felt like I'd found a home

with some of the finest scholars I would ever meet.

We were young, clear-headed, invincible.

Then one day, my very dear friend, Owen Barfield,

who satisfied my hunger for debate and rational opposition

announced that he had changed his views.

He was no longer a materialist and had become a theist.

I was shocked. I thought Barfield was safe.

He came from such a free-thinking family.

He'd barely even heard of Christianity.

Barfield bought up all the abominations:

God, spirit, afterlife.

I said, "Dammit Owen, it's medieval."

- [Jack] Dammit Owen, it's medieval.

- [Owen] You may say that Jack, but the medieval world

has a lot to teach us.

- [Jack] You mean that the world is flat.

- Oh come on Jack, be serious. Open your mind.

- [Jack] I have.

And as a wise man once said to me, he that neither knoweth-

- This started our great war,

our philosophic disputation that lasted for years.

I remember Barfield asking:

- Jack, do you believe that logic and reason

bring forth indisputable truth?

- [Jack] I do.

- And are your moral and aesthetic judgments

valid and meaningful?

- They are.

- Well then materialism must be abandoned.

There is a hopeless discord between what our minds

claim to be and what they really must be

if materialism is true.

We claim our minds to be reason-perceiving

universal intellectual principles, moral laws,

and possessing free will.

But if materialism is true, our minds must in reality,

be merely chance arrangements of atoms in skulls.

- I of course, argued back.

- We are to accept reality as it is revealed to us

by our senses and the findings of science have concluded

that human reason is merely cognitive maps

resulting from natural selection,

with random mutations over millions of years

to confer on humans a reproductive advantage

over other species.

- I had to say something.

I'd been defending materialism for years.

- Look.

If my clearest reasoning tells me

that my mind is nothing more than the accidental result

of atoms colliding in skulls, there must be some mistake.

How should I trust my mind when it tells me

that my most profound thoughts are merely mental patterns

resulting from heredity and physics?

- Barfield's notion that if materialism is true

my conscious mind is nothing more

than atoms colliding in skulls.

This was simply unbelievable to me.

I could not force my thought into that shape

any more than I could scratch my ear with my big toe.

It was as final as a physical impossibility.

Mind, reason, imagination, consciousness

must be more than mere biochemistry.

It must be a real participation.

Something further up, further in.

Rock-bottom reality had to be intelligent.

(pensive music)

It's astonishing I've not seen this before.

Willful blindness, I suppose.

And I was careful not to attach rock-bottom reality to God,

my skepticism would not allow me to go that far.

Rather I attached it to the universe itself.

Still it had immense potency.

Behind the material curtain lay the hidden glory.

Barfield and I began to talk religiously about an absolute.

Of course, this was a religion that cost nothing.

It wasn't personal.

It wouldn't do anything.

It wouldn't lead to dark places where men scream

they're being dragged into hell.

It was there.

Never come here. Make a nuisance of itself.

Within the faculty, I befriended Hugo Dyson

and J.R.R. Tolkien, both Christians.

Oh these queer people were popping up on every side.

There was a wider disturbance.

All my books were turning against me.

I must've been as blind as a bat,

not to have seen this before.

George McDonald had done more to me than any other writer.

Of course he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity.

He was good in spite of it.

Spenser, Dante, Milton had it too.

I thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive,

apart from his Christianity.

I was beginning to think that Christianity

was quite sensible apart from its Christianity.

On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer religion

and with whom my sympathies ought to have been complete:

Shaw, Wells, Gibbon, Voltaire, seemed thin, tinny.

Oh, they were all entertaining, especially Gibbon,

but hardly more.

The roughness and density of life

did not appear in their books.

I concluded that those with untrained philosophic minds

could come near the notion of an absolute being

by believing in a God.

And I distinguished my belief very sharply

from the God of popular religion.

Oh there was no possibility of being

in a personal relation with him.

I could no more meet him than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare.

And I did not call him God, either.

I called him Spirit.

One must fight for one's remaining comforts.

About this time one of my fellow tutors,

the hardest boiled atheist I'd ever known,

sat in my rooms other side of the fireplace and remarked

"The evidence for the historicity of the gospels,

surprisingly good.

Rum thing, all that mythology about the dying god.

Rum thing, looks as if it really happened once."

I was shattered.

If he the cynic of cynics, who's never since

shown any interest in Christianity

were not as I still would have thought him, safe,

where can I turn?

Before God closed in on me

I was in fact offered a moment of free choice.

I was sitting on a bus going up Headington Hills

thinking I was wearing a suit of armor,

trying to keep something out.

I could unbuckle the armor or, keep it on.

The choice felt momentous.

I chose to unbuckle.

Did not seem impossible to do the opposite.

The initiative did not lie with me.

If Hamlet and Shakespeare could ever meet,

it would have to be Shakespeare's doing,

he could write himself into the play.

What I called Spirit began to show

an alarming tendency to become personal.

Into my mind, crept a horrible novelty.

I really believed something.

And now that I had blundered into that

I knew I could play at philosophy no longer.

It was time something should be done.

The absolute had arrived.

Making a nuisance of itself, issuing a command.

All my acts and desires were to be brought in line

with this absolute spirit that I now believed.

For the first time I examined myself

with a serious practical purpose.

What I found appalled me.

Depth after depth of pride, self admiration,

a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions,

a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatred.

Oh, my name is legion.

Amiable agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God,

may as well talk of the mouse's search for the cat.

All I ever wanted was not be interfered with,

to call my soul my own.

Keep out, private. This is my business.

But no one talked glibly of the comforts of religion.

Is it a small thing to give yourself blindly to a guide

when his own showing may very well

be leading you to poverty, ridicule, death?

Oh, I knew I would not allow myself

to do anything intolerably painful.

I would be reasonable.

Would it be reasonable?

No assurance was offered.

It was all or nothing.

As the dry bones shook in Ezekiel's dreadful valley,

the absolute spirit began to stir and heave

and throw off its grave clothes.

He said, "I am the Lord.

I am that I am.

I am."

(pensive music)

You must picture me alone in my room at 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 found me.

In the Trinity term, 1929, I gave in.

And admitted that God is God.

Knelt and prayed perhaps that night,

the most dejected, reluctant convert in all England.

I did not then see the divine love

that would accept a prodigal on such terms.

Kicking, struggling, resentful,

darting his eyes in every direction,

looking for a chance to escape.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man.

His compulsion is my liberation.

(bells tolling)

You must understand that the conversion I just described

was only to theism, pure and simple, not Christianity.

I knew nothing of the incarnation,

the God to whom I surrendered was not human.

I had no belief in an after life.

That to me, felt like a bribe.

My argument against God was that the universe

was so cruel and unjust,

but where had I got this notion of cruel and unjust?

I call a line crooked

because I have some idea of a straight line.

What was I comparing the universe with,

when I called it cruel and unjust.

If the whole universe has no meaning,

I should never have known it has no meaning.

All of my reasonable mind was convinced

that the universe cannot explain itself,

that God is behind the universe,

that he has purposes.

And is to be obeyed simply because he is God.

I suppose my religion was like that of the Jews.

As soon as I became a theist,

I started attending my parish church on Sunday.

College chapel during the week.

Not because I believed in Christianity,

but because I thought one should fly one's flag.

(congregation singing drearily)

Church was an unattractive affair.

I like clergy as I like bears, but I have no more wish

to be in church as to be in a zoo.

Church to me meant ugly architecture, bleed music,

bad poetry, hymns are extremely disagreeable to me.

And the botheration of it all, the crowds, the notices,

the perpetual organizing.

- Before our final prayer, a quick announcement,

if you would like to join Edith on the flower rota,

she's desperate for volunteers,

do please speak to her at the back by the font afterwards.

Let us pray.

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee oh Lord

and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils

and dangers of this night,

for the love of Thy only son, our savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

(expectant music)

- My new conviction in a higher being

did not exactly make me a paid-up member

in the Church of England.

But now that I believed in God,

I wanted to know more of him,

from any source, pagan or Christian.

The question was no longer to find the one true religion

among many, but where had the thing grown up.

Paganism was the childhood of religion.

Where had it reached maturity?

As for the materialists, their view was out of court.

If reason is only the accidental result of atoms

colliding in skulls, I could see no reason

to believe that one accident

should give the correct account for all other accidents.

My allegiance was now with the mass of humanity

who danced, sang and prayed, worshiped.

There isn't really an infinite variety

of religions you know.

To me, the only ones worth considering

are Christianity and Hinduism.

Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies.

Buddhism's only the greatest of the Hindu heresies.

All that is best in Judaism and Plato

survives in Christianity

and Hinduism bears no historical claim.

That had been put into my head by that hard-boiled atheist,

who said, "All that mythology about a dying God

looks as if it really happened once."

One day Tolkien and I took a stroll on Addison's walk.

As we talked, I said.

- Tollers, I have, with considerable resistance,

come to believe in God, but not Christianity.

- Oh Jack.

- I cannot believe something I do not understand.

How can the life and death of someone else,

whoever he was, 2000 years ago, help us in the here and now.

- When you meet a God sacrificing himself in a pagan story

like Dionysus, Balder, Osiris or even in a fairy tale,

you like it very much and are mysteriously moved by it.

Provided you meet it anywhere except in the gospels.

Well the story of Christ is a myth,

working on us in the same way as other myths,

with one tremendous difference in that it really happened.

- Suddenly a rush of wind interrupted us, startling me.

So many leaves fell to the ground I thought it was raining.

I held my breath.

- Come on, Jack. You're too slow to catch a cold.

You know Dyson hates sitting on those steps

waiting to be let in.

- I don't know if Tollers remembered that moment.

I did. His words hit home.

No matter how unwilling, I was beginning to move.

Tollers and I talked deep into the night.

Hugo Dyson joined us.

- Beef. Sensational pie.

- You make a mess with that.

Now this stuff will put hairs on your chest.

- Here she is.

Make space would you.

There we go.

- Look, I may be prepared to accept Jesus

as a great moral teacher,

but I simply cannot accept his claim to be God.

- Oh, come on Jack.

How could a mere man be called a great moral teacher

and say the sort of things Jesus said?

- Such as?

- That he always existed.

- That he was coming again to judge the world.

- Such men are judged frauds, lunatics.

- In spite of my resistance,

they convinced me that nothing else in all literature

is just like the gospels.

Myths are like it in one way with its stories

of the miraculous, histories like it in another

with its attention to minute details,

but nothing is simply like it.

And no person is like the person depicted.

- I'm sure there are many people

who believe themselves to be God.

Our hospitals are full of them.

- Oh, come on Jack be serious.

No great moral teacher has ever made that claim

except Jesus, and you know it.

- And he went on and on and on.

- What do you mean?

- Well, claiming to forgive sins

and that he himself is the injured party

in every transgression.

Look, in anyone else this would be thought silly.

- Suppose you told me that two of your colleagues

had lost you a top professorship

by telling lies about your character.

And I replied "Freely forgive them both."

Would you not think this sheer lunacy?

- It would be sheer lunacy.

- Yet, even those who opposed Jesus

admitted that he expressed moral truth of depth and purity

full of wisdom and shrewdness.

- Wisdom and shrewdness.

You make him sound like Solomon the great.

- On the contrary,

history repeatedly calls him humble and meek.

- Not that you want to notice that of course Jack.

Humility and meekness are the last things one would ascribe

to someone who makes claims worthy of being a megalomaniac.

- The Great Knock taught me to shame inconsistency.

If Jesus' statements are false.

Christianity is of no importance.

If true, it is of infinite importance,

but one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

- So what are you saying?

- Simply that either this man was, and is, the son of God

or else he is a liar, a lunatic or a fraud,

but all this patronizing nonsense

about him being some great moral teacher,

it's not an option to us, nor was it intended to be.

- I felt a resistance to this

almost as strong as my resistance to theism.

Every step from the absolute to spirit to God

was a step toward the more concrete.

And now to accept the incarnation that God became man

was a further step in the same direction.

Oh, this too was something I had not wanted.

I remember very well when, but hardly how,

the final step was taken.

I was being driven by my brother Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo

in the sidecar of a motorcycle one Sunday morning

in the autumn of 1931.

When we set out, I did not believe

that Jesus Christ is the son of God.

When we reached the zoo, I did,

I had not spent the journey in thought, or great emotion.

It was more like a man who, after a long sleep,

has become aware he is now awake.

My conversion shed new light on my search for joy.

The overwhelming longings that emerged from "Phantastes"

and my brother's toy garden were merely signposts

to what I truly desired.

They were not the thing itself.

I concluded that if I find in myself a desire

that no experience in this world could satisfy,

the most probable explanation, I was made for another world.

At present we're on the outside of that world,

the wrong side of the door.

We cannot mingle with the splendors we see,

but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling

with the rumor that it will not always be so.

One day, God willing, we shall get in.

Meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown

and tomorrow is another morning.

A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of this world,

and we have been invited to follow our great captain inside.

Following him is of course the essential point.

♪ In the bleak midwinter ♪

♪ Frosty wind made moan ♪

- That Christmas, I took the short walk to my parish church.

That walk marked the end of one journey

and the beginning of another.

♪ Snow had fallen ♪

♪ Snow on snow on snow ♪

♪ In the bleak midwinter ♪

- As I looked around, I thought not only

of my own potential glory hereafter,

but also that of my neighbor's glory.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods

and goddesses, to remember that the dullest,

most uninteresting person you meet may one day

be a creature that if you saw it now,

you would be strongly tempted to fall down and worship

or else a horror or a corruption such as you now meet,

if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long, we are helping each other

to one or the other of these two destinations.

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities

that I should now conduct all my dealings.

There are no ordinary people.

I've never met a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, civilizations, these are mortal.

Their life is to ours as that of a gnat.

It is immortals whom we joke with, work with,

marry, snub, exploit.

The weight or burden of my neighbors glory

should be laid daily on my back.

A load so heavy, only humility can carry it.

And the backs of the proud will be broken.

♪ What can I give him ♪

♪ Poor as I am ♪

♪ if I were a shepherd ♪

♪ I would give a lamb ♪

♪ if I were a wise man ♪

♪ I would do my part ♪

♪ Yet what I can I give him ♪

♪ Give him my heart ♪

- Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

Therefore let us keep the feast.

(solemn music)

The body of our Lord Jesus Christ.

- Unlike my first communion, 17 years earlier.

I now believed.

(uplifting music)

- Okay. Thanks very much.

That's a cut there. Thank you.

Thank you Max.

- Thank you.

(people chattering)

(gentle music)