Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy is C.S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, tracing the steps that led up to his conversion to Christianity. This guide refers to the 1955 Harcourt Brace & Company/Harvest Books edition. Lewis was born in 1898 in Ireland and begins his story with his childhood in Belfast, where he and his family lived in a maze-like house full of empty attics and heaps of books. He was close with his older brother, and together they invented an elaborate fantasy world called “Boxen,” populated by talking animals. 

It was through another game with his brother that Lewis first got the feeling that he calls “Joy”—the theme around which this book centers. Looking at a miniature garden his brother once made in the lid of a biscuit tin, his young self was overcome with a longing that was at once painful and delicious. It was a longing not for the miniature garden for itself, but for something just beyond it—and the feeling was its own reward. Surges of Joy followed Lewis throughout his life. He frames the rest of his narrative around his pursuit of this feeling—and his eventual understanding that it can’t be pursued for its own sake; it is, in fact, pointing to something better than itself.

Lewis’s idyllic early years ended abruptly when his mother died of cancer. His father was loving but not well attuned to the personalities and needs of his sons and sent them to a series of terrible boarding schools. In spite of going through all the travails of early-20th-century schools—beatings, bullying, bad education—Lewis had a few great teachers and established a love of the fantastical and the romantic in literature. Though his feelings of Joy went underground for a while, he remembers them resurging intensely when he fell in love with Norse mythology through a beautiful edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The feeling of “Northernness,” like the feeling of the miniature garden, woke up the old longing.

His father at last took him out of the boarding schools and put him under the tutelage of his father’s own former tutor, a wonderful and eccentric old man called Mr. Kirkpatrick and nicknamed “the Great Knock.” The Great Knock educated Lewis in Greek, Latin, and intense logical reasoning, refusing to let any vagueness or imprecision of thought pass even in casual conversation. Lewis loved and respected the Great Knock, and under his tutelage was prepared to go on to Oxford University. He was only there for a term before enlisting in the Army.

After his service in World War I, Lewis returned to Oxford, finished his degree, and began teaching. Through these years, he found himself drawn uncomfortably toward a belief in God. He resisted this draw strenuously: He thought of God as a sort of divine meddler, getting in his business, when what he wanted most of all was to be left alone. His spiritual life was confined to seeking the experience of Joy.

Lewis at last realized that Joy wasn’t a thing he could seek out or make happen, and that the more he tried, the faster it went away. He began to understand that Joy is like any other emotion: If you consider the emotion yourself, you stop considering the thing that produces the emotion, and so the emotion ceases. The emotion is the byproduct of the experience of contemplation. But what was he contemplating to produce the feeling of Joy? He had found that it was not in those places where he’d found it before—not the miniature garden or the Norse myths or any other material thing—but in the feeling that these things reminded him of something else that he couldn’t quite name.

Meanwhile, through encounters with Christian writers and the reasoning of his converted friends, he began to move reluctantly toward theism (simple belief in a God) and then to Christianity. He describes this as a process of many slow steps—in fact, as a game of chess. At last, a combination of reason and experience converted him. At the time of writing, Lewis sees Joy as a longing for that which the world can’t contain—but one that in itself is only a signpost pointing at the greater reality that is God.