C. S. Lewis' Spiritual Guide - A Mini Documentary | C.S. Lewis

The year is 1916. On the French side of the English Channel, World War I, known then as the Great War, is consuming lives by the thousands, the tens of thousands, by the day and the week. Back on the English side of the English Channel, standing on a quiet train platform, a young man, nearly 18 years old, is standing and looking at a bookstall's books. Many years later, that young man, C.S. Lewis, writing in the book, Surprised by Joy, will describe what happened. I and one porter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead Station to ourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of an engine to glow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The hills beyond the Dorking Valley were of a blue so intense as to be nearly violet, and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold. The glorious weekend of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an everyman edition in a dirty jacket. Fantastis, a fairy romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names, Saxon and Sweet as a Nut. Bookham, Effingham, Horsely Train. That evening I began to read my new book. As he read, both that night on the train and later, he came across a passage like this one. They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the center of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendor, which is an undeveloped life lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connections with the worlds around us than those of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man's soul, and it may be with the secret history of his body as well. They are portions of the living house wherein he abides. Lewis, nearly 30 years after that night standing on the station platform, chose to write for us an explication of what it all meant as he began to read Fantastis. This is from his own anthology of Macdonald's works. He wrote, A few hours later, I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in romanticism and, likely enough at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now, Fantastis was romantic enough in all conscience, but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity, and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble, that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant, that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, mourning innocence and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of death, good death. What it actually did to me was to convert even to baptize my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor, at that time, to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the process was complete, by which, of course, I mean when it had really begun, I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way. In that same anthology, Lewis points out his deep, deep commitment to understanding the truth of Jesus by reading George MacDonald's unspoken sermons. And indeed, so much of the Lewis voice can be found throughout all of those beautiful texts. So we'll leave you in this particular episode with just a short reading from MacDonald that echoes beautifully in so much of the writing of C.S. Lewis. This comes from the unspoken sermons, that one called The Higher Faith. MacDonald writes, There is more hid in Christ than we shall ever learn, here or there either. But they that begin first to inquire will soonest be gladdened with revelation, and with them he will be best pleased. For the slowness of his disciples troubled him of old. To say that we must wait for the other world, to know the mind of him who came to this world to give himself to us, seems to me the foolishness of a worldly and lazy spirit. The Son of God is the teacher of men, giving to them of his Spirit, that Spirit which manifests the deep things of God, being to a man the mind of Christ. The great heresy of the Church of the present day is unbelief in this Spirit. The mass of the Church does not believe that the Spirit has a revelation for every man individually, a revelation as different from the revelation of the Bible, as the food in the moment of passing into living brain and nerve differs from the bread and meat.