A NIght's Walk

A Night’s Walk 

Outside Reading: Alister McGrath/C.S. Lewis: A Life

September 8, 2016

In his brilliant biography on the life of C.S. Lewis, Alister McGrath retells a pivotal conversation in Lewis’s spiritual development. It was the evening of September 19, 1931. Lewis was hosting Hugo Dyson, an English professor at Redding University, and J.R.R. Tolkien for dinner at Magdalen College at Oxford. Still a pleasantly warm night, the three friends decided to take a walk along the River Cherwell. Their conversation became centered on the nature of metaphor and myth. As the conversation ran long, the men returned to Lewis’s place and remained there late into the night, Tolkien leaving around 3am and Dyson an hour later. In a subsequent letter to his dear friend, Arthur Grieves, Lewis testifies to the profound significance this conversation had on him. From Surprised By Joy, we know that Lewis had yet to accept many of the core Christian doctrines. His conversion, thus far, had been one from atheism to theism. The conversation with Tolkien and Dyson  was an important step in his conversion from theism to Christianity. 

In the conversation, Tolkien showed Lewis that his true problem was not a rational failure to grasp dogma but an imaginative failure to see the significance of story. Tolkien himself, held a deep belief in the power of story to reveal the nature of reality. To him, Christianity was a grand narrative shedding light on all things; the universal context in which all particulars are understood. Myths do not teach us what to see but how to see. Since he was a boy, Lewis had viewed his imaginative life as completely severed from reality. In Surprised By Joy he shifts back and forth between giving an account of his imaginative life and real life, presenting the two in a dualistic manner. In story, Lewis came to see how everything belongs, how reason and imagination can be synthesized, providing a complete presentation of reality.