The final chapter of C S Lewis‘ autobiography, SURPRISED BY JOY, THE SHAPE OF MY EARLY LIFE. He calls this chapter ”The Beginning.” Lewis relates his acceptance of the specifically Christian faith in addition to ”mere” theism. God, he says, by His very nature as God demands our obedience, our reverence, our worship. Why Christianity rather than another faith tradition?
”The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, ‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?‘ With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was henceforth out of court. As against them, the whole mass of those who had worshipped--all who had danced and sung and sacrificed and trembled and adored--were clearly right. But the intellect and the conscience, as well as the orgy and the ritual, must be our guide. There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awaking? (The Everlasting Man was helping me here.) There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarisation of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralised and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged.... And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion--those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them--was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato‘s Socrates ..., yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god--we are no longer polytheists--then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ”a religion”, nor ‘a philosophy.‘ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”
