The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapter 7 “How the Adventure Ended”
C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 3, Issue 8
Chapter 7 “How the Adventure Ended”
Background: C.S. Lewis could write about Eustace’s undragoning experience and all that followed because he remembered his own conversion experience.
Foreground: When we stumble toward God beginning to be a different person, He is pleased and proud as our Father. But He will not leave us there. He has promised to make us perfect as He is perfect. Eventually, Eustace will be a different boy, just as we will be different people. Thankfully, God never gives up before we see Him face-to-face.
Quote: “It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”
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Background: “How the Adventures Ended”
As we examine Eustace’s undragoning, which amounts to his conversion, it’s probably a good time to explore Lewis’ own journey of becoming a Christian.
The first step is to see what Lewis was reading. As he makes clear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the books we read influence us tremendously. Partly, this is because reading great works allows us to gain insight into the perspective of others, as Lewis writes in An Experiment in Criticism. “My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. ... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”
Eustace lacks empathy and understanding because he isn’t well-read. But Lewis’ reading expands his perspective beyond himself and his atheism. Many of Lewis’ literary influences turned out to be Christians and prodded him along toward God. George Herbert, George McDonald, and G.K. Chesterton wrote from a Christian perspective and much more winsomely, by Lewis’ account, than secular writers like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
In seeing the imagination and “Joy” on the side of the Christians, Lewis was torn.
On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
This conflict ate away at Lewis until he had to give in, and it was just that, him resigning himself to the existence of some god.
I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
As Lewis embraced theism, he was not ready to accept Christianity or even the idea of a personal God. Yet, Lewis continued to be influenced by Christian friends, particularly Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. On February 3, 1930, Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield:
Terrible things are happening to me. The “Spirit” or “Real I” is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931
On Saturday, September 19, 1931, Lewis had a long talk with Dyson and Tolkien as they strolled along Addison’s Walk in Oxford. The two Christians were able to demonstrate to Lewis that Jesus’ resurrection is the True Myth. It is the mythical story that really happened.
Lewis finally realized the reason he had felt such an affinity to all the pagan myths was that they had slivers of truth in them. They were anticipations of the truth myth that was to come later. Similarities between Christianity and other religions don’t prove Christianity to be false, rather they give it even more credence.
The next month, Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves about that night.
I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931
Nine days after his conversation with Dyson and Tolkien, Lewis is driven by his brother Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo.
I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.
For Lewis, this changed everything. As he would later write in the essay “Christian Apologetics” from God in the Dock, “One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
Eustace discovers this same truth. Everything changed for him once he encountered Aslan and became “undragoned,” so let’s talk about one of the most iconic scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia.1
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