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With around a quarter of a billion of C. S. Lewis’s books in print and much-loved films adapted from his novels, Lewis is so well known as a Christian writer and apologist that it is easy to forget that he was once a firmly convinced atheist. Indeed, it was the depth and intensity of his atheism that made him the formidable advocate for the faith that he became. As the profundity of his atheism, so the persuasiveness of his faith. He had known the Christian faith, as he put it, from the outside. His atheism was no casual conviction. He knew it from the inside, he knew many strong atheists, and he had read all the best-known atheist writings from Epicurus and Lucretius to Voltaire, Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. And yet his thinking eventually convinced him that atheism did not satisfy.

Lewis described his fifteen-year journey toward faith as an intellectual quest that moved him from atheism and materialism to idealism, to theism, and finally to the Christian faith. Yet his passion for the intellect was balanced by his appreciation of intuition and imagination; throughout the whole quest a recurring signal of transcendence played a key part in turning him around and spurring him on: Joy. “All joy wills eternity—wills deep, deep eternity!” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra exclaimed in his midnight song. But where Nietzsche did not follow the logic of what he was saying, Lewis did—and it was joy that troubled his atheism and sent him out as a seeker and a “lapsed atheist.”

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