Vintage NRO: Russell Kirk on C.S. Lewis

Professor Lewis, who has done almost as much to restore attachment to religious principle in our time as Chateaubriand did a century and a half ago through his Genius of Christianity, gives us now a little autobiographical volume that would make scarcely more than a chapter in Chateaubriand's Memoirs. But its explicit description of the process by which Lewis returned to Christianity excels anything of the kind in Chateaubriand's long shelf of exceedingly personal works.

Joy, as described by Mr. Lewis, is a sudden stab of intense consciousness, very different from mere pleasure. And there is something better than joy — as much better than joy as joy is better than pleasure: Christian faith. Joy comes to Lewis as often and as sharply since his conversion as before. "But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer."