C.S. Lewis - From Atheist to Faith in God

C.S. Lewis wanted to be a great poet, but after he published his poetry, his achievement was no longer satisfying to him.  At the time, he was an atheist, but his closest friends - like J.R.R. Tolkien - were very religious. 

How did he square his internal and external conflicts?  One night, in his room at Oxford University, he got on his knees.  He later wrote of that moment: 

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.

Credits

Video clip online, courtesy PBS - The Question of God:  Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis (2004)

Produced by Tatge/Lasseur Productions in association with WGBH and Walden Media.

Director: Catherine Tatge

Producer: Dominique Lasseur

Executive Producers: Mike Sullivan, Catherine Tatge and Doug Holladay.

Complete four-hour video available from PBS.