My first post on things I learned on my trip to Oxford focused on Lewis’s dual approach to apologetics. He made reasoned arguments for the Christian faith, but also wrote imaginative literature to help awaken a desire in people for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful found in the Gospel. My second takeaway from the trip is related to the first: the distinction Lewis draws between contemplation and enjoyment.

“Looking at” vs. “Looking along”

Lewis got those two terms from British philosopher Samuel Alexander’s book, Space, Time, and Deity. The difference is explained in simpler terms in his essay, Meditation in a Toolshed. Lewis describes an experience of being in a dark toolshed with a beam of light shining in through a crack at the top of the door. He could see the beam of light and the specks of dust floating in it. Then he moved and looked along the light through the crack and saw the leaves of a tree and the sun shining behind it.

Lewis saw in these two ways of experiencing the light a metaphor for two different ways of knowing: looking at (contemplation) and looking along (enjoyment). The difference is your frame of reference. When you look at or contemplate something, you examine it from the outside; when you look along or enjoy something, you are viewing it from the inside.

Take being in love, for example. Contemplating it would mean examining the behavior of people in love or looking at it strictly in terms of biochemistry; enjoying it is the experience of being in love. Which one is a better explanation or description of the phenomenon? When you are in love, the first seems awfully reductionistic and misses the point entirely.

Lewis notes that the modern age is far more given to “looking at” than “looking along” since moderns think that this is more objective. Lewis dismantles this argument, however—if you’re interested in how, read the essay. Both “looking at” and “looking along” are necessary, but which gives you better understanding varies depending on the topic.

Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy that he “accepted this distinction [between contemplation and enjoyment] at once” and that he “regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought.”

Lewis’s Conversion

I’d read Lewis’s comments on contemplation and enjoyment before, but I hadn’t grasped their significance until I heard Prof. Michael Ward speak on the missing element of Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s spiritual autobiography. Although the book is supposed to be about Lewis’s conversion, the description of the moment of his conversion is oddly lacking in detail and contains inconsistencies that call the entire incident into question. What is going on?

Ward suggested that the key is found in Lewis’s distinction between contemplation and enjoyment. While Lewis could, for apologetic purposes, contemplate God, his own faith was anchored in enjoyment, not in external analysis or description. To attempt to describe his coming to faith would be to make it an object of contemplation. Rather than looking at it from outside, Lewis was in the faith much as he was in the sunbeam in the toolshed when he looked along it. Stepping outside of his faith to treat it as a specimen to be examined cannot reveal the reality of what happened at his conversion. That could only be experienced from the inside, and so he deliberately obscured the details of what happened.

Enjoyment of God

Enjoyment rather than contemplation was central to Lewis’s approach to God. For example, he thought the liturgy was vital to worship, since if he had to be constantly looking to see what to do next, he couldn’t focus on God—the experience of worship would be more contemplation (looking at worship) than enjoyment (looking along the liturgy to God).

I think the distinction between contemplation and enjoyment is also relevant to Lewis’s apologetics. His rational apologetic work amounts to contemplating the faith—examining it and making a case for it from the outside. His imaginative apologetics invites people into the faith, to see the world through it, and thus to reveal its beauty in a way that external approaches cannot do.

A Personal Response

On a personal level, the distinction has helped shape my thinking about the Sacraments, and especially the Lord’s Supper. Theologians over the centuries have fought over how to understand exactly what is happening to the bread and wine during the Eucharist, but for a variety of reasons I have long thought this misses the point. And looking at it(!) through Lewis’s lens, this kind of theologizing amounts to contemplating the Sacrament rather than enjoying it. Think about it like this: when we eat a meal, we don’t need to know how it is digested to become part of us; it just happens. In the same way, we don’t need to understand exactly what is going on in the elements in order to receive the grace they offer. We should instead look along the elements rather than looking at them and enjoy the mystery (which in Latin is sacramentum) of the Supper. There is certainly a place for theologizing about the Sacrament, but when we celebrate it, I now think it is far better to enjoy it by faith than to contemplate what we’re doing as if we’re viewing it from the outside.

A similar point can be made about our approach to Scripture. There is a place for study, of course, but we also need to “look along” Scripture, to see the world through biblical lenses, rather than just to analyze it and learn a bunch of facts from it. I would argue that the point of our engagement with Scripture should be to look at it so that we learn to look along it.

Why It Matters

The distinction between contemplation and enjoyment is not only “an indispensable tool of thought,” as Lewis put it, but it is also an important point to keep in mind for those of us who are given to theological analysis and concern for proper doctrine. It is easy to slip into an approach to the Faith that focuses on rational analysis and doctrinal precision within our particular theological tradition and thus to contemplate the Gospel from the outside rather than enjoying it from the inside. Both are necessary, both have their place, but in the modern world, contemplation is far more common than enjoyment. But as Lewis points out, even our contemplation requires prior enjoyment—we are “inside” a set of ideas that we “look along” in order to contemplate. In our case, modernist assumptions too often provide the frame through which we look at Scripture.

Enjoyment is essential for the kind of relationship with God Jesus talks about in the Upper Room Discourse. And in a postmodern world, the story we can tell and the mystery that is found from a place of enjoyment may very well prove to be the most effective way of reaching the lost for the Kingdom.