This conversation was the key to Lewis’s conversion. It provided a means to unite his mind and heart around the Gospel, to connect what he loved with what he saw as truth. 

On September 19, 1931, three friends had a conversation on Addison’s Walk, a tree-lined path on the grounds of Magdalen (pronounced “Maudlin”) College in Oxford. This discussion would be the catalyst for the conversion of one of the most important Christian thinkers of the twentieth century.

Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, both committed Christians, were discussing Christianity and myth with C.S. Lewis. Lewis was an odd duck. Intellectually, he was a rationalist, but temperamentally, he was a romantic: he loved mythology and fairy tales but saw no real value in them since they did not provide the only kind of truth his rationalist mind could accept. He started as an atheist, but philosophical reflections had forced him to accept the existence of God in 1929, describing himself as the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. But this was just a conversion to theism, not Christianity.

Two years later, after dinner on September 19, Dyson, Tolkien, and Lewis went to Addison’s Walk and began a discussion on metaphor and myth, “interrupted,” as Lewis reported in a letter to Arthur Greaves, “by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining.” The conversation then turned to Christianity. Lewis accepted the historicity of the Gospels but could not accept the idea that Jesus’ crucifixion could in any way save us.

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