Faith & Spirit Quote by C. S. Lewis

A line like this lands because it refuses to dress conversion up as self-improvement. "I gave in" is the vocabulary of siege and surrender, not aspiration. Lewis frames belief as capitulation to a reality that keeps winning arguments, not a comforting story he chose to believe. The repetition - "God was God" - sounds almost childish on the surface, but it’s doing serious work: it strips the statement down to something like a tautology, the bare fact of ultimacy. No bargaining, no custom-built deity, no "God as I understand Him". Just the uncomfortable recognition of authority.

The subtext is pride getting evicted. Lewis isn’t presenting himself as spiritually sensitive; he’s presenting himself as outmaneuvered. That’s consistent with his persona in Surprised by Joy and related writings: the Oxford don who tried to fence off the supernatural with cleverness, only to find that cleverness can’t permanently keep the door shut. The sentence implies a long interior courtroom drama: the defense has run out of motions, the verdict is in, and the defendant finally stops grandstanding.

Context matters, too. Lewis’s conversion story sits inside a modern, educated skepticism that treats faith as either naive or merely therapeutic. By describing belief as reluctant admission, he offers a counter-narrative tailored to people who distrust religious emotion. It’s a rhetorical masterstroke: he grants the skeptic their dignity - reason, resistance, self-scrutiny - and then depicts those very tools as the route by which God becomes unavoidable.