Joy Davidman

The Argument

Joy Davidman is known to most people as the woman C.S. Lewis married, and that knowledge, while true, almost entirely obscures the significance of her own intellectual and spiritual journey. She was a communist, an atheist, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, a Hollywood screenwriter, and one of the most intellectually serious converts to Christianity of her generation — and her conversion account, The Longest Way Round, is one of the most honest documents of twentieth-century spiritual autobiography.

Her account of her conversion begins with the admission that she had been a personification of the modern mind — secular, scientific, politically committed, contemptuous of religion. Her conversion was not gradual erosion of unbelief but sudden encounter — the experience of a presence in the room during a moment of crisis that she could not explain away. She then did what serious intellectuals do: she read her way into the tradition she had encountered, which is how she found Lewis.

For literary apologetics, Davidman's significance lies in both her journey and her work. Smoke on the Mountain — her commentary on the Ten Commandments — is a lucid and intellectually serious engagement with biblical ethics that demonstrates a mind fully formed by the secular tradition now reading Scripture from within the faith. She brings everything her secular formation gave her to the service of the tradition she had found.