Links In A Golden Chain: C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald and Sadhu Sundar Singh

by Kathryn Lindskoog

For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

George MacDonald’s spiritual influence upon C. S. Lewis is common knowledge,
but until now Sadhu Sundar Singh’s influence upon C. S. Lewis has been
overlooked. 1

The earliest hint that Lewis was acquainted with the life of Sundar Singh
appears in Book 8, Chapter 2 of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis told of a
Man who descended to help the pilgrim when he was in great need. "I
will give you a hand," said the stranger, and pulled him out of a
desolate gorge. 2 A few chapters later, the Man helped
the pilgrim again. "Then I dreamed that once more a Man came to him
in the darkness." The Man said, "Your life has been saved all
this day by crying out to something which you call by many names."
3 According to Lewis’s running headline, the Man
was Christ.

Lewis seems to have been consciously echoing Sundar Singh’s conversion
story. Because Pilgrim’s Regress is made up largely of references to a
wide variety of authors, it is not surprising that Lewis referred to someone
else’s famous conversion experience when telling of his own.

Sundar Singh was born nine years before C. S. Lewis, in 1889. He was
the youngest child in an aristocratic Sikh family (all Sikhs are named
Singh) in the village of Rampur in Patiala, India. The Sikh faith combines
Hinduism and Islam, and so his mother lovingly taught him the Sikh and
Hindu scriptures and urged him to become a holy man. When he was seven
years old he knew the entire Bhagavad Gita by heart (not a unique feat
in India), and he was filled with longing for santi, peace of soul.

Sundar Singh eagerly studied holy books, meditated, practiced Yoga, and
did good works. When he was fourteen years old, in 1902, his mother and
older brother died. (In 1908, C. S. Lewis’s mother, uncle, and grandfather
died.) Unlike his mother, Sundar Singh’s father thought he was overly
religious for his age. Once, the boy’s Guru said to his father, "Your
son will become either a fool or a great man. "4

Sundar Singh sought God in Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. He
was exposed to Christianity for a year in a local school provided by American
Presbyterian missionaries, but the more he heard of the New Testament,
the more he resented it. He quit the school. When he saw missionaries
in public he abused them and ordered his father’s servants to do the same.
He finally burned a New Testament in public to express his outrage.

Later, Sundar Singh saw that his fanatical opposition to Christianity
had disguised a secret attraction to it. His father disapproved of his
Bible burning as much as his obsession with proper Indian religions and
wondered if his son was losing his sanity. Indeed, on December 17, 1904,
fifteen-year-old Sundar Singh told his father goodbye and announced that
he would commit suicide before breakfast. He fully planned to lie down
on the railroad tracks near his house and be run over by the 5 a.m. express
train in order to find God on the other side of death.

At 3 a.m. on December 18, Sundar Singh arose and took a cold bath according
to Hindu custom. He begged and begged God to reveal Himself before the
train came. Suddenly such a great light appeared in his small room that
he looked to make sure the house was not on fire. Then a luminous cloud
appeared, and he saw a Man’s face in it – radiant with love. The Man spoke
in perfect Hindustani, Sundar Singh’s mother tongue: "Why do you
persecute me? Remember that I gave My life for you upon the Cross."
5

Sundar Singh wrote later, "What I saw was no imagination of my own.
Up to that moment I hated Jesus Christ and did not worship Him. If I were
talking of Buddha I might have imagined it, for I was in the habit of
worshipping him. It was no dream. When you have just had a cold bath you
don’t dream! It was reality, the Living Christ!" 6

Sundar Singh fell down before Jesus and worshipped him. Peace and joy
finally flooded his soul. At breakfast he told his bewildered father,
"The old Sundar Singh is dead; I am a new being."
7 His conversion was obviously much like that of the apostle Paul,
and he told everyone who would listen.

Sundar Singh’s Christianity was even less acceptable to his father than
the previous enmity to Christianity; he considered his son insane. The
family pressured him to abandon his new faith, then finally drove him
away. It is said that his last meal at home was poisoned. His friend Gardit
Singh, who became a Christian at the same time, actually died from poisoned
food. In the local uproar, the mission station had to be closed down and
village Christians moved away for safety.

Sundar Singh went to study the Bible at a medical mission station. Because
it was unlawful to be baptized until he turned sixteen, he was baptized
an Anglican Christian on his birthday, Sunday, September 3, 1905. His
teacher advised him to get theological training, but he felt called to
preach the gospel as a traditional Indian holy man instead.

Thirty-three days after his baptism, Sundar Singh put on the yellow linen
robe of a celibate sadhu and set out with only a Hindustani New Testament
and a blanket which he often wrapped around his head as a turban. He used
no money, and he never begged; when no one offered him food and shelter,
he did without. He also did without the protective dagger that Sikh men
always carry. When someone asked him if stones did not cut his bare feet,
he answered that his feet were so hard they cut the stones.

As a typical Sikh, Sundar Singh was just over six feet tall, with a full
beard and luminous dark eyes. His eyes showed deep inner peace and drew
people to him. He stood erect, his body poised. Animals and children were
always attracted to him. He loved to play with children, and he had a
sense of humor. When Jesus was mentioned, his whole face lit up with a
joyful radiance. After his vision on December 18, 1904, he had just one
passionate interest-loving and serving Jesus.

Thus he wandered around India and to Afghanistan and Kashmir preaching
Christ. He joined Samuel Stokes, an American missionary who had left his
wealthy family in order to try to live like Saint Francis of Assisi in
India; together the two friends worked in a leper colony and then in the
Plague Hospital in Lahore.

In 1909 Sundar Singh took the advice of friends and became a theology
student at Saint John’s Divinity College in Lahore. He remained an Anglican
all his life and preached often in Anglican churches, but as a preacher
he refused to be bound to one denomination. To him all Christianity was
one. Sundar Singh also respected the religions that had nurtured him as
a child, and he saw them fulfilled in Christ. He believed in giving people
the living water of God in the cup of their own culture, not in a foreign
cup. He felt a special calling to preach to the dangerous, inaccessible
land of Tibet, and he made many almost impossible trips there on foot.

In 1912 Sundar Singh’s fame began to spread across India, and in 1916
the first of several books about him was published. Wherever he went in
India, both Christians and nonChristians thronged to see and hear him.
In 1918 he also preached in Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, Japan, and China.
In Penang, Malaysia, he was invited to preach the message of Jesus in
a Sikh temple. In 1919 Sundar Singh’s father received him kindly and said
he was ready to become a Christian. They were reconciled at the very time
when C. S. Lewis and his father became estranged after World War I. At
this time C. S. Lewis was a student at Oxford.

Sundar Singh was told by God to preach in England, and his father offered
to pay for the journey. In February 1920 he arrived in England and stayed
first at a Quaker center. Then he was a guest of the Anglican Cowley Fathers
in Oxford and preached in several colleges and Saint John’s Church. It
is highly likely that C. S. Lewis heard that Sundar Singh was speaking
in Oxford at the time, but it is unlikely that Lewis went to hear him.
In the first place, Lewis was especially busy that month. He wrote to
his friend Arthur Greeves, "I must work like ten devils this term."
8

At the age of twentyone Lewis found Christianity distasteful. Besides
that, he had had an upsetting experience early that year after a night
talk with a student friend about "shadowy subjects – ghosts and spirits
and Gods." His friend told about many supernatural experiences, and
Lewis fell into a fit of terror like nightmarish terrors he had suffered
in childhood. As a result, he said, he "conceived, for the present,
a violent distaste for mysteries and all that kind of business.” 9

From Oxford the Sadhu went to London, where he preached to great crowds
in a variety of major churches, including the Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle.
At Church House, Westminster, he addressed a meeting of seven hundred
Anglican clergymen, including several bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He also spoke at Trinity College, Cambridge, and crossed to Paris to preach.
Then he went to Ireland and on to Scotland, where he preached in leading
Presbyterian churches in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Sundar Singh was not puffed up by international popularity. He pointed
out that the ass that bore Christ into Jerusalem would have been very
foolish to think that the palms and flowers decking the road were in its
own honor. Likewise, it would be foolish for those who carry Christ to
people today to take credit for the response.

In May the Sadhu crossed the Atlantic and spent three months preaching
in American cities from New York to San Francisco. Next he preached in
Honolulu, then in several places in Australia. In contrast to other traveling
speakers from India in those days, Sundar Singh did not seek to explain
and praise Indian wisdom; he came to preach only Jesus. Finally, at the
end of September, he returned to India, grieved about the greedy materialism
he had seen in the West. In the East many people worship idols, he observed,
but in the West people worship themselves.

In 1921 Sundar Singh ministered in Tibet again. Then in early 1922 an
old dream of his came true; he toured Palestine, tracing the steps of
Jesus. From there he went to preach in Egypt; then in France; and then
in Switzerland, where he spoke in the hall used by the League of Nations.
In Germany he spoke in Martin Luther’s own church in Wittenberg. Then
he spoke in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland. He arrived back in England
very tired, and spoke only at the Keswick conference in Wales. That year
he turned down pressing invitations to speak in Finland, Russia, Greece,
Romania, Serbia, Italy, Portugal, the United States, and New Zealand.

In spite of the fame and adulation heaped upon him, Sundar Singh reportedly
remained unassuming and humble. He said he came not to preach (the world
has plenty of sermons), but to witness to the saving power of Jesus. His
one interest was to come nearer and nearer to Jesus, to grow more and
more like Him, and to wear out in His service. Indeed, people everywhere
were struck by what they perceived as his resemblance to Jesus. Some people
were interested in the Sadhu chiefly because of the miracles and marvels
in his life, but when he realized this, he quit telling much about them.
What he wanted to emphasize most was prayer. He attributed all he knew
and did and experienced to prayer. "Prayer, prayer, and again prayer"
was his motto. 10

In April 1929, he set off on his dangerous trek to Tibet again in spite
of heart trouble and blindness in one eye. After he set off, no one ever
heard from him again. Although friends went searching for information
about him, no clues were ever found; he had simply disappeared. When the
government of India announced four years later that he was officially
given up for dead, some suspected that he had withdrawn from civilization
in order to meditate and pray in the Himalayas. But most likely he died
shortly after he set out on his final missionary journey. For years he
had been eager to leave this life in order to get to heaven to be closer
to God.

It was almost surely in April or May 1929 that Sundar Singh ended his
Christian vocation on this earth. And, oddly enough, that is when C. S.
Lewis knelt down in his room in Oxford and reluctantly admitted that God
is God and began his own journey in Christian ministry.

There can be no question that C. S. Lewis was aware of Sadhu Sundar Singh.
In May 1943 Dorothy Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle
on the Life of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was first published, and
C. S. Lewis promptly read it. He wrote later, "For my own part, l
have reread it every Holy Week since it first appeared, and never reread
it without being deeply moved." 11 He quoted
from its preface. In that preface Dorothy Sayers included a footnote quoting
from The Sadhu by B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy: "The Sadhu’s
mind is an overflowing reservoir of anecdote, illustration, epigram, and
parable, but he never makes the slightest effort to avoid repetition;
in fact he appears to delight in it. ‘We do not,’ he says, ‘refuse to
give bread to hungry people because we have already given bread to others.’
Hence we have constantly found the same material occurring in more than
one of the written or printed authorities we have used. ‘My mouth,’ he
says, ‘has no copyright.’" 12

Seven months after first reading the tribute to Sundar Singh quoted by
Sayers, C. S. Lewis wrote his preface for That Hideous Strength. In it
he advised readers that his new book was not history but "a modern
fairy tale for grownups."13 In the story itself,
evidently written in 1943, protagonist Elwin Ransom takes on a strange
assignment that has come to him indirectly from a man in India, "the
great native Christian mystic whom you may have heard of-the Sura,"
as one character explained to another in chapter five. 14
This fictional Sura foresaw a great danger to the human race coming to
a head in England, and he left prophetic word that a group of committed
people would gather around Ransom to combat the evil. After giving this
message the Sura disappeared, and no one knew if he was alive or dead.
It has seemed to some alert readers that Lewis expected readers to be
familiar with such a figure.

What did Lewis mean by the term Sura? In Sanscrit the word means god.
In the Hindu pantheon, a sura is a good angel or genie. In Arabic a sura
is one of the 114 chapters of the Koran. Lewis must have known all this
when he chose the word. I believe that Lewis used the word sura because
he was hinting at the word sadhu, which means a holy man in India. (As
an adjective in Sanscrit, sadhu means straight.) If Lewis had actually
called his Christian mystic the Sadhu, some readers might have believed
that his tale was a true account about the famous Sadhu Sundar Singh.

When Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength, Sundar Singh had been missing
only fifteen years and would have been fifty-four years old if still alive.
He was the Mother Teresa figure of his day. On October 24, 1949, Queen
Wilhelmina of Holland wrote, "I never met him. I know him only from
his books and books about him. I belong to those who are deeply impressed
by his life and teaching and I am sure the way he manifested his radiant
love for Christ and His peace, and in general his teaching, was a real
help to me in the worst episodes of the terrible catastrophe that was
the last war." 15

To check my conviction that C. S. Lewis’s Sura was really meant to represent
Sadhu Sundar Singh, in 1987 I contacted Lewis’s Oxford pupil and lifetime
friend Dom Bede Griffiths, since 1955 a Benedictine monk in India. I explained
my theory and asked him what he thought. (Griffiths, like Sundar Singh,
wore the traditional robe of an Indian holy man.)

"As regards Sadhu Sundar Singh," Griffiths wrote on June 12,
1987, "I know his life well and have always admired him. Lewis would
have admired him especially for his nondenominational or ‘mere’ Christianity.
I don’t recall C. S. Lewis ever mentioning him, but I think it is almost
certain that the reference in That Hideous Strength is to him." 16

"I don’t suppose that anyone has made the link between Lewis and
Sundar Singh before," Bede Griffiths continued in another letter
on July 27, 1987. "On reflection I feel that it is very likely that
Lewis heard of him through the Cowley Fathers with whom he was very close.
In any case, Sundar Singh needs to be more widely known." 17
(The Cowley Fathers were the devout Anglicans who had hosted Sundar Singh
during his 1920 visit to Oxford.)

Sundar Singh may have influenced C. S. Lewis in several ways. For example,
the name Singh comes from the Sanskrit word for lion. Because Sundar Singh
was popularly perceived as the most Christ-like man in Lewis’s day, it
is possible that Sundar Singh was in the back of Lewis’s mind when Aslan
the lion came bounding into Lewis’s first story of Narnia. (Aslan is the
Turkish word for lion.)

C. S. Lewis and Sundar Singh happened to express the same idea about
the relationship between wishes and truth. Sundar Singh taught that every
desire we have is given for a special purpose, and we would have no desire
to believe in God unless he exists. "The capacity for religion is
. . . rather like thirst . . . Just as thirst has been created to make
men use water, so the religious thirst has been created to make men come
to God." 18 In comparison, Lewis wrote: "But
what does the existence of the wish [for God] suggest? At one time I was
much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that
we have bread.’ But surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular
man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food! i.e.
if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, weren’t designed to eat,
would we feel hungry?" 19

It seems that George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and Sadhu Sundar Singh all
converged in the pages of The Great Divorce. (On July 20,1956, when I
told Lewis how much I loved that book, his eyes lit up; he said that it
was his Cinderella-much better than The Screwtape Letters, in his opinion,
but far less popular.) The Great Divorce is the story of a busload of
disgruntled residents of hell who travel to the outskirts of heaven, where
they are welcomed in vain. Most of them prefer to get back on the bus
and return to hell.

In Chapter 9, C. S. Lewis (like Dante encountering Virgil in The Divine
Comedy) encounters the wise, holy figure of George MacDonald on the outskirts
of heaven. MacDonald explains to Lewis that "the damned have holidays-excursions,
ye understand." 20 Most of them take trips
to earth, but some take trips to heaven and refuse to stay. "Milton
was right. The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words
‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ . . . Ye see it easily
enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper
than say it was sorry and be friends." 21 "All
that are in Hell, choose it." 22

When he put those words into the mouth of his mentor George MacDonald
in The Great Divorce, Lewis might have been thinking of the following
words of Sundar Singh: "Men were not created for Hell and therefore
do not enjoy it, and, when there, desire to escape into Heaven. They do
so, but they find Heaven even more uncongenial than Hell, so they return."
23 These words appeared in 1921 in The Message of
Sundar Singh, co-authored by B. H. Streeter, an Oxford professor impressed
by Sundar Singh’s visit the year before.

In Lewis’s invented plot in That Hideous Strength, the Sura in India
passed on a spiritual assignment to Ransom in England, whom he had never
met. Is it possible (I wonder) that in real life the Sadhu in India unknowingly
passed on a spiritual assignment to C. S. Lewis in England? Such synchronicity
would be in keeping with the Sadhu’s strange and marvelous life. (The
Bible speaks of such a transfer in the story of Elijah and Elisha in 2
Kings 2.)

George MacDonald died on September 18, 1905. Just then the young Sundar
Singh decided to become a wandering Sadhu, and less than three weeks after
MacDonald’s death he set out on his twenty-fouryear ministry. When Sundar
Singh died in the spring of 1929, C. S. Lewis dedicated his life to God
and gradually began his own remarkable ministry. All three of these men
ministered by public speaking, by writing, and by deep and constant prayer.

Perhaps the chronological links between the prayer and teaching ministries
of George MacDonald, Sundar Singh, and C. S. Lewis were only a coincidence.
Life is full of coincidences, and George MacDonald believed that we don’t
even notice most of them. But he believed that they are all significant.

C. S. Lewis no doubt failed to notice the chronological coincidence that
linked his ministry to the ministries of Sundar Singh and George MacDonald.
But in 1948, just three years after publishing his fictional tribute to
Sundar Singh in That Hideous Strength, Lewis published his little book
titled George MacDonald: An Anthology. One of the insightful passages
he decided to include was from MacDonald’s novel Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood:
"And if we believe that God is everywhere, why should we not think
Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange? For
if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of
those things." 24

A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SUNDAR SINGH

Andrews, C. F. Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir. Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 1934.

Appasamy, A. J. Sundar Singh: A Biography. Published by Lutterworth Press
in London, 1958. First Indian edition, 1966.

Heiler, Friedrich. The Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh. First published
in German in 1924, then published in English in 1927. First Indian edition
published by the Lucknow Publishing House in Lucknow, India, 1970. Abridged
English translation by Olive Wyon.

Parker, Rebeccah. Sadhu Sundar Singh, Called of God. Published by the
Christian Literature Society in Madras and the S. C. M. Press in London,
1920.

Singh, Sundar. The Complete Works of Sundar Singh, including At the Master
‘s Feet (1922), Reality and Religion (1923), Search After Reality (1924),
Spiritual Life (1925), Spiritual World (1926), Real Life (1927), With
and Without Christ (1928), and Life in Abundance (first published in 1980).
Published by the Christian Literature Society in Madras, 1986.

Singh, Sundar. Visions of Sadhu Sundar Singh of India. Foreword by Bishop
LaFroy of Lahore, India. First published by Anker G. Dahle in 1926. Now
published (no date) by Osterhus Publishing Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Singh, Sundar. With and Without Christ. Introduction by the Lord Bishop
of Winchester. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1929.

Streeter, B. H. and A. J. Appasamy.The Message of Sadhu Sundar Singh:
A Study in Mysticism on Practical Religion. Published by Macmillan in
New York, 1921. (The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion.
Published by Macmillan in London, 1922.)

NOTES

1 Christopher Mitchell checked Lewis’s library books held at the Marion
E. Wade Center and found a copy of B. H. Streeter’s and A. J. Appasamy’s
The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (London: MacMillan,
1922). It contains no marginal notes and is inscribed on the inside cover
with a name other than Lewis’s. There is no way to tell how or when Lewis
acquired it. back

2 C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity
Reason and Romanticism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing,
1981), Book 8, Chapter 2, 136. back

3 Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 8, Chapter 5, 140. back

4 Friedrich Heiler, The Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh, Abridged Translation
by Olive Wyon (Lucknow, India: Lucknow Publishing House1970), 31. back

5 Heiler, 36. back

6 Heiler, 37. back

7 Heiler, 37. back

8 They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963),
ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), letter dated February 3,
1920, 264. back

9 They Stand Together, letter dated February 3, 1920, 265. back

10 Heiler, 88. back

11 C. S. Lewis, "A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers," "On
Stories" and Other Essays on Literature, ed. by Walter Hooper (New
York: Harvest HBJ, 1982), 93. back

12 Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life
of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (London: Victor Gollanez Ltd., 1969),
32-33. back

13 C S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan Company, 1946),
subtitle and preface, vii. back

14 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 125-6. back

15 A. J. Appasamy, Sundar Singh: A Biography, (Madras, India: C. L. S.,
1966), 7. back

16 Dom Bede Griffiths, letter to Kathryn Lindskoog (unpublished), June
12, 1987. back

17 Dom Bede Griffiths, letter to Kathryn Lindskoog (unpublished), July
27, 1987. back

18 B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy, The Message of Sundar Singh, (New
York: Macmillan, 1921), 68. back

19 C. S. Lewis letter to Sheldon Vanauken, December 23, 1950. Sheldon
Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 93.
back

20 C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan , 1946), 62. back

21 The Great Divorce, 66. back

22 The Great Divorce, 69. back

23 B. H. Streeter, The Message, 101. back

24 C. S. Lewis, editor, George MacDonald: 365 Readings, #278, 115. back