C.S. Lewis

The “Dawn Treader” and the Church

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Narnia

Tolkien himself may object to a blog post about Narnia on such an otherwise perfect Hobbit Day, but since we’re reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a family the book is on the brain and, hence, on the blog. The reading (or re-reading or re-re-reading, depending on who in the family you are talking about) is in anticipation of the 3D movie release in December. The extra time will allow us to slow our pace and to read and study the book carefully and benefit from secondary sources. Over the past few days I have been digging through a few books for background it was while researching that I stumbled upon an interesting point made by Alan Jacobs. He proposes that TVDT is ultimately an allegory of the Church. Here’s the argument in Jacobs makes in The Narnian (HarperOne, 2005), page 209-210:

… The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” … I am tempted to call an allegory of the Church. After all, historically Christians have linked the Church with Noah’s Ark: each boat is, in its time and place, a unique vessel of salvation. As the Church sails toward Heaven, so the Dawn Treader sails toward Aslan’s country at the end of the world.

And on this voyage Eustace’s situation is the most significant one. He finds himself on this ship, knowing no one, comprehending nothing, and staying with the others only because he has no other option, as the slave trader Pug discovered when he “threw him in free with other lots and still no one would take him.” He doesn’t see that the Dawn Treader is his only hope of survival; he doesn’t see that from the other members of that crew he could learn skills and virtues alike. Thanks to his parents and his school, he is a “boy without a chest” and is simply incapable of understanding what motivates the others, the martial Mouse Reepicheep above all.

And the only way for this to be remedied … is for Eustace to undergo a kind of death: to have his very skin stripped away by Aslan, and only by Aslan, and to emerge newly born from the encounter. Moreover, the first part of what he must learn is simply that he is not a very good boy, that he is weak and cowardly—that, to put it bluntly, he is simply inferior to Caspian and Edmund and, yes, Reepicheep. It is noteworthy that after he becomes a boy again he tells Edmund, “You’d think me simply phony if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.”

This is the first time that Eustace has considered himself anything but superior to everyone else, and if it seems obvious that Eustace’s musculature would be dwarfed by that of the powerful young king, well, in the matter of self-knowledge everyone has to start somewhere. Only once he has acknowledged the “mouldiness” of his arms and the “beastliness” of his behavior is Eustace ready to begin the process of becoming a real member of the Dawn Treader’s crew.

If Jacobs is right and TVDT is an allegory of the Church, that allegory is ripe with application about what it means to live humbly within the community, to depend upon Christian friends (reminiscent of Bunyan’s allegory), and what it means to welcome and care for ungrateful wretches like Eustace who are yet in need of God’s sovereign and gracious skinning. Needless to say, after reading this excerpt from Jacobs I think I will be reading TVDT with new eyes.

But Narnia will wait until another day because this day is Tolkien’s day. And tomorrow on the blog I hope to have a few pictures of our coney stew feast.

Happy Hobbit Day.

The Narnian

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Narnia

Alan Jacobs, in an interview with Ken Myers, as recorded in back matter of Jacob’s excellent book, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis [(HarperCollins, 2005), page 349,] said:

“…almost everything that Lewis really cared about and that he deeply believed in, almost everything that he thought was vital for us to know, no matter how scholarly, no matter how intellectual, found its way somehow into the Narnia books—to a shocking degree, actually. You wouldn’t think that he would be able to get all that stuff into a series of what are, after all, relatively brief books for children, and yet he did.”

Looking in the wrong end of the funnel

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Prayer, spurgeon, Transposition

In her Washington Post column today, “Does God play favorites?” (5/9, A17), Kathleen Parker argues that Christian prayers are no more special than the prayers of say a Hindu or a Muslim because “new brain research supports the likelihood that one man’s prayer is as good as any other’s.” To back this up she introduces NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty and her book Fingerprints of God a book that shows neurologically that “whether one is a Sikh, a Catholic nun, a Buddhist monk or a Sufi Muslim, the brain reacts to focused prayer and meditation much in the same way. The same parts light up and the same parts go dark during deep meditation.” I don’t doubt it. But she makes a fundamental mistake.

A drunk man blabbing in the street and a man filled with the Spirit of God and speaking the gospel in a foreign language apparently have some similarities to an observer. But they are doing very different things (Acts 2:5–13). Similarly, an act in the bedroom that is borne out of sinful lust between an unmarried couple as compared to the same act in the bedroom that originates from marital love and faithfulness are two radically different acts, even if they are physically indistinguishable. The physical appearance of the act often does not distinguish the sinfulness or the holiness of the act itself. This is what C.S. Lewis called “transposition,” when higher and more complex elements of the spirit world are acted out in a less complex material world they often don’t look particularly unique to the human eye. Or, as Lewis explained, when you take a book that was written in a very complex language and translate that book into a much more simplified language you must (out of necessity) give certain words multiple meanings. The same is true spiritually. The prayers that are pleasing to God—those prayers that are mediated by the blood of Jesus Christ and are reinterpreted and amplified by the voice of the Holy Spirit (Heb. 10:19–22, Rom. 8:26) are prayers that may in fact look exactly the same in a neurological scan as all other prayers and meditations that are not sanctified by the blood of Christ and not prayed through the Spirit.

To understand spiritual complexities we don’t study the simplified translation, we study the original book. In seeking to understand the spiritual world we must look down from heaven to earth rather than from earth up into the heavens. This is only possible through God’s revelation. God’s word is the only source that will help us make spiritual sense of physical acts that appear to be similar. And this is why brain activity can never determine the spiritual value of one’s prayers and meditation. It’s to attempt to understand spirituality by looking in the wrong end of the funnel.

For more on transposition see Lewis’ marvelous essay in The Weight of Glory (pages 91–115).

Pragmatism

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Pragmatism, spurgeon

C.S. Lewis opened his essay “Man or Rabbit?” [now published in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970), pages 108–113] with these words:

“‘Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?’ This is the question on which I have been asked to write, and straight away, before I begin trying to answer it, I have a comment to make. The question sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself, ‘I don’t care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I’m not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the Materialists say. All I’m interested in is leading a good life. I’m going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.’

Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathise with this state of mind. One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe any of you have really lost that desire. More probably, foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts—to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.”

Literary Frivolity

Tony Reinke Art, C.S. Lewis, Literature

Here is a very helpful and balanced perspective on literature and aesthetics from a paper by C. S. Lewis published the book Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1967) page 10:

“The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of work. The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences; he feels ethically irresponsible, perhaps, but he braces his strength to receive responsibilities of another kind which seem to the Christian quite illusory. He has to be ‘creative’; he has to obey a mystical amoral law called his artistic conscience; and he commonly wishes to maintain his superiority to the great mass of mankind who turn to books for mere recreation. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world …

It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant; but the world must not misunderstand. When Christian work is done on a serious subject there is no gravity and no sublimity it cannot attain. But they will belong to the theme. That is why they will be real and lasting—mighty nouns with which literature, an adjectival thing, is here united, far over-topping the fussy and ridiculous claims of literature that tries to be important simply as literature.

And a posteriori it is not hard to argue that all the greatest poems have been made by men who valued something else much more than poetry… The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all with those who make literature a self-existent thing to be valued for its own sake.”

‘Our best havings are wantings’

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Heaven

From a letter written by C. S. Lewis (5 November 1954) and published here:

“About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria [the heavenly homeland]. It is the bright frontispiece which whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.”