I always start with A Grief Portrayed, one of the finest books written about mourning. Lewis lost a long-awaited and spirited spouse to bone cancer, and Shadowland gripped Lewis' last years. I am not a biographer -- and there are already more than five -- but you see the two sides of Lewis' mind already established -- bipedaling the desire to imagine and feel "Joy" (Narnia, Perelandria), and his responsibility to the God of residual dogma (Allegory of Love, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity)-- before he came to be seduced by a married woman named Joy. And she dies. And he is CS Lewis, left to dry alive, not to die, and unable to return to privately priggish common room hearty bachelor life. He emerges, he does not emerge, he is living the Problem of Pain inside, and in trying to cling to a personal faith in the shadow of a personal insult to the entire continent of his belief, he finds his faith has no hands. He now KNEW that conversion was not real, and was not a means of joy in a real world.
He is left with the quest, living the questions. And here is where the believer and the nonbeliever meet -- in the realm of the imaginery, where everything important takes place, or doesn't. Where shared ritual unfolds, where the layers of allegory story each onion, and the petals of metaphor open up each rose.
Who knows what CS Lewis believed in his final hour, the author of magic Narnia slipping into the final resting Wardrobe. We cannot express enough gratitude for a man who gave us fairy tales and faith, and most comforting for those of us who escape into imagination, a permanent bed of doubt.
Hi, I like this little tribute to a man who managed to communicate his humanity. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteNot sure about the other stuff about law and government and money - that's just things people have made up, isn't it? It can't be real, surely?
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ReplyDelete"...the other stuff about law and government and money-- that's just things people have made up...It can't be real, surely?"
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the differences between the way Tolkien and Lewis understood the metaphor of myth. Tolkien could never figure out how Lewis could mix mediterranean satyrs and centaurs with Nordic snow queens, Grendelian growlers, and talking Lions. For Tolkien, the myth was real, but it was myth. For Lewis, reality was myth, all things were metaphoric. It was an inclusive reality which included a lot of things made up.
You seem to share this view.
And the problem - once made up, things come into existence as ideas. This virtual reality takes on an existance. This is the virtual reality we have inhabited since using words. Now the unreal is real.
Are you comfortable that things that do not exist can be dismissed? Some of these little abstractions like laws and government have gone to a great deal of trouble to make rooms for themselves in the mythologies we seem to inhabit.
The latest book about Narnia...Laura Miller's THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK (2008). For those of us who share Miller's fascination for the seven children's books Lewis devoted to Narnia, we join in the joy of this critique of the Chronicles.
ReplyDeleteI cannot help but note her silence, however, on the question of Lewis' theology, which she expressly flies over on the ground that it is "already been plowed".
She does describe how "Christianity worked like a black hole, sucking all the beauty and wonder out of Narnia" leaving her bereft of "something infinitely precious to me".
I remember my parents discussing whether Faith was a Gift or a Choice. Perhaps Belief is only maintained by a constitutional substance of chaos, a ground of random Unbelief. As if we can only see a clear reflection in still water -- but that appearance is still only a reflection, and the real reified and reifying thing and the waters are splashing and evaporating away.
Miller concludes that Lewis was less Christian than he thought he was. She would not be surprised, then, to be advised of the long-suppressed fact that Lewis disavowed Christianity prior to his death. This is of course, the great treasure of Lewis: That he prized the joy of both truth and fantasy.