On C.S. Lewis and Sunbeams

The Apologetics of Imaginative Inhabitation

I recently finished the very interesting book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward. 

In Planet Narnia, Ward makes the argument that Lewis uses the archetypes of the "seven heavens"--Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the Moon, and the Sun--to create a distinctive imaginative world for each of the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia. You can read Planet Narnia to see which planets go with which books in The Chronicles. I went into Planet Narnia as a skeptic that Ward had cracked "the Narnia Code," but he makes a strong case. And even if Ward is wrong, his close reading of The Chronicles, along with the Ransom space trilogy and Lewis' entire corpus, popular and scholarly, is very illuminating.

Ward also makes the argument in Planet Narnia that The Chronicles of Narnia was written to advance Lewis’ argument from his apologetical book Miracles. 

The popular consensus is that Miracles is Lewis' least effective apologetical work. When I read it, many years ago, I didn't find it overly persuasive. Ward argues that Lewis also felt a dissatisfaction with the book, and that the The Chronicles of Narnia was his attempt at a better approach. 

Scholars of Lewis have long been interested in his seemingly abrupt switch from popular apologetical works to the writing of children's fantasy stories. What caused this change? Was Lewis withdrawing from the fight for the faith?

Ward argues, no, Lewis didn't withdraw. He simply changed tactics. According to Ward, Lewis recognized the limits of rational argumentation in apologetical debate. You see that rationalism on display in Miracles. Such logical arguments really only go so far, and they generally fail to persuade. What was needed, rather, was a conversion and a baptism of the imagination. This is what happened to Lewis himself when, as a young atheist, he encountered George MacDonald's fairy story Phantastes. MacDonald converted Lewis' imagination.

Lewis knew that the rational arguments of books like Miracles could only get you so far. You struggle to "get" faith by standing aloof and objective, analyzing it from the outside. What was needed, rather, was imaginatively inhabiting faith, getting "inside" the story. Only there, from the inside, could the "logic" of faith be appreciated and understood. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia to create that imaginative world and opportunity.

Lewis described this strategy of imaginative inhabitation in a short essay titled "Meditations in a Toolshed":

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

The book Miracles was looking "at" the sunbeam of faith. Detached, rational, objective, argumentative. Miracles examined enchantment from the outside.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by contrast, looks "along" the sunbeam, imaginatively inhabiting the world of faith. Enchantment is experienced from the inside. Looking "along" the sunbeam is a participatory form of knowing and understanding as you live within the story.