Narnian Tales: The Life of C.S. Lewis

By Danielle M. Thomas | Monday, January 9, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacobs, 2005

As a noted scholar of literature, a prolific writer, and perhaps the leading Christian apologist of the 20th century, the late C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) left ample material for a biography, and many books have been written about his varied and interesting life. The latest, by Wheaton College English professor Alan Jacobs, is well-timed to take advantage of renewed interest in Lewis spurred by the release of his Chronicles of Narnia as a major motion picture. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis does justice to its subject and makes for an easy and thought-provoking read. Jacobs draws on Lewis's extensive correspondence, interviews with close friends, and his own comprehensive knowledge of Lewis's works to create a thorough portrait of a life punctuated by tragic loss, deep friendships, and developing doctrines.

When the prospect of snow sports was eliminated by the lack of snow over break in Tahoe, I ventured out to see Disney's adaptation of Chronicles of Narnia with an atheist friend who had not read the books as a child. As we left the theater, she commented on the Christian message embedded in the film—the story of the lion Aslan is a thinly-veiled allegory for that of Jesus—as if Lewis had a secret missionary agenda to save the souls of his audience. This message, however, is far from hidden. Rather, it marks a distinctive characteristic of Lewis's work: despite the diversity of genre he used—including children's fantasy, science fiction, evangelical dialectics, and radio commentaries—a certain thematic unity permeates all of Lewis's work. A previous biographer identified this as a "presence of mind" because "somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything." Jacobs uses a slight variation on this observation as the thesis of his book: "Lewis's mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life." That this is an insightful and accurate description will be clear to any reader familiar with Lewis's works or his life, which was marked by an appreciation of joy from simple pleasures, the belief in a loving God, and a willingness to succumb to the enchantment of a story. He simultaneously believed that all these related things were threatened by modernity, the stimulus for his fervent lifelong battle to reverse the "disenchantment of the world" through his writing and speaking.

This unifying mission is epitomized by Lewis's lifelong quest for "Joy." As a young man, Lewis began recording each experience of this elusive emotion in a journal. His definition of joy is not of a happiness inspired by the fulfillment of a desire but of "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." He titled his autobiography Surprised by Joy (a somewhat ironic title considering his later marriage to a brash American named Joy Gresham). Lewis, who consumed books with a voracious appetite born of childhood solitude, most frequently experienced this joy when immersed in a charming story. Later in life, he adopted the British tradition of making long walks and dutifully documented the joy experienced during these solitary hours in nature. In these sought-after moments of joy, Lewis felt as if life on earth were but a shadow of something deeper and more real. Evoking Platonism, Lewis later described joy as "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." Although an atheist at the time, these periodic encounters with joy resonated with his notion of a greater presence that he would later come to identify as God.

Although these encounters usually occurred while Lewis was alone, he delighted in the numerous deep and challenging friendships that shaped his character, citing "adult male laughter" as his favorite sound on earth. Jacobs provides an in-depth description of Lewis's first such friendship. On discovering that both he and his friend experienced the thrill of joy while reading the same books, Lewis wrote that "Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery that there exist people very, very like himself,". During his life at Oxford, where he was a fellow from 1925 to 1954 after graduating with three Firsts, Lewis became the dominant personality in a literary group of friends that included J.R.R. Tolkien and later adopted the name of "the Inklings." Through their lively discussions at a local pub called the Eagle and Child, the Inklings formulated a counterculture of sorts, professing belief in the "possibilities for the human mind, heart, and spirit beyond what one might read in the newspapers, or in intellectual journals, or in textbooks."

Despite his inclination to believe and be enchanted, C.S. Lewis did not accept the Christian faith that defines his work until late adulthood, after years of rejection and defiance. As a child, Lewis was propelled towards atheism by the death of his beloved mother. He completely polarized his reason and his love of Joy and enchantment, a frustrating internal chasm that was only maintained through incredible self-discipline. His description of these internally-divided years is bleak:

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow 'rationalism.' Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Especially after experiencing the gore of the front-line trenches of World War I first-hand as an infantry officer in the British army, Lewis raged against the God in whom he denied belief, furious about his own loss of faith. During this period, Lewis was unable to find the joy he had documented so meticulously in his earlier years and his brilliant imagination was temporarily extinguished. After vigorous debates with his religious friends as well as his own soul, Lewis slowly began to accept theism, then monotheism, and finally the Christianity he eventually became famous for professing. Once he finally tore down the barrier between his reason and his faith, his writing was energized "as though the key to his own hidden and locked-away personality was given to him. What appears almost immediately is a kind of gusto (sheer, bold enthusiasm for what he loves) that is characteristic of him ever after."

Once Lewis integrated both "hemispheres" of his mind, he began to fight against the cultural elements and mis-education that kept his mind from separated from Joy for so long. In Abolition of Man, which is composed of three related essays on education, he argued that modern culture is in the process of training "men without chests"—educating the intellect without a corresponding education of the emotions and morals. Lewis believed that this imbalance, indoctrinated in childhood, led to an "invincible ignorance" that renders man unable to recognize truth. Uncle Andrew in the Narnia books is a pitiful specimen of this mis-education and, when he finally encounters Aslan, manages to convince himself that the hero of the series is roaring, not speaking, since it is logically impossible for animals to speak:

The longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed…He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan's song. And when at last the Lion spoke and said, 'Narnia awake,' he didn't hear any words: he heard only a snarl.

Uncle Andrew blinds himself to the triumphant moment of Narnia's revival through his own faulty logic. Lewis felt that the modern culture of his day used a similar logic that viewed things as only what they were composed of, missing the deeper realization of what they really are. A nature reduced to just organic molecules could not explain the joy and deeper essence he perceived in it. An exchange between a star named Ramandu and a human boy, Eustace In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in the Narnia series aptly summarizes Lewis' position: "'In our world,' said Eustace, 'a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.' 'Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of,'" the star relies.

Lewis used the same argument against reductionism wherever he found it, including in the increasingly influential psychoanalytic theory of Freud, which reduced human behavior and religion to sexual motivation: "Why should that be the right way of looking at it? If he can say that It is sublimated sex, why is it not open to me to say that sex is undeveloped It?" By seeing through everything that holds faith or enchantment, one sees nothing at all and is thus trapped in a prison of his own mind. As Lewis wrote on The Problem of Pain, "the doors of Hell are locked, but they are locked on the inside." Through its fear of being taken in by belief and thus reducing all that holds faith to its elements, modern culture had become lost, and Jacobs' timely biography allows us to realize that anew through a clear view of Lewis's life, philosophy, and the connection between them.

Narnian Tales: The Life of C.S. Lewis

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