A hermeneutical understanding of The Chronicles of Narnia

By Anna Blanch

The Chronicles of Narnia sees an apparent collision between Lewis's Christian worldview, his Platonism and his utilisation of pagan mythology. Understanding and analysing the coherence of these apparently disparate tracks of theoretical thought is integral to applying a heuristic approach in which Lewis's critical assumptions are foremost and enables construction of the approach that he intended the reader to take in relation to their reading of the series.

Lewis has created, in Narnia, an intrinsically mythical world that employs aspects and elements of various cultures and traditions, relating to their history, deities, ancestors and heroes, including biblical literature, Celtic, Roman, Greek and Norse mythology. Lewis's contention that allegorical interpretation was an important aspect of the Christian world's appropriation of the art of the ancient pagan world is important in his fusion of pagan mythology and biblical literature. The evolution of his definition of myth can be found in the influence mythology had on him and his work, both early in his life and in his academic career. Lewis's definition closely intertwined his interest in mythologies with his Christian faith.¹ Lewis admitted that during the height of his interest in Norse mythology, around 1919, he believed in Norse myths as “truth”.² Consequently, Lewis began early to combine genres and mythologies in his work. Lewis described Dymer (1926) as an attempt to complete a tragedy “Norse in subject and Greek in Form”.³ Lewis was particularly taken by the work of George Macdonald who was himself inspired by Norse sagas and eddas, and intentionally infused both mythology and his Christian worldview into his fictional work.⁴ Lewis began to explore other worlds in his own work, beginning with the creation in his childhood of an animal land, titled Boxen, and progressing to the books of his Space Trilogy, Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, in which planets, and thus worlds, are juxtaposed with earth and “primary world” reality. Essentially, myth awakened in Lewis a “longing for other worlds”, and it is for this reason that he perceived great value in the ability of plays and novels to articulate “the great myths”.⁵

Lewis believed that “what might be myth in one world might be fact in another” and that all mythology, religions and pagan ritual have their essence in the one “true myth”, which he understood to be the Christian understanding of God and his incarnate son, Jesus Christ.⁶ Thus it could be said that Christianity is a myth like any other, excepting that, unlike other myths, it has the quality of a “true myth”.⁷ This concept of a “true myth” came from his discussions with Tolkien, but for both, this assertion is a direct response to the anthropological classic, The Golden Bough, and its authoritative author, J.G Frazer. In asserting the interrelated fabric of all myth, Lewis was concurring with Frazer's beliefs. The similarities however, end there. Frazer argued that none of the myths was more “true” than any other (a precursor to religious pluralism).⁸ By positing that in essence there is truth and that pagan rituals have an essence of the one true myth, which is the incarnation of Jesus Christ, in our world at least, Lewis was placing himself in conflict with the dominant anthropological and sociological canon.

Lewis's definition is integral to developing and applying a heuristic framework in order to interpret his “other world” subcreation and his symbolic use of typology. The interaction between the mythological influences on Lewis and his personal conversion to Christianity changed the level of prominence he gave to Christian “myth” and consequently to his creative exercise. Lewis believed in the inherent correlation of myth and fact, and similarly saw all pre-Christian myths as shadows of the Christian “truth”. It is for this philosophical reason that he used so much “primary world” mythology, both classical and pagan, in The Chronicles, rather than creating a whole new mythology and language, as did his friend and colleague Tolkien.⁹ Lewis drew upon diverse mythological sources to construct a world in which “permanent and inevitable” truth may be explored. Lewis's alternative description of the series as a “supposal” as opposed to an allegory strongly supports the proposal that Lewis intended the series not to be decoded like an allegory.

Hooper explains that by “allegory” Lewis meant the use of something real and tangible to stand for that which is real but intangible.¹⁰ It is on the basis of the images' reality in the context of another world that this becomes supposal, not allegory. Lewis's alternate definition, in which allegory acts as a way to reveal, not to hide, and symbolism acts as a way to see the archetype through the type, led him to deny the label partly because of the modern tendency for “one for one” equivalence, and because supposal instead employs symbolism. He also held that the allegorists firmly believed in their ability to illuminate the immaterial, that the allegorical “copy” transmits some of its features in transforming the immaterial. This is contrary to the spirit of what Lewis intended through the use of mythological and biblical sources. A supposition bears essential features of the original material thing with details unique to the situation, and, most essentially, it is not designed to alter, transform, or illuminate the original. Instead, Lewis presents a type of the original, and in doing so admits that it cannot and does not compare in depth or quality to the original; rather its very inability points to the “truth“ of the original.

The key to supposal lies, as Lewis saw it, in the factual tangibility of the incarnate Christ. It can be shown from Lewis's correspondence that he did intend Aslan to be a type of Jesus, and that Aslan be recognised as such. Lewis clearly stated, however, that Aslan wasn't Jesus, allegorically, but what Jesus might have been like if there was another world and he had chosen to use the form of a lion. Intrinsically, Lewis is portraying the truth, as he sees it, of the Christian myth. While The Chronicles are saturated with images that are types of aspects and characters present in the Bible, his purpose was not a promotion of pluralism or intellectualism.¹¹

In the very nature of supposal, Lewis is clearly engaged in creating similitudes between this world, the next and other worlds. Lewis fundamentally disagreed with the critical notion of the allegory offering more than the object being described, which is one reason he gives for why allegorical language is used in preference to literal language. Especially when dealing with matters as “weighty” as the Christian gospel, Lewis would reasonably and naturally deny any label that suggested any significant intervention in his part that was beyond mere shadow and reflection. This is not, however, the most significant obstacle for Lewis:

Allegory, after all, is simile seen from the other end; and when we have seen the point of simile we do not throw it away ... to read an allegory as a continued simile, but a simile which works backward ...¹²

Herein lies the rub, for, as I will argue, The Chronicles of Narnia are not to be read backwards—that is, I would contend, through a lens of biblical Scripture, but forwards, being recognised as a shadow of the real, in Platonic terms, preparing the reader for what may later be encountered in a revelation of the Christian salvation narrative. The practical application of Lewis's definition of myth can most strikingly be seen in an analysis of images that have a basis in both biblical literature and pagan mythology. I will now turn to a brief examination of a number of these images.

Creation

Creation is an important theme in The Chronicles,¹³ and a type of biblical creation is represented in The Magician's Nephew as Narnia is created verbally ex nihilo by a pre-existent creator. Out of nothing, light, sun, heavenly bodies, the forms of the earth and all within it are created by Aslan, the son of the Emperor across the Sea.

The Narnian creation narrative parallels the narrative emphasis on speech (in and of the creator) in Genesis 1 and John 1, which includes the reality of speech determining action. That is to say, creation occurs out of speech.¹⁴ This is refigured in The Magician's Nephew where creation is spoken and sung¹⁵ in a parallel narrative with Genesis, and in terms of form and intent with the first chapter of the gospel of John. John 1 is focused on positing the connection between the members of the Trinity, Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit, and the role of the King and saviour as creator. Aslan, as a type of the creator, sings a world into creation, and this can be paralleled with the “word of God“ speaking the world into creation as expressed in John 1:1-3.¹⁶

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

In contrast, Genesis 1 itself is significantly concerned in structure and themes with Babylonian mythology, and particularly with using similar narrative forms to persuasively highlight a single omniscient and omnipotent God, as opposed to a pantheistic world.¹⁷ In The Magician's Nephew, the stars and the sun (which signifies the health and age of the world, both in Charn and in Narnia) are created by Aslan.¹⁸ “Stars” as indicators of “seasons” and appointed times are not merely a phenomenon of pagan astrology but they are also biblically endorsed in Genesis 1:14. “God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.’” In the same way, Genesis 1:16-18 sees God fashion the sun. The sun and the stars are highlighted as a creation of God to prevent and rebut mythologies that are centred upon a Sun deity or other heavenly bodies. The point is also made in The Magician's Nephew when the narrator describes Digory's sensations: “They [the sun and earth] made you feel excited; until you saw the singer himself, and then you forgot everything else”.¹⁹

The creation narrative in The Chronicles of Narnia does not confine itself to biblical literature, as Lewis specifically highlights connections between the Narnian creation story and other mythologies, while at the same time distancing this world from those mythologies. This is illustrated in The Magician's Nephew when Uncle Andrew shows Digory a box from Atlantis, a world like Narnia, accessible from the “Wood between the worlds”. This world, and consequently Narnia, is defined by what it is not: “... it wasn't Greek, or Old Egyptian, or Babylonian, or Hittite, or Chinese”.²⁰ In itself, this framing statement is a juxtaposition of mythology, evolution theory and biblical history.

The creatures of Narnia have diverse and rich origins in the mythology of different civilisations: the Roman Bacchus and Pomona; the Greek fauns, satyrs and centaurs, Dryads and hamadryads (good tree spirits who populate the forests of Narnia); Naiads and other River “gods”; along with Minotaurs who act as soldiers in the White Witch's army. Beyond these, there are other types of mythological creatures from various cultures, including wraiths, hags and ogres. Unlike the biblical account, this creation narrative is without the explicit creation of man as “Son of Adam”.²¹ Digory is already present during the creation process, and so creation finds its culmination in the “creation” of talking beasts who are created from the earth, literally arising from it.

Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? ... In all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than mole-hills, some as big as wheel-barrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal.²²

From these, Aslan selected two animals at a time from each type by touching noses with them, though some sorts of animals he passed over altogether.²³ These creatures, the chosen ones, were imbued with speech and were changed—some being made slightly larger if they were small (like moles and rabbits) and some being made smaller if they were very large (like the elephants).²⁴ Significantly, breath (symbolic of spirit in biblical terms²⁵) and a bolt of fire (often symbolic of cleansing and holiness) are used as a means of anointing during this ceremony (which carries with it some resonance of Pentecost) in order to instill certain characteristics such as speech and free will:

The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath ... Then came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself ... and in the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”²⁶

The fusion of divergent imagery and motifs is an example of how the creatures are not intended to allegorically represent biblical creation; rather, they operate as a type of the creation. The selection of a pair of each type recalls Genesis 6:18-7:24 and the selection of pairs to enter Noah's ark.²⁷

The Lion

As lion, saviour, creator and judge of the created, Aslan has clear foundations in mythology and biblical literature. The lion as a motif has been characterised as King of the Jungle, King of Beasts and, in Frazer, as Lord of the Wood.²⁸ In Pagan mythology, the lion is a pastoral motif indicative of power. For example, since Ovid, the Lion as King of Beasts has been prominent as an embodiment of power and uncontrollable strength.²⁹ As all of these, and additionally as the Son of the Emperor beyond the sea,³⁰ the motif of the lion is incarnate in the figure of Aslan.

There appears to be a clear synergy between mediaeval and biblical images of the “lion”. For example, the Royal Lion Hunt was common in the early iconography of Western Asia, and often symbolised death and resurrection; continuation of life was ensured by the killing of the godlike animal.³¹ The King's own divinity was often suggested by his fearless grasp of the animal's paws—an archetypal image of human courage matching lion courage.³² This image of characters touching their hands with Aslan's paws, as when Aslan greets Bree and Hwin for the first time in The Horse and His Boy, or when Aslan wipes away the tears of Digory in The Magician's Nephew and those of Lucy at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, reflect this conception.³³

It is clear that Aslan is supposed to be compared with, and considered in the light of, Jesus. Specifically, Aslan is a typological representation of Jesus, while simultaneously within Narnia, Aslan is himself an antitype. He is a type as King David is a type, of the antitype, Jesus Christ.³⁴ Biblically, Jesus is often referred to as the Lion of Judah,³⁵ while similarly, “lion of Judah” is a synonym for Jesus Christ found in medieval texts. In the Physiologus and other medieval bestiaries, the lion is made a symbol of Christ's role as redeemer and victor over Satan, who is also sometimes described as “a roaring lion”³⁶. Lindskoog has also written about these parallels in great detail.³⁷ Lewis explicitly links Aslan with the Lion of Judah in a letter written in 1954 where he tells a child that the great lion Aslan is the “Lion of Judah”.³⁸ The figure of the Christ is described as the Lion of Judah, (also a synonym for the “King of Judah”) in the Old Testament,³⁹ while the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” is said, in Revelation 5:5, to have conquered all.⁴⁰

Evil and Instruments of Deception

Figures and instruments of evil are in constant opposition to (though they are never able to defeat) the “deeper magic” and thus Aslan. Each evil character finds some foundation or basis in pagan mythology: Jadis, the White Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Tarkaan, Shift and Tash. I will explore the examples of Jadis and Shift.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch (later seen in her first incarnation as Jadis in The Magician's Nephew) personifies qualities of fear, cowardice, surrender, coldness, blankness and the pallor of death. Jadis resonates with “Jade” and consequently the colour green. In pagan mythology, green was linked with female deities, and a pale greenish tinge with death. In English idiomatic usage, green can describe immaturity while also evoking the hues of envy and jealousy. Aspects of Jadis and the White Witch are often associated with biblical and pagan symbols of evil. For example, Satan himself is sometimes represented as green, and similarly the horned minotaur, who is a servant of the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is a Greek mythical image that has been partly borrowed by the Christian tradition to depict Satan.⁴¹

Jadis is described in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the daughter of Lilith, the first wife of Adam. Though she is nowhere named in the Bible, this pagan legend dates from the Dark Ages.⁴² In Babylonian legend, Lilith was a “demon of desolate places”, and in later Jewish law, she is believed to have deserted Adam and haunted the night. Jadis's power in her own world seems to be based on mental energies, but in Narnia, magic (at least, black magic) seems to be based on elements. Jadis uses a wand and some sort of a magical substance that can be transfigured. Magic has existed from the creation of the world, and it is connected intimately with kingship and the power to rule. Lewis distinguishes clearly between the use of magic for evil and the intrinsic “deeper magic” of the good creator.

Shift is the anti-Christ figure in The Last Battle. Placing Shift in a stable recalls 2 Thessalonians 2:4 where it is prophesied that world rulers will set themselves up in the temple of God, the stable being the birthplace of Jesus. Shift, like the antichrist, is a powerful leader who subdues the world's rulers, persecutes the faithful, and performs “signs and lying wonders”,⁴³ like Mark 13:22: “False Christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect”.

The ape is an image of sharply diverging symbolism, respected in ancient Egypt, Africa, India and China, but deeply distrusted in Christian tradition where it was equated with vice, lust, idolatry and devilish heresies. Similarly, “an ass in a lion's skin”, which is the picture of the donkey “Puzzle” in The Last Battle, is a folkloric aphorism for a coward—a fool that “apes” the wise man. The ass that put on a lion's hide was betrayed when he began to bray.

Implication of use of pagan mythology and biblical literature

Lewis's use of images with a basis in both biblical literature and pagan mythology demonstrates his method of symbolic typological construction. Lewis's methodology of type is integral to his practical application of authorship in the context of how Lewis intended the text to be read. An interpretation of Lewis's methodology limited to allegorical representation or “illumination” undermines Lewis's intended approach to reading the The Chronicles of Narnia. But his intended approach may have broader implications for understanding Lewis's theology and ideological framework.

I will now address the hermeneutical foundations underlying Lewis's image construction and how this impacts his intended approach to reading The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis held firmly to a Christian worldview.⁴⁴ Lewis wrote The Chronicles within this framework, and in the context of Lewis's Platonic thought, Narnia provides the expressive medium for his understanding of biblical literature and mythology, expressed through his use of typology employed as a narrative technique. Lewis was intent on the result of this subcreation functioning as a “baptism of the imagination”. This concept of “baptising” is about preparing the reader for later explicit transmission of the Christian gospel. In The Discarded Image, Lewis specifically stresses the continuity of pagan and Christian thought, and proposes that pagans and early Christians have far more in common than either share with modernity. This assumption is evident in the manner in which Lewis fuses pagan and biblical imagery in The Chronicles.⁴⁵ However, The Chronicles is not the first series where Lewis endeavoured to fuse myth with biblical imagery; indeed, Moorman (1966) argues that it was Lewis's main aim in the Space Trilogy to create and maintain a “metaphor that will serve to carry in fictional form the basic tenets of Christianity and present them from a non-christian point of view, but without reference to normal Christian symbols”.⁴⁶ In The Chronicles, Lewis refigures Neoplatonist motifs and interpretational notions of meaning, originally neither Christian nor anti-Christian, for obliquely apologetic purposes.⁴⁷

Lewis did not necessarily think that the moral part of literature had to be foremost. If an entertaining work also had the quality of being didactic, this was not negative per se; rather, Lewis felt that if a writer wrote what interested him, and if that person was a moral person, then morality would naturally flow through the book.⁴⁸ Hinton elaborated by arguing that,

Lewis always insisted that he did not decide to write an overtly Christian or ... moral ... work and then come up with a story; rather Lewis had pictures in his mind that he formed into a story and the Christianity found its way in because of who he was as a person.⁴⁹

The concept that there is “smuggled theology” in The Chronicles has been an area of significant controversy. Indeed, a thematic strategy to present Lewis's sense of truth and morality has been considered ingenious by some, like Downing, Green and Hooper, while being dismissed as simple and crude by others, like J.B.S. Haldane.⁵⁰

In Downing's evaluation,

one may argue about Lewis's odd mixture of narration and exposition or decry his tendency to reduce complex philosophical and sociological issues to a battle of light and darkness. But in the end one cannot help but admit the resourcefulness and conviction with which Lewis weaves his worldview into the fabric of his fiction.⁵¹

The narration that Downing refers to—Lewis's overt authorial commentary—has been itself criticised for its moralising tone.⁵² Indeed, Como describes Lewis as “relentlessly persuasive” and argues that all Lewis's work, fiction or non-fiction, is focused on apologetics—whether specifically veiled or not.⁵³ From Lewis's own statements, this seems fair. Additionally, Hooper argues that Lewis wished to conquer for his own what had “hitherto been used for the opposite side”.⁵⁴ Lewis wrote,

I think that this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England; any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under a cover of romance without them knowing it.⁵⁵

Tolkien was an open critic of this practice, believing that the diversity of mythological sources was an irrecoverable flaw in Lewis's work. Indeed, George Sayer describes Tolkien observing that “the book was worthless, that it seemed like a jumble of unrelated mythologies”.⁵⁶ Tolkien intensely disliked the series because it was “too allegorical, too consciously concerned with communicating the truth—claims of Christianity”.⁵⁷ Moreover, Holbrook, for example, condemns Lewis for his “intense self-righteousness”, and refuses to acknowledge that the series could be reasonably accepted as a Christian fable due to what he describes as its forfeiture of autonomy and presence of dehumanizing sadism.⁵⁸

Lewis, however, firmly believed that pagan myth served as an effective preparation for the gospel.⁵⁹ Lewis employed mythological and biblical literature (and even traditional faerie tales) in order to desensitise a secular modern world to the spiritual realm. Wolfe contends that Lewis possessed an ability “to breathe new life into ancient myths and religious dogmas by taking their symbolic patterns and placing them in a different context”.⁶⁰ Lewis was not as concerned about originality as one might perceive the creator of an other world to be; indeed, he was concerned with minimising his own injection of originality by seeking to use the materials provided as they were.⁶¹

Narnia is a shadow of the true or real Narnia. In the same way, the biblical ideas in Narnia are mere shadows of Scripture itself, and consequently of the creator-God. For Lewis, our world is a mere shadow of the spiritual realm. In order to describe what is seen in the real creation, Lewis does not seek to be “original” in his creation of a secondary world. Lewis's Platonism also enabled him to reconcile the notions of other worlds, layers of meaning and transcendental concepts of space, time and natural law (known in Narnia as the “deeper magic”).

Lewis believed in a transcendent moral law that exists in the fabric of the world and has done so from its foundations (Lewis referred to this as the Tao⁶²). A universal moral law equates to a universal law giver in Lewis's understanding. Lewis was a Platonist in so far as he believed that the primary world is a shadow of another which exists simultaneously. This means that the primary world is a series of shadows and reflections of the real world, the spiritual.⁶³ Lewis believed that the worlds were seamlessly linked.⁶⁴ This is illustrated in The Last Battle when Professor Kirke tries to explain the difference between the real Narnia and the copy that has passed away but laments at the lack of knowledge of Plato amongst the children. This is, as Hooper points out, a reference to Plato's Republic and Phaedo where he wrote of the “immortality and unchanging reality of changing forms”.⁶⁵ While Lewis confirms different universal levels to be inherent in Platonism, this is not representing a distant platonic God. Nor does Lewis ever separate the spiritual from the material—that is, he is a Christian Platonist, not a Platonic Christian.

While Platonic thought has been linked with symbolism, it has also been linked with typology.⁶⁶ This is because, for Lewis, metaphor does not create new insights, but rather reveals what has been present all along. Smith argues that metaphor functions, in Lewis's opinion, in terms of resemblance rather than representation—“showing how things may be like another, without actually being identical”.⁶⁷ He goes on to explain that “a thing can resemble another thing only if it is not that thing, and only if the difference between the two is apparent”.⁶⁸ In the same way, there are levels of perception a reader has about the meaning of different images, degrees of verisimilitude as it were. Like Dante, Lewis considered the universe as a mirror;⁶⁹ Dante thought it was a mirror of God while Lewis saw the image as a “shadow,”, rather than a reflection, and heaven as casting the shadow rather than the universe.

Lewis's concept of magic, as opposed to “deeper magic”, is a reflection of his Platonist philosophy. Lewis believed that everything in this world is a reflection of a greater, better and more real existence which God has waiting for us. He believed that, in eternity, we will keep discovering deeper, more direct levels of God's greatness. The Last Battle is a direct exploration of this belief. Thus, the concept of “deeper magic” in Lewis's philosophical and theological framework centres around the concept that the laws we know in this “primary world” are a reflection of greater, deeper, closer-to-the-source laws. Consequently, in accordance with Lewis's theology and his Platonist philosophy, Jesus' resurrection was possible because of a greater law by which death could not conquer him, just as Aslan was resurrected in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by the “deeper magic” instituted in Narnia before the beginning of time (as seen in The Magician's Nephew).

Lewis's assertion that The Chronicles of Narnia is a supposal has also been linked with his Platonism.⁷⁰ It is certainly the case that the “as if” component of Lewis's secondary world depends on the willingness of the reader to entertain the concept of a visible and invisible world that are seamlessly connected. The concept of “further up and further in”—that is, the revelation of the extent of the Narnian world—is prefigured in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the He-Beaver invites the children “further in” to the forest and parts of Narnia that they have not yet seen. Consequently, the end of the Narnian world is a fulfilment of the prefiguring of the end of the world (as in The Magician's Nephew), the full revelation of the true Narnia, and the final fulfilment of the “deeper magic” (though death and evil had already been defeated in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Aslan's death). It is also a re-enactment of the biblical covenant in Genesis 9:8-17 where creation is shown to be part of the “deeper covenant” between God and mankind.⁷¹ There is an implication then that Lewis's typology, in as much as it is inherently metaphorical, makes possible a comprehension of aspects of both immaterial and specifically spiritual aspects of reality.⁷²

Reversal of the Hermeneutical flow

Hermeneutics is the art of understanding and interpreting discourse through systematic procedures.⁷³ Standard hermeneutical theory holds that the reader should always try to read the text in the terms the author believed in. It seems plausible in light of Lewis's worldview that interpretation of The Chronicles have generally been carried out in accordance with biblical hermeneutics in which the Bible operates as the mediator or lens.

Figure 1:

Lewis was hesitant to allow the label of allegory, not just because of all the reasons given in of this essay, but because he disagreed with the critical approach of those who seek to interpret allegory as if translation of each minute part is necessary.⁷⁴ Lewis argued that this method

leads you continually out of the book and back to the conception that you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse ... moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.⁷⁵

Lewis really hoped to do more than create a world in which simple conceptual equivalences were made by his readers. Two other aspects of this are significant. Firstly, Lewis advocated a reversal of the commonly held interpretative process. This is, then, his intended approach to the reading of The Chronicles. And secondly, Lewis held that the purpose of allegory is to enrich a concept by moving “further up and further in”. This too is how Lewis intended The Chronicles to be viewed, but not so that conflicts result between this view of the series where Narnia functions as a reflection of the true Narnia (heaven), and the Christian gospel.

Reversing the standard hermeneutical flow is not a new concept. In the context of examining pop culture and film, Detweiler and Taylor explore what film says about the Bible and God, thus “reading the bible through a grid of pop culture”.⁷⁶ In the same way, The Chronicles can function as the grid through which an examination of what it has to say about the Bible and God can be conducted.

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

The idea is that the reader moves from The Chronicles and Narnia to the real—the real in terms of God, the Scriptures, and the relationship between the primary world and God. An example of how the reversal of the standard approach impacts on the interpretation of the text can be seen by examining the scene where Eustace's redemption and transformation from the physical form of a dragon back into the form of a boy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader takes place.⁷⁷ If the standard approach (in which one considers the passage through a lens of biblical Scripture) is taken, then one could conclude that Lewis is arguing for the necessity of physical baptism as intrinsic to personal salvation. This doctrinal stance is controversial in itself, and leads to assumptions about Lewis's own theology. The reader may also be led to search for specific parallels, and he or she will be hard-pressed to find appropriate material, though he or she may settle on the healing of the blind man by the pool in John 5:1-9.

On the other hand, in the light of a reverse approach, the passage may lead one to conclude that it provides a sensation of what redemption is, as opposed to being a definitive manifestation. It may lead one to the recognition of the concept that one cannot transform oneself, which is part of the “baptising of the imagination“. It may lead one later to comprehend the notion of being transformed and born again spiritually. Or, finally, it may lead one to Icelandic folklore in which unfortunate people are transformed into dragons as they sleep.

T.A. Shippey's analysis provides an example of a critic analysing The Chronicles using a standard hermeneutical approach.⁷⁸ Shippey considers that Christian doctrine is apparent in the narrative, and that textual parallels with the crucifixion are “obvious”. He particularly emphasises the analogy between the death and taunting of Aslan (which recalls Jesus' death); the scene of Aslan's despair (recalling the Garden of Gethsemane); the role of Lucy and Susan (being like the two Marys at the Cross in their anointing of the dead); and finally the breaking of the Stone Table as a sign of Aslan's resurrection (recalling the rolling of the stone from Christ's tomb). This is a perfect example of where one can reach conclusions which seem feasible but which are based on incorrect assumptions. In reversing the hermeneutical approach, we can give Shippey the first of his parallels but the rest are perhaps unwarranted (or at least questionable). The most strikingly incorrect of his parallels is the last, and a typological analysis shows this to be so. The breaking of the stone table—inscribed with the law and the deep magic of Narnia—to signal the fulfilment of the law and the resurrection of Aslan does function as a biblical type. But it is not a type of the stone rolled away to reveal an empty tomb; rather, it is a re-enactment of the tearing of the temple curtain from top to bottom. This curtain had separated all from the ark of the covenant—the law—and its tearing (or splitting) in two symbolised the fulfilment of the law and the function of the resurrected Christ as the great high priest and mediator between God and his people. The stone performs no such function.

Establishing that The Chronicles of Narnia is a typological work rather than an allegorical work changes the focus. It becomes less about illumination and more about description. Similarly, a typological construction fits more neatly into the author's stated purpose of the “baptism of the imagination” as it is less explicit and unequivocal and does not contradict the broader description of the work as supposal. For example, Barfield reports that Lewis, in trying to explain why he was so obsessive about discussing Barfield's philosophical opinions and the “animosity” he harboured with regard to them, told him,

a story about a man born blind, who recovered his sight by an operation. The result was disastrous for the protagonist, because he insisted on trying to see the mysterious thing he had heard people calling “light”; whereas you do not see light itself, but only the object it illuminated.⁷⁹

While Barfield affirms that light is in essence the conveyance—the “by”—it is not visible or able to be conceived in and of itself. That is to say, “Light is what you see by; it is not anything you see, or ever can or will see it”.⁸⁰ Thus he saw in John 1, “the word is light”, an almost incontrovertible contradiction:

this dilemma—of the light being in the world and the world “knowing” it not, because it is within it—had become the very thing which the Baptist pointed to, and to the overcoming of it, the very thing which Christ was born and died to bring about.⁸¹

I wish to make one further point to frame the context, and to contrast Lewis with Barfield. Barfield quotes from a letter Lewis wrote late in his life which said, “Barfield cannot talk on any subject without illuminating it”.⁸² In the context of Barfield's Anthroposophism, Lewis's evangelical faith, and their sustained disputative relationship, the latter quote was not a compliment. Rather, it can be implied that Lewis was contending that Barfield tried to be the light, the agent of the illumination—that which makes visible.⁸³ On the other hand, Lewis was consumed with trying to describe what is illuminated—that is, what can now be seen by, or because of, the “light”. As in all worlds, including Narnia, the “light” is the agent by which we can understand the world; Aslan is the “light”. For Lewis, in our primary world, the “light” is Christ; that which he illuminates is the fundamental truths of the Christian salvation narrative, and consequently God and our relationship with him:

Again Jesus spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”⁸⁴

That same passage goes on to say that the only way we know the Father is through the Son. Lewis, similarly, is not trying to be the agent, by his subcreation of Narnia and Aslan, or the “light” of our world, the “primary world” (as he argues that Barfield attempts to be). But rather he is seeking to describe through subcreation—the artistic expression of image-making—what the “light” of the primary world might be conceived to be like in a secondary world.⁸⁵ Lewis describes that which is “illuminated” on the presumption that secondary world-making, especially in typological terms, will not confer additional characteristics or create “light”.

In a similar way, Lewis's intended approach to reading the Chronicles of Narnia comes about as a result of his Christian worldview. Lewis intended that The Chronicles not be read with Scripture as a lens—that is, as an allegory, read backwards, searching always for its “hidden” meaning—but that they should operate as an incitement, or “a seed” for the reader to go on to seek the real, the antitypes, presented in the series. The greatest of these antitypes, “the real”, are heaven, Jesus and God.

Lewis also saw the real as the biblical Scriptures themselves (from which he constructed parallels and episodic allegories) and the mythological source material (whether it be the classic or pagan myths themselves, or the classic works of literature, like Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy).

Conclusion

Lewis's images have a basis in both Christian biblical and classical mythological sources. Additionally, they also draw upon Platonic and “ordinary moral” sources. Therefore, there is a deeper level, reflected by these images constructed from divergent source material. This deeper level is what his images and his work are pointing the reader towards, and what Lewis consciously intends for the reader to see. Thus Lewis's intertwining of Platonic thought, Christian worldview and his didactic infusion of morality are evidence of his intended hermeneutical approach. These form a framework by which the means, including Lewis's fusion of divergent mythology and biblical sources, are manifested. This deeper level is reflected in the construction of truth, heaven, and redemption, as it results from the incarnation of God and his entrance into our primary world, in Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection.

Ultimately, it must be said that the Christian worldview was such an intrinsic part of Lewis's personality, and consequently his writing, that it would naturally form a part of any secondary world created by him. The extent to which his worldview permeates the series is some measure of the extent to which this worldview permeated Lewis's intellectual as well as his spiritual life. However, it must be emphasised that Lewis's most immediate and conscious concern in writing The Chronicles of Narnia was to write a really good story—to be, first and foremost, entertaining, while simultaneously possessing all those characteristics that great stories had in Lewis's mind—including myth, adventure, and far-off worlds which impact on our own. Debate about the level at which Lewis intended audiences to be cognisant of his Christian apologetics will continue, and may never be adequately concluded. Indeed, the construction of Lewis's theory of apologetics as illustrated by The Chronicles is one area which would benefit from further examination.

Footnotes

¹ Colin Manlove discusses the way myth and the engagement of the literary imagination are fused with Lewis's Christian apologetics. See C.N. Manlove, C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 1-10.

² Clive Staples Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1978, pp. 65-66, 169.

³ Op. cit., p. 94.

⁴ Clive Staples Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), ed. Walter Hooper, London: Collins, 1979, September 5, 1931, pp. 1420, 1427-1938.

⁵ Wayne Martindale, “Myth”, in The C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D Schultz and John G West Jr, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998, p. 288. Martindale, “Myth”, p. 288.

⁶ Quoted at the beginning of Clive Staples Lewis, “Forms of Things Unknown”, in The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper, London: Harper Collins, 1977. The quote is from: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pp. 170-175. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), p. 427.

⁷ Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) , October 18, 1931.

⁸ James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore, New York: Random House Publishing, 1981.

⁹ Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, Hidden Spring, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2003; Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

¹⁰ Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons: The Narnian Chronicles of C.S. Lewis, New York: Collier Books, 1979, p. 64.

¹¹ In a 1999 article Salwa Khoddam considered that such “typological thinking” was a key element in Lewis's view of mythology, and that such use of mythological motifs provided Lewis great creative freedom. By 2001, Khoddam had softened her rhetoric to consider mythology as merely creating analogues, allegorically of biblical imagery in the Chronicles of Narnia. See Salwa Khoddam, “Balder the Beautiful: Aslan's Norse Ancestor in the Chronicles of Narnia”, Mythlore 22, no. 3 (1999), p. 66; “‘Where Sky and Earth Meet’: Christian Iconography in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, Mythlore 23, no. 2 (2001).

¹² Clive Staples Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, London: Oxford University Press, 1956, pp. 124-25.

¹³ Wesley A. Kort, C.S. Lewis Then and Now, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 142. Kort argues that in Lewis's work creation is a more important theological catalyst than is the atonement. This is notwithstanding that the actor and agent of creation is also the actor in the atonement narrative in The Chronicles of Narnia.

¹⁴ References in Genesis to God speaking creation into existence include: Gen 1:1, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24; as well as later references Psalm 33:6 and Heb 11:3 in addition to John 1.

¹⁵ Clive Staples Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, London: Fontana Lions, 1980, pp. 93-99.

¹⁶ Op. cit., p. 99. Just as theologians often replace “Word” with Jesus, so too, for our purposes could we replace “Word” with Aslan. The spirit of this substitution is confirmed in The Magician's Nephew as Digory muses that “When you listened to his song, you heard the things he was making up”.

¹⁷ John P. Dickson, The Genesis of Everything: The Thought World of the Bible's Account of Creation. (Centre for Apologetic Scholarship in Education, 2004 [cited 12 August 2004]); available from http://www.case.edu.au/fileuploads/2TheGenesisofEverything.pdf.

¹⁸ Lewis, The Magician's Nephew. Creation of the stars, planets and constellations, p. 93; Creation of light, p. 94; Creation of the sun, p. 95.

¹⁹ Op. cit., p. 95.

²⁰ Op. cit., p. 24.

²¹ Human beings, “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”, are hierarchically invested with sovereignty over Creation and all in it by the creator, Aslan, explicitly recalling a similar investiture in Genesis 1:26-28. The Magician's Nephew serves to provide a foundation for this hierarchy, which is present in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the loyal Narnian “talking beasts” serve the four Pevensie children without question.

²² Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, p. 105.

²³ Touching noses is a traditional form of greeting among Polynesian cultures.

²⁴ Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, p. 107-8.

²⁵ The Greek pneuma is translated as both spirit and breath.

²⁶ Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, p. 108.

²⁷ Noah's Ark is a standard recognisable children's story motif both within and outside a biblical context. In theological terms, the aftermath of the flood is widely considered a type of creation in that it is a reversal of the creation process before a renewal takes place. The selection of pairs of animals signifies the commencement of the redemptive process. Genesis 7:11ff shows that judgment takes the form of total destruction of the order created by God before a renewal and redemptive process. This is a pattern repeated throughout the Old Testament. See Don A Carson et. al., eds., New Bible Commentary Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1994, p. 66.

²⁸ Frazer, pp. 4, 213.

²⁹ Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, ed., The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable Enderby, Leicester: Blitz Editions, 1990, p. 705.

³⁰ It is interesting to ponder whether this is in some way related to a nickname of Chevalier Charles Edward who was often referred to as “King over the water”. See op. cit., p. 707.

³¹ Frazer, pp. 90-95.

³² Jack Tresidder, Symbols and Meanings, London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2000, p. 58.

³³ Clive Staples Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, The Chronicles of Narnia, London: Harper Collins, 1980, p. 158. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the scene beyond the end of the world where Aslan appears as a lamb is an obvious parallel for the “Lion lies down with the lamb” in Isaiah 11:16. But even more literally specific is John 21:12 which says, “As soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread” which is refigured by the children sharing a meal of fish over coals with the lamb. The dual character of the lion and the lamb is one of the characteristics of the messianic kingdom described in Isaiah as evidence of a return to prelapsarian innocence.

³⁴ Paul talks about this in Hebrews. See also Romans 5:14 which describes Adam as “a type of the one who was to come” (Jesus).

³⁵ Revelation 5:5.

³⁶ 1 Peter 5:8. See also David Lyle Jeffrey, “C.S. Lewis, the Bible and its Literary Critics”, Christianity and Literature 50, no. 1 (2000).

³⁷ Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land; the Theology of C.S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973, p. 46ff.

³⁸ Majorie Lamp. Mead and Lyle W Dorsett, eds., C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children London: Simon & Schuster, 1995, 22nd January 1952, p. 1929.

³⁹ Hosea 5:14.

⁴⁰ This New Testament statement recalls words from the Old Testament books of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.

⁴¹ Tresidder, p. 14.

⁴² Clive Staples Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London: Harper Collins, 2001, p. 99. David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1992, p. 15. Biblical scholars have argued that Isaiah 34:14 refers to Lilith (the screech owl). See Carson et al., eds.

⁴³ 2 Thessalonians 2:9; c.f. Mark 13:5-6, 21-23.

⁴⁴ For general discussion on the concept of worldview, see David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2002; James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

⁴⁵ Lewis also concluded that “the modern who dislikes the Christian fathers would have disliked the pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons”. See Clive Staples Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 47.

⁴⁶ Charles Moorman, The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966, p. 109.

⁴⁷ Kort, p. 87.

⁴⁸ Corbin Scott Carnell, “Allegory”, in The C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D Schultz and John G West Jr, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998, p. 71.

⁴⁹ Op. cit.

⁵⁰ David C Downing, “Jack is Back: The Search for the Historical Lewis”, Christianity Today, Feb 3 1997; Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, London: Souvenir Press, 1988; J.B.S. Haldane, “Auld Hornie, F.R.S.”, in Shadows of the Imagination, ed. Mark Hillegas, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969, pp. 17-18.

⁵¹ David C Downing, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, p. 59.

⁵² Naomi Wood, “Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman”, Children's Literature in Education 32, no. 4 (2001), p. 245.

⁵³ James T Como, “Rhetorica Religii”, Renascence 51, no. 1 (1998), p. 4.

⁵⁴ Green and Hooper, p. 163; Hooper, p. 99.

⁵⁵ Clive Staples Lewis, Letters, ed. W.H. Lewis, London: Fount Paperbacks, 1988, pp. 16-17.

⁵⁶ George Sayer, Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times, 1st ed., San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 187. Tolkien's opinion is somewhat specious given his own eclecticism.

⁵⁷ Colin Duriez, A Field Guide to Narnia, Downers Grove, Illionois: Intervarsity Press, 2004, p. 164.

⁵⁸ David Holbrook, “The Problem of C.S. Lewis”, Children's Literature in Education 10 (1973). Holbrook seems preoccupied with sexual connotations and Freudian themes in the series and denies any influence of Lewis's classical education while claiming that Lewis adheres to an extreme form of Calvinist predestination theology that doesn't concede any notion of free will. The latter contention starkly contradicts scholars like Vaus and Khoddam who both specifically highlight Lewis's tendency toward Arminianism. See Khoddam, “‘Where Sky and Earth Meet’: Christian Iconography in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”.; Will Vaus, Mere Theology, Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

⁵⁹ Ralph C. Wood, “The Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”, Renascence 55, no. 4 (2003), p. 10.

⁶⁰ Gregory Wolfe, “Essential Speech: Language and Myth in the Ransom Trilogy”, in Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991, p. 65.

⁶¹ A.D. Nuttall, “Jack the Giant Killer”, VII (Seven) 5 (1984).

⁶² Lewis was not referring to the Tao as it is known in Chinese philosophy; rather he used it to describe a way of life and a theory of existence. He adopted the term because it was not overtly religious.

⁶³ There are internal contradictions in Lewis's Platonism. Lewis rejected aspects of Platonism including the image of a distant God as well as the disregard for the body and the over-emphasis on a life of redemption both in this life and the next. See Wolfe, p. 75; Wood, “The Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”, p. 6.

⁶⁴ For a discussion of this aspect of Lewis's Platonism, see Wood, “The Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”, pp. 4-5.

⁶⁵ Hooper, p. 123.

⁶⁶ Raymond Carter Sutherland, “Theological Notes on the Origin of Types, ‘Shadows of Things to Be’”, Studies in the Literary Imagination 8, no. 1 (1975), p. 5.

⁶⁷ Lyle H. Smith Jr, “C.S. Lewis and the Making of Metaphor”, in Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991, p. 23.

⁶⁸ Op. cit., p. 27.

⁶⁹ Rodney J. Payton, A Modern Reader's Guide to Dante's Inferno, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992, p. 4.

⁷⁰ Wood, “The Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”, p. 5.

⁷¹ This is also consistent with Colossians 1:18.

⁷² D.A. Hart, Through the Other Door: A New Look at C.S. Lewis, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984, pp. 15-16; Francis J. Morris, “Metaphor & Myth: Shaping Forces in C.S. Lewis's Critical Assessment of Medieval and Renaissance Literature” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977) pp. 26, 43-44, 69; Doris T Myers, C.S. Lewis in Context, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994, p. 28.

⁷³ Vincent Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York: WW. Norton, 2001, pp. 611-625.

⁷⁴ This may have been because attempts at textual commentary and interpretation that express codified meaning are often considered by scholars as marking the text as allegorical; this is the position of Quilligan, though it was earlier stated by Northrop Frye where he explained that true allegories need no commentary or “alllegoresis” because this is inherently suggested by the text. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, New York: Atheneum, 1967, pp. 89-90; Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 29.

⁷⁵ Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p. 149.

⁷⁶ Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor, A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Engaging Culture, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003, p. 103-4.

⁷⁷ Clive Staples Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Glasgow: Fontana Lions, 1980, pp. 85-87.

⁷⁸ T.A. Shippey, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, ed. Frank N Magill, Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Salem Press, 1983, pp. 248-55.

⁷⁹ Owen Barfield, “Introduction”, in Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965, p. xviii. [emphasis in original].

⁸⁰ Op. cit.

⁸¹ Op. cit. [emphasis in original]

⁸² Op. cit., p. xix.

⁸³ See also John 1 where it is made clear that John the Baptist is not the “light”.

⁸⁴ John 8:12

⁸⁵ J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, in Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Martin Hallet and Barbara Karasek, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996, p. 271.

Bibliography

Barfield, Owen. “Introduction”. In Light on C.S. Lewis, edited by Jocelyn Gibb, pp. ix-xxxi. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965.

Brewer, Rev. E. Cobham, ed. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Enderby, Leicester: Blitz Editions, 1990.

Carnell, Corbin Scott. “Allegory”. In The C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey D Schultz and John G West Jr, pp. 70-78. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998.

Carson, Don A, Richard T France, J A Moyter, and G J Wenham, eds. New Bible Commentary. Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1994.

Como, James T. “Rhetorica Religii”. Renascence 51, no. 1 (1998): 3-19.

Detweiler, Craig, and Barry Taylor. A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Engaging Culture. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003.

Dickson, John P. The Genesis of Everything: The Thought World of the Bible's Account of Creation. Centre for Apologetic Scholarship in Education, 2004 [cited 12 August 2004]. Available from http://www.case.edu.au/fileuploads/2TheGenesisofEverything.pdf.

Downing, David C. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

——. “Jack Is Back: The Search for the Historical Lewis”. Christianity Today, Feb 3 1997, 66-67.

Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Hidden Spring, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2003.

——. A Field Guide to Narnia. Downers Grove, Illionois: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore. New York: Random House Publishing, 1981.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Souvenir Press, 1988.

Haldane, J.B.S. “Auld Hornie, F.R.S”. In Shadows of the Imagination, edited by Mark Hillegas, pp. 17-25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Hart, D.A. Through the Other Door: A New Look at C.S. Lewis. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984.

Holbrook, David. “The Problem of C.S. Lewis”. Children's Literature in Education 10 (1973): 3-25.

Hooper, Walter. Past Watchful Dragons: The Narnian Chronicles of C.S. Lewis. New York: Collier Books, 1979.

Jeffrey, David Lyle. “C.S. Lewis, the Bible and its Literary Critics”. Christianity and Literature 50, no. 1 (2000): pp. 95-109.

——, ed. A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1992.

Khoddam, Salwa. “Balder the Beautiful: Aslan's Norse Ancestor in the Chronicles of Narnia”. Mythlore 22, no. 3 (1999): pp. 66-75.

——. “‘Where Sky and Earth Meet’: Christian Iconography in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. Mythlore 23, no. 2 (2001): 36-52.

Kort, Wesley A. C.S. Lewis Then and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Lamp Mead, Majorie, and Lyle W Dorsett, eds. C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children. London: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Leitch, Vincent, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, and Barbara et. al. Johnson, eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: WW. Norton, 2001.

Lewis, Clive Staples. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

——. Selected Literary Essays. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

——. “Forms of Things Unknown”. In The Dark Tower and Other Stories, edited by Walter Hooper, pp. 119-128. London: Harper Collins, 1977.

——. Surprised by Joy. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1978.

——. They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963). Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Collins, 1979.

——. The Horse and His Boy, The Chronicles of Narnia. London: Harper Collins, 1980.

——. The Magician's Nephew. London: Fontana Lions, 1980.

——. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Glasgow: Fontana Lions, 1980.

——. Letters. Edited by W.H Lewis. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1988.

——. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Harper Collins, 2001.

Lindskoog, Kathryn Ann. The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land; the Theology of C.S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973.

Manlove, C. N. C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987.

Martindale, Wayne. “Myth”. In The C.S Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey D Schultz and John G West Jr, pp. 287-288. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998.

Moorman, Charles. The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966.

Morris, Francis J. “Metaphor & Myth: Shaping Forces in C.S. Lewis's Critical Assessment of Medieval and Renaissance Literature”. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977.

Myers, Doris T. C.S. Lewis in Context. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994.

Naugle, David. Worldview: The History of a Concept. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2002.

Nuttall, A.D. “Jack the Giant Killer”. VII (Seven) 5 (1984): pp. 84-99.

Payton, Rodney J. A Modern Reader's Guide to Dante's Inferno. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.

Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

Sayer, George. Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

Shippey, T.A. “The Chronicles of Narnia”. In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, edited by Frank N Magill, 248-255. Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Salem Press, 1983.

Sire, James W. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

Smith Jr, Lyle H. “C.S. Lewis and the Making of Metaphor”. In Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, edited by Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, pp. 11-28. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Sutherland, Raymond Carter. “Theological Notes on the Origin of Types, ‘Shadows of Things to Be’”. Studies in the Literary Imagination 8, no. 1 (1975): pp. 1-13.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories”. In Folk and Fairy Tales, edited by Martin Hallet and Barbara Karasek, pp. 263-92. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996.

Tresidder, Jack. Symbols and Meanings. London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2000.

Vaus, Will. Mere Theology. Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

Wolfe, Gregory. “Essential Speech: Language and Myth in the Ransom Trilogy”. In Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, edited by Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, pp. 58-75. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Wood, Naomi. “Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman”. Children's Literature in Education 32, no. 4 (2001): pp. 237-259.

Wood, Ralph C. “The Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”. Renascence 55, no. 4 (2003): pp. 315-338.

——. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle Earth. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

The “Great Permanent Mainspring”: C.S. Lewis on The Inner Ring

By Andrew Cameron

May I read you a few lines from Lewis's That Hideous Strength?

You would never have guessed from the tone of Studdock's reply what intense pleasure he derived from Curry's use of the pronoun “we”. So very recently he had been an outsider, watching the proceedings of what he then called “Curry and his gang” with awe and with little understanding ... Now he was inside and “Curry and his gang” had become “we” or “the Progressive Element in College”. It had all happened quite suddenly and was still sweet in the mouth.

... He did not like things which reminded him that he had once been not only outside the Progressive Element but even outside the College. He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.¹

No discussion of Lewis can be complete, I believe, without consideration of what he called “one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action”. I raise it at the conference because I don't think it is possible to understand either Lewis the man, nor Lewis the thinker, without reference to it. Likewise, Lewis would probably raise it at this conference because he would contend, I believe, that it is integral to a proper understanding of ourselves. At a conference considering “C.S. Lewis Today”, this mainspring, at least, remains the same as always.

Studdock is the rather servile sociologist in Lewis's third science fiction novel. We meet Studdock as an earnest, insecure young man at the beginning of his career at Bracton College. By the end of the tale, he has been a major player in the near-successful attempt by the National Institute for Controlled Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to mount a scientific and sociological takeover, first, of Britain, and beyond that, the globe. His entanglement erodes his professional and moral standards, it loses him his friends and his ability to think straight, and it almost loses him his wife.² But these things become eroded, not by N.I.C.E's fascism, but by his own enslaved need to be on the “inside”.

“Of all the passions,” says Lewis, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”³ Lewis describes the nature of this Inner Ring in an address of the same name, delivered in 1944 to young graduates who, like Studdock, are also at the beginning of their careers. Although they are exclusively men, the essay clearly also retains deep applicability and relevance for women. It is one of Lewis's most brilliant pieces of prose. The twenty minutes it cost to read it changed my life, and it has done the same for many others. I can hardly do justice to it, and will unashamedly include lengthy quotations from it. I will then go on to put it in the context of Lewis's other writings and his Christian faith.

In a passage from Tolstoi, a captain and a lieutenant talk together in such a way as to leave a general feeling excluded. Although generals are supposed to be at the top of the pecking order, the young lieutenant has discovered that armies have a visible and an invisible order of things.

The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. There are what correspond to passwords, but they too are spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.⁴

But it is no constant thing. You cannot say, at a given moment, who is “in” and who is “out”. Some are obviously in, some are obviously out, and always some are borderline. If you returned six weeks later, you might find it all quite different, even though no one has been formally admitted or expelled. Indeed, people can still think they are in after they have actually been pushed out. And the most amusing sight for those who are really on the inside is when someone who has never been allowed in thinks they are “in”.

Inner Rings are found not just in armies, but everywhere. They do not usually have a name; “the only certain rule is that the insiders and the outsiders call it by different names”. Insiders might just call it “you and Tony and me”. Stable and secure Inner Rings call themselves, “we” or, in an emergency, “all us sensible people”. But outsiders, particularly those who have despaired of getting in, call it “that gang” or “so-and-so and his set”. We could multiply modern examples beyond those Lewis gives: “Gemma's clique”, “the Mafia” or just plain “they”. But tellingly, what do we call it when we are on the way in?

If you are a candidate for admission you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.⁵

If we enter a Ring, we then discover the way each Ring has others within it.

You discovered [an Inner Ring] in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion.⁶

I will return to the public school origins of Lewis's example in a moment. In Studdock's case, the urbane Lord Feverstone, whom he first thought to be a member of Curry's gang, in fact despises Curry and turns out to be the gateway into another Ring further in. Feverstone offers Studdock an introduction to the Deputy Director at N.I.C.E.

“I've read everything you've written since you were in for your fellowship. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one place to another ... prevented him from speaking.⁷

Even though Feverstone lays out the N.I.C.E. agenda at the outset—sterilisation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, re-education⁸—Studdock's eagerness to move inward makes him wilfully blind. As Lewis put it to the King's College students,

the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif, or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do”. And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.⁹

And so a scoundrel Studdock became. I am reminded here of Hannah Arendt's famous experience of the Eichmann trial, which she attended in order to discover where the heart of evil might lie. What would make a man so efficiently able to timetable trains that bore tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths? To her horror and amazement, Eichmann's reasons were as facile as those of Studdock: he wanted to belong, impress his friends and advance in his career. She journeys into the heart of darkness to discover that nothing real is there, just a corrupted preoccupation with the same social impulse that drives us all. That shocking discovery generates her famous concluding description, of “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”.¹⁰

This drive may turn Studdock, and us, into scoundrels, yet even then, it delivers no peace. The siren voices of Inner Rings lure us, but the “onion” effect enslaves us to a cycle of perpetual envy, anxiety, exultation and disappointment. When Studdock is motivated to enter simply for entry's sake, not because of what is there, his membership has no real content.

You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. ... The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic. Once the first novelty is worn off the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. ... You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow's end will still be ahead of you. The old Ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.¹¹

Studdock's dislike and eventual contempt of Curry highlights the way Inner Rings are essentially a negating form of social intercourse. The rainbow's end is always ahead. There is no real belonging here:

You yourself once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. ... [Y]our genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There'd be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence.¹²

It is clear enough that Lewis was profoundly informed by the public school of his own boyhood, which he called “Wyvern”. He went to Wyvern prepared to do a form of worship there.

[T]he Bloods, the adored athletes and prefects, were an embodiment of all worldly pomp, power, and glory. ... [W]hat is a Master compared with a Blood? ... He is a member of the school aristocracy [which] has nothing whatsoever to do with the social position of the boys in the outer world. ... A wise candidate for Bloodery will wear the right clothes, use the right slang, admire the right things, laugh at the right jokes.¹³

In this most painful chapter of his autobiography, Lewis describes the endless machinations of boys positioning themselves against each other, within Houses, and within the wider College, and their willingness to give even their bodies as free labour, or in sexual servitude, to find the good graces of a Blood. Sport was a central component of this system:

[T]he whole structure of Bloodery would collapse if the Bloods played in the spirit of play ... For boys who were not yet Bloods but who had some athletic promise ... went to the playing fields ... racked with dazzling hopes and sickening fears, never in peace of mind till they had won some notice which would set their feet on the first rung of the social ladder. And then not a peace either, for not to advance is to fall back.¹⁴

Spiritually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. ... And from it, at school and in the world, all sorts of meanness flow; the syncophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friends that will not help the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action.¹⁵

If this experience was formative of Lewis's conception of the Inner Ring, it is not hard to spot other experiences that may also have contributed to it. We know that he saw this impulse easily enough in himself: when at Wyvern, he delightedly took the “we” of “Priggishness”, so finding a ground for retaliation against the Bloods and their Prefects.¹⁶ Perhaps uncharitably, A.N. Wilson wonders whether 25 years later, The Inklings may have instantiated an Inner Ring, although he is quick to point to its willingness to include a non-literary general practitioner among its number. Wilson is more disturbed by The Inklings' role, led by Lewis, successfully to elevate the poetically untalented chaplain of Magdalen College, Adam Fox, to Oxford's Chair of Poetry in 1938. Their campaign opposed a more gifted candidate who had the support of Oxford's religiously hostile literary elite. According to Wilson, “By his campaign for Fox, Lewis probably destroyed his own chances of promotion in the University, even though he was very obviously the most distinguished member of the English Faculty”.¹⁷ Did Lewis perhaps look with regret upon a drivenness in himself, acting from a misplaced loyalty to his group, to boost its member to prominence?

Lewis's knowledge of the inevitable British Inner Ringism awaiting the King's London graduates, which is based precisely upon one's educational pedigree, seems to have motivated Lewis to prepare them for an Oxbridge-dominated world (remembering that King's London is well down this educational pecking order). But he knew firsthand, of course, that not even membership of an Oxbridge college would suffice to protect them from the ravages of Inner Ringism: “A distinguished literary atheist to whom I am introduced mutters, looks away, and walks swiftly to the far end of the room.”¹⁸ Even in the heart of Oxford, he was often an outsider looking in, excluded as a Christian from Rings where he might have found professional advancement.

Were Lewis here today, he would rebuke as folly any claim that either Australian egalitarianism, or Christian culture, offered any protection. I am currently an ordained person in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, and a member of the Moore College faculty. For a small handful of people, that is an enviable position. Yet along the way, I have felt, and have perhaps seen in others, both the lust for the next Ring and the onion effect. To be invited into the Ministry Training Scheme (MTS); to be accepted to Moore College; to be accepted as a candidate for ordination by the Diocese; to become a Senior Student there; to land the coveted Department of Evangelism traineeship (a kind of “knighthood” in my tribe); to become ordained; to be approved by the Anglican Church League (a group of church-political activists); the Archdeaconry; the Episcopacy ... all of these offer, in their own way, the lure of the Inner Ring. Indeed, my having named them here as such will probably elicit the same kind of shocked denials that, according to Lewis, typify such Rings.

But even if my current position is enviable to that small handful, they need to know that the onions has endless layers, that the sieve can never be filled with water, that the horizon always recedes. And to the vast majority who have no interest in Sydney Anglicanism, Lewis will note that there are as many forms of this longing as there are groupings of people. Invitations from duchesses might mean nothing to you, but you are devoured by the desire to join some fledgling rock band in the back of some beautiful yet forbidden garage; or to play golf with that Saturday morning crew; or get your child into that private school across town. You long for that sacred garage, or clubhouse, or tea-room, and “the delicious knowledge that we, we four or five huddled here, are the people who know”.¹⁹ Indeed the desire diabolically conceals itself: the company accountant pulls you aside and whispers, “Listen mate, John and I saw at once that we must get you onto our committee.” That would be such a bore. “It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons; but to have them free because you don't matter—that is much worse.“²⁰

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man.²¹

One of the most dominant elements in all our lives is the desire to be inside such local “Rings”, and the terror of being left outside. He suspects that this drive even trumps our desire for sex: “I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For, of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated.”²²

But could it be that our age is unsurprised by this drive to climb the social ladder? Do 21st-century people understand better than Lewis that within every human breast is Nietzsche's will-to-power? Perhaps this age has come to accept it as normal that human affairs are constructed of the ceaseless quest for power over one another. Perhaps it is merely illusory to expect anything else, so that to operate according to deconstructionist suspicion is always and forever the best way to decode human affairs. According to this view, the regular Christian bleat that “there should be no cliques among us” makes as little sense as to command each other to give up our slavish dependence upon oxygen.

It is at this point that Lewis surprises both Christian and Nietzschean.

To the Christian who insists that there should be no “cliques”, Lewis would reply that there is of course a place for friendship, for shared tasks and for circles of common interest. Inner Rings are not evil simply because they exist. Of course, there must be confidential discussions. It is good when people work together and friendships grow. Informal “networks” simply develop while people work on projects or just “hang around” together. There's nothing wrong with that. “Inner Rings” are necessary, and we should not even think of them as a necessary “evil”. They are an unavoidable, innocent feature of life. The structures of Sydney Anglicanism are not, in themselves, an evil.²³ Nor should the little knots of people who like each other be blasted as mere “cliques”.

To the Nietzschean, Lewis insists that the world is not finally an invisible mesh of power-relations: people can be enjoyed in and of themselves. There are any number of things in others that can draw us to them—virtue, kindness, loyalty, humour, learning, wit. Likewise, whatever works of craftsmanship that bring us together can be enjoyed as well. “If, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it”.²⁴ His target is not the Rings themselves. If it were, then all we would be left with is an undifferentiated collective, or thousands of unconnected individuals. He doesn't really like what he takes to be a modern tendency to eradicate solitude and gather people into crowds.²⁵ But although his natural bent was toward solitude, unconnected individualism made no sense to him either. He describes the way he bonded with others, particularly his brother Warnie, in early childhood adversity:

To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which “we two” or “we few” (and in a sense “we happy few”) stand together against something stronger and larger. England's position in 1940 was to me no surprise; it was the sort of thing I always expect. Hence while friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot understand why a man should wish to know more people that he can make real friends of. Hence, too, a very defective perhaps culpably defective, interest in impersonal movements, causes and the like.²⁶

It is not, then, the natural human interest in social relationship that he attacks. If it were, he would be trying to overturn that astonishing declaration of God to Adam—made even when Adam was in harmonious relationship with God himself—that “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Humanity needs human company. But the “great permanent mainspring” to which he refers is a disordering of our proper desire for human relationship, expressed as the longing to have it, the anguish when we are excluded, the dark side of that “delicious sense of secret intimacy” that inclusion gives us,²⁷ and the pleasure of excluding others in their turn.

Lewis's stark, final diagnosis has stayed with me ever since I first read this essay: that “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it”.²⁸ “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”²⁹ The stark humanity of this diagnosis repeats Augustine's pained recollection of himself, made 1500 years earlier: that “there is a ... kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me. Can it ever pass from me in all this life? It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy”.³⁰ Augustine's insight, that “no true joy” can result from abandoning ourselves to this drive, prefigures Lewis's own lifelong preoccupation with the pursuit of joy and with an account of what brings it. The architectonics of Lewis's quest for joy and his theological account of it also structures his account of our other desires, including our desire for social inclusion. I will return to this connection in a moment.

Lewis ends his address with a promise of sorts: that to break this drive will free us to enjoy our work, and will free us to enjoy the friendships that happen upon us.

[Y]ou will ... find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. ... It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.³¹

Yet, although ending upon this tantalising note, Lewis says nothing in the address at King's College about how to conquer this fear and break this quest. All he will say is that “the true road lies in quite another direction”, with a cryptic little mention of the Christian Scriptures.³²

Looking then to his other writings, we find Lewis contemplating an odd paradox: that we cannot find shelter from this storm by joining a herd, whether large or small. He knows that various large groupings are necessary, but they are transient and are limited to short-term goals. He has no confidence that our longing to belong will be met by membership in some human movement or cause.³³ But what about that other kind of shelter that most people in out world turn to in order to find a home—the solace of family? The problem, Lewis says, with the supposed shelter of family is that we pretend that we can rest easy there, and “be ourselves”. Sadly though “there is nowhere this side of heaven where one can safely lay the reins on the horse's neck. It will never be lawful simply to ‘be ourselves’ until ‘ourselves’ have become sons of God. ... [H]ome life has its own rule of courtesy—a code more intimate, more subtle, more sensitive, and, therefore, in some ways more difficult, than that of the outer world.”³⁴ The family home has its pitfalls, and the problem of the Inner Ring can be at its most acute in a family. So if these herds cannot help us, what can?

This conundrum instantiates a persistent theme in Lewis's thought: that all our desires are dim anticipations of what was always finally intended for us by God.³⁵ (If such a conception has Platonic overtones, Lewis was well aware of them, consciously subscribing as he did to a form of philosophical idealism.³⁶) He spoke often of those fleeting, aching moments of joy which keep pointing beyond themselves to something more. Something similar is at work in our unquenchable and unrequited longings to belong. Lewis describes the way that in a universe where we are constantly treated as strangers, “we pine”, “longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm”.³⁷ Whether we realise it or not, our hunger is for “acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things”. With God, he says, “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last”,³⁸ and in the presence God we find the home we have always sought.

Lewis is equally cognisant of the obverse truth: that so also must we reckon with the threat of banishment from God's presence, “left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored”.³⁹ If the longing for the Inner Ring is a harbinger of Heaven, the terror of exclusion is equally a glimpse of Hell.

In the here and now then, the life we are beckoned to is a mode of life well beyond the herd—and well beyond solitude also, even though Lewis speaks very highly of the good of solitude. Lewis speaks here of a mode of life that begins to quell our heavenly longings and our hellish fears—of the offer, open to all, to membership in the Body of Christ. “We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator”.⁴⁰ Lewis rediscovers what Augustine knew of human sociality: that stitched into our very marrow is the ultimate purpose of our existence—to rest in a “perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God”.⁴¹

The Bible is of course replete with this way of seeing, and its entire direction nails Inner Ring-ism at core. When we believe that an Almighty God has made us, and made us well; when we believe that in redeeming us from sin and punishment we find no greater statement of love; when we know that we journey here as “exiles” toward another, final “home”—then are we freed from the emptiness of Inner Ring-ism. Three biblical examples must suffice.

1. I think of a series of confrontations with Ahab, the most powerful tyrant ancient Israel ever saw, where the lone figure of Elijah twice declares, “As the LORD the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand ...” (1 Kings 17:1 & 18:15). Perhaps “before whom I stand” is just a turn of phrase for “whom I serve” (NIV). But it seems to be more: despite Ahab's awful power, Elijah “stands before” the massive bulk of Almighty God. Any temptation to envy the “Inner Ring” of Ahab's court is neutralised by this God's “backing”.
2. NT writers feel the weight of this divine backing this with even greater force when they consider what Christ's death must imply. After Paul's long exploration of it in Romans 1-8, the astounding conclusion:
   

   If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ... neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:31-39)

   
   The force of Paul's argument obviously calls upon us to accept this relationship rather than avoiding it—but having accepted it, then to settle, once and for all, whether the excluding sneers of any Inner Ringer can be any threat whatsoever. For no human condemnation can find any point of attachment to the person whom God has forgiven and approved.
3. Likewise, in the letter to the Colossians, Paul addresses himself to a situation where esoteric insiders leverage the desire for the Inner Ring, torturing vulgar outsiders with tales about how they have seen angels, or sustain strict adherence to food laws, or strictly observe religious festivals. But in a brilliantly unanticipated manoeuvre, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ]” (Col 1:19). “All the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” in this Christ (2:9)—and breathtakingly, Paul can declare to these vulgar Colossian outsiders that in reality, “you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority” (2:10). To be with Christ in this way is to be at the centre; in fact it is the Colossian Inner Ringers who have “lost connection with the Head” (2:19). Their aloofness to Christ puts them, by their own choice, on the outside.

I am reminded of the inaugural address to the Anglican Diocese of Sydney by its new Archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen. He addressed the general perception of some powerful Diocesan “centre”, and spoke to those who perceived themselves as isolated, marginal, and forgotten by it. Jensen disavowed the view that the episcopacy, the denomination's structure, or the Diocesan head office constituted such a “centre”, since, “our true centre is in heaven; we march to the beat of His drum”.⁴² This view of social reality is unusual for an organisation's most senior official, and starkly counterpoints that of Studdock, Feverstone, the deputy director of N.I.C.E., and Tolstoi's general. Christian theology shapes a powerful alternative vision of true “belonging”, and in this respect, Lewis's King's College address is, I believe, a deliberate “appetite-whetter” for Christianity.

Those who won't accept Christianity as the best account of how to break the longing of the Inner Ring could of course try to break it through their “inner strength”, or their “belief in themselves”. With Lewis, I remain pessimistic about my own chances of finding success by that strategy. His comments in another context on a related matter give some clues, I think, about how on a daily basis he went about being released of his chains:

... I am not in despair. At this point I become what some would call very Evangelical; at any rate very un-Pelagian. I do not think any efforts of my own will can end once and for all this craving ... Only God can. I have good faith and hope he will. Of course, I don't mean that I can therefore, as they say, “sit back”. What God does for us, He does in us. The process of doing it will appear to me (and not falsely) to be the daily or hourly repeated excercises of my own will renouncing this attitude, especially each morning, for it grows all over me like a new shell each night. Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal ... We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day.⁴³

Footnotes

¹ C.S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”, in The Cosmic Trilogy, (London: Pan, 1990), 359-60, 361; chapter 1, 2.

² I first discovered Studdock's story in W. Jay Wood, Epistemology: becoming intellectually virtuous (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1998), 22-23. His treatment uses Studdock to illustrate the way emotional investments skew cognitive processing, and suggests that a commitment to “intellectual virtue” is a necessary corrective to this very human trait.

³ C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”, in Essay Collection, ed. Lesley Walmsley, (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 319. The address can also be found in C.S. Lewis, Transposition and other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 55-64; C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (Glasgow: Collins/Fount, 1977), 28-40; and in C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976); online: http://faculty.millikin.edu/~moconner/in150/lewis2.html and http://www.geocities.com/bigcslewisfan (accessed 24th April 2006). Page references in this paper will be to the most recent version, edited by Walmsley.

⁴ Lewis, “Ring”, 314.

⁵ Ibid., 315.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Lewis, “Hideous”, 384.

⁸ Ibid., 387.

⁹ Lewis, “Ring”, 318-19.

¹⁰ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Revised and Enlarged) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977; originally published New York: Viking Press, 1964), 252.

¹¹ Lewis, “Ring”, 319.

¹² Ibid., 319-20.

¹³ C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 95, 96.

¹⁴ Ibid., 112-13.

¹⁵ Ibid., 125.

¹⁶ Ibid., 120-21.

¹⁷ A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990), 158.

¹⁸ C.S. Lewis, “Revival or decay?”, in Undeceptions, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 209.

¹⁹ Lewis, “Ring”, 316.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., 318.

²² Ibid., 316.

²³ “[I]t is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organization should quite coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the highest posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. In that way the second, unwritten system is bound to grow up. It is necessary; and perhaps it is not a necessary evil.” (Ibid.). Of course I realise that Lewis spoke here of Anglicanism in general, hardly that of Sydney; of particular Sydney “deadweights”, the most salient example is myself every day before midday. Yet Feverstone's comment to Studdock about N.I.C.E. does somehow remind me of my own situation: “Isn't it a little naïve to suppose that being in on a thing involves any distinct knowledge of its official programme?” (Lewis, “Hideous”, 381-82.)

²⁴ Lewis, “Ring”, 319.

²⁵ C.S. Lewis, “Membership”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 159, 163.

²⁶ Lewis, Surprised, 35.

²⁷ Lewis, “Ring”, 317.

²⁸ Ibid., 320.

²⁹ Ibid., 319.

³⁰ Augustine, Confessions tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics edition, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 244 (X.36).

³¹ Lewis, “Ring”, 320.

³² Ibid.

³³ Lewis, “Membership”, 159, 163.

³⁴ C.S. Lewis, “The Sermon and the Lunch”, in Undeceptions, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 236-37.

³⁵ “I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to himself.” Lewis, Surprised, 88. ”Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” [C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 16.]

³⁶ Lewis, Surprised, 258-59.

³⁷ Lewis, “Glory”, 40.

³⁸ Ibid., 41.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Lewis, “Membership”, 166.

⁴¹ Or near equivalent—twice in De civ. Dei XIX.13 and once in XIX.17. (Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans tr. R.W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)) Cf. Oliver M.T. O“Donovan, ”Augustinian Ethics,“ in A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, eds James F. Childress and John Macquarrie, (London: SCM, 1986); and Oliver M.T. O”Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 25.

⁴² Peter F. Jensen, “Presidential Address”, in Yearbook of the Diocese of Sydney, (Sydney: St Andrews House, 2002), 383 (delivered 26th October 2001).

⁴³ C.S. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 191-92.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Revised and Enlarged). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Originally published New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Augustine. The City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

——. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin Classics edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

Jensen, Peter F. “Presidential Address.” In Yearbook of the Diocese of Sydney, 370-89. Sydney: St Andrews House, 2002.

Lewis, C.S. “The Inner Ring.” In Essay Collection, edited by Lesley Walmsley, 313-320. London: HarperCollins, 2000.

——. “The Inner Ring.” In The Weight of Glory, edited by Walter Hooper, 141-157. London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976. Online: http://faculty.milli