Word Pictures for the Word Made Flesh

by David C. Downing
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” That concise statement by the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 5:19a) has kept theologians busy for nearly two thousand years, trying to understand what exactly is being affirmed in the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement.

C. S. Lewis never lost his sense of wonder about either one of these central Christian teachings. Referring to the Incarnation as “The Grand Miracle,” Lewis said he could not conceive how “eternal self-existent Spirit” could be combined with “a natural human organism” so as to make one person. He added, though, that every human embodies the same enigma to a lesser degree, an immortal spirit inhabiting a mortal body (Miracles, chap. 14).

Lewis was equally amazed by the doctrine of the Atonement, saying only that “the central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.” He adds that one not need adopt any one theory of the Atonement, or to understand it fully, in order to benefit from the work of the cross. In the same way, a starving person can be saved by a timely meal, without knowing anything at all about the principles of nutrition (Mere Christianity, bk. 2, chap. 4.)

When trying to explain the deepest mysteries of Christian faith, Lewis often found it helpful to use analogies and metaphors instead of theological formulations. He invited his readers to use their imaginations to try and comprehend elusive doctrines that may well have baffled their intellects. Many of Lewis’s most memorable word-pictures appear in passages where he is trying to help readers grasp the significance of the crucial, but mystical, doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement.

The very idea that that an infinite, eternal God could descend into frail human flesh was an idea that astonished Lewis and one he often meditated upon. He remarked in Mere Christianity that this was even more a miracle than if a human should descend into the form of a slug (bk. 4, chap 4.) The cycle of descent and re-ascent, God become human in order that humans might become the children of God, was one that Lewis returned to often in his imagination. In one of his most extended comparisons, Lewis compares Christ to a pearl-diver, a passage so elaborate that it borders on allegory:

"One may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanishing rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks the surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color too" (Miracles, chap. 14).

In a similar vein, Lewis visualizes the Incarnate Infinite as a strong man called upon to lift a great burden. First he must stoop down very low, almost disappearing under the load, until at last he finds his grip and rises up again, straightening his back and balancing the whole weight upon his shoulders in order to carry it (Miracles, chap. 14).

Lewis offered equally evocative metaphors in his discussions of the Atonement. In one passage, he visualizes Christ, the God-Man, as a rescuer with one foot firmly planted on the riverbank, the other foot in the rushing water. It is this very stance that allows him to save the drowning, to snatch them out of the rapid current while remaining firmly anchored himself (Mere Christianity, bk. 2, chap. 4). In a more mystical vein, Lewis describes God as an infinite ocean of light, able to absorb all shadows: “The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of the Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?” (Letters to Malcolm, chap. 8).

Lewis also liked to describe key Christian doctrines as incomprehensibles which make everything else comprehensible. In one of his most famous analogies, Lewis said that “We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else” (Miracles, chap. 14). Lewis also compared the Incarnation to the missing chapter of a novel that gives meaning to the whole rest of the story. None of the other episodes quite make sense, or fit together into a whole, until this pivotal missing chapter has been added to the narrative (Miracles, chap. 14).

Finally, Lewis resorts to metaphors in trying to explain how God’s descent and his reconciling work have forever changed the human condition. Lewis says that we are like human statues in a sculpture’s studio waiting for that breath that will turn us into living beings. We have already been given physical life, bios, which is always subject to eventual decay and death. But God came down from heaven to bring Zoe, the spiritual life that abides forever (Mere Christianity, bk. 4, chap.1).

In an analogy that would have certainly hit close to home with Lewis’s original audience during World War Two, he compares spiritual warfare to the battle that was then raging all over the globe. Lewis explained that we are like residents of enemy-occupied territory. Our rightful ruler has landed once, and founded a secret society to help prepare for his eventual landing in force. One day the time will come for a full-scale invasion in which the tyrant will be overthrown.

To those skeptics who wonder if that day will ever come, Lewis speculated the great invasion is being postponed to give more people a chance to choose the right side before it is too late. No one would be too impressed with someone who decided to join the freedom fighters on the day the Allies liberated Paris. And the time for choosing sides will be over when Christ returns a second time. For that day will be the end of the world as we know it (Mere Christianity, bk 2, chap. 5).

Many articles and books have been written about the theological richness of Lewis’s imaginative writings, especially the Ransom trilogy and the Narnia Chronicles. But one can’t help being impressed by the opposite side of the coin, the way in which Lewis’s theological works are so thoroughly infused with the glow of his spiritual imagination.

---------------------------------

David C. Downing is the R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has written numerous articles and reviews on C. S. Lewis, as well as four books: Planets in Peril (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), a critical study of the Ransom trilogy; The Most Reluctant Convert (InterVarsity, 2002), an examination of Lewis’s journey to faith; Into the Wardrobe (Jossey-Bass, 2005), an in-depth overview of the Narnia Chronicles; Into the Region of Awe (InterVarsity, 2005), a study of how Lewis’s wide reading in Christian mysticism enhanced his own faith and enriched his imaginative writings.

---------------------------------

Downing serves as a consulting editor on Lewis for Christian Scholars Review, Christianity and Literature, and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. His most recent book is A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy (Cumberland Press, 2007). His college website may be found at http://users.etown.edu/d/downindc/)

READ MORE

Finding Neverland

by Bruce L. Edwards
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." – C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” On Other Worlds (Harcourt, 1966), 34.

We all have our Neverlands. Literary spaces of reverie. Places of refuge. Places of recovery. For C. S. Lewis, that “Neverland” was to be found especially in the genre of the fairy tale, an affection and an admiration he shared as a guilty pleasure with his close friend and ally, J. R. R. Tolkien, architect of Middle-earth. As Lewis famously said to Tolkien at one point early in their friendship, "Tollers, people don't write the books we want, so we have to do it for ourselves."

What kind of books did Lewis and Tolkien want? Simply put: stories of derring-do, daunting quests, compelling safaris of the spirit, set in landscapes populated by fantastic characters and “talking beasts” that intrigue and delight through repeated encounters. Escapist? Not so, said Lewis and Tolkien. Neverlands not only invite their readers to renew a sense of child-like adventure, they also route them to a central theme that challenges the accepted wisdom of the present age, helping them put this world in perspective as well. Fairy tales push us through a literary portal into a universe more grand, more romantic. More enrapturing than our own, a place where one may witness justice reigning, and the good, the true, and the beautiful honored and celebrated.

For both Lewis and Tolkien the imagination tapped by such visits brings us back in touch with the primary means by which we come to make sense of what we euphemistically call the “real world” in the first place. Reason may give us the “facts,” but it is the imagination that allows to put such facts in meaningful order. As Lewis viewed it, the imagination provides humankind the rationale for trusting reason in the first place, uncovering the gestalt of life’s meaning—its enchanted core.

In the Narnian Chronicles, as elsewhere, Lewis rewards the child’s and entreats the adult’s imagination with a re-enchantment he found in the fairy tales he was forced to read “in secret,” but now exhorts us to read “openly.” What do I mean by “re-enchantment”? Simply put, to re-enchant is to un-inhibit the seeker who wishes to embrace the spell cast at the beginning of this cosmos, to see it as this world once was, and as it might well still become.

The “original spell,” of course, is our creation in the image of God, who has spoken or “spelled” our world into existence by His mighty Word. The Gospel is literally and decidedly a “Good-Spell,” a “good word,” which can tell us our true story and heal us when we believe it. In reading Narnia we may have our vision corrected, our line of sight cleared; our hearts restored as a faculty for seeing transcendently. The imagination, unfettered, serves as a counterpart of and, though often discredited, as a vital complement to Reason.

Inside Neverland, we begin to recognize that truth comes to us not only through words and propositions, but also through what is mediated beyond the words, through images and patterns, through “groanings too deep to be uttered.” There are some things—maybe most things—that are too momentous and too wonderful to be grasped by logic and reason alone, something radical and demanding that we cannot apprehend through the intellect alone.

In reflecting on his childhood experience of fairy tales and his early struggle with religious experience, Lewis explains something of aesthetic inspiration that motivated his Narnian tales:

"I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm... . But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?" (“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Of Other Worlds, [Harcourt, 1966], 37)

Lewis and Tolkien both were convinced that newly constructed Neverlands, set in Cair Paravel or Middle-earth, could serve as “alternate histories,” winsome, redemptive tales that would point readers inauspiciously toward the renewed pursuit of a promised destiny. Histories alternative to what? Simply put, the tendentious and debilitating histories that disenchant the spirit, evincing a naturalism that reduces men, women, children--even whole civilizations--to instincts, impulses, genetics, environments. Written for recovering moderns and postmoderns, Lewis’s narratives are designed to equip them “with ears to hear, and eyes to see,” to assist them in refuting the notion that we are “cosmic accidents,” but rather immortals whose dreams and visions point them to longings they cannot account for in mere “scientific” terms.

Lewis is not a tame writer, and he recognized that it is part of our deepest desire to know there is a homeland where we truly belong, a Neverland that calls to us boldly in the midst of confusion and cacophony, and offers us confident citizenship. That calling has seldom been expressed better than in this passage from Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same" (Macmillan, 1960, 120).

From Hobbiton to Narnia, from Perelandra to Cair Paravel, and on to Mordor and Malacandra, Lewis and Tolkien invite us to re-enchant the cosmos, keeping alive the promise and animating the search for the world beyond the world. Long before Willy Wonka or Harry Potter appeared on the scene, they were establishing an outpost on the edge of doubt, opening the wardrobe door to help us realize the object of our longing, and the true end of our journey.

---------------------------------

Bruce L. Edwards is Professor of English and Africana Studies, and Associate Vice Provost for Academic Technology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where has he been a faculty member and administrator since 1981. He has served as a C. S. Lewis Foundation Fellow at the Kilns in Oxford, England; a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999-2000); a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC (1989-90); and as the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988). Bruce and his wife, Joan, live in the mighty metropolis of Bowling Green, Ohio, and have four grown children, ranging in age from 24 to 34.

His C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (4 volume encyclopedia) was published by Praeger Press in 2007. Bruce’s other books on Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia include: Not a Tame Lion (2005) and Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (1988) and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer (1988). He has since 1995 maintained a popular web site on the life and works of C. S. Lewis at www.cslewisblog.com.

READ MORE