C. S. Lewis and Myth 2020

As I am beginning to read Lewis’s Till We Have Faces , I found the description of Psyche and her beauty in the second chapter particularly striking.  The text reads: “As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be” (22).  The idea that Psyche is a sort of ideal woman reminded me of Plato’s ideal forms that we discussed at the beginning of the semester with his Simile of the Divided Line.  According to this simile, shadows have a little bit of truth because they participate in their corresponding bodies, which have a little more truth than the shadows because they participate in the concepts, which have a little more truth than the bodies because they participate in the forms, which have more truth than the concepts because they participate in the Good, which is what is ultimately real.  According to this model, as we discussed in class, the forms are the ideal or prototypical for...

 Throughout C.S. Lewis' works, there are a number of moments in which the story is building up to a great clash between the forces of good and evil. Yet when the conflict actually occurs, it is started and finished in only a few sentences. If you blinked you might miss it. I first noticed this in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,  but it is equally present in That Hideous Strength, and other books. I will be looking at  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in this post.  Throughout  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,  the Witch seems to be an almost indomitable foe. The book all leads up to the great battle in which she is defeated. Yet we hardly even catch a glimpse of the battle. Most of what we learn from the battle is explained to the reader through the reflection of characters after the battle is over and the tension is diffused. Rather than let the tension build up to a truly climactic moment in battle, we are given five sentences in which A...

When we watched Shadowlands in class, I was struck by the theme of the relationship between joy and suffering. For Lewis (at least as he was portrayed in the film), the ending of his time with Joy Davidman and the suffering it caused was a part of the joy.  For me this called to mind several ideas from other things we’ve read and discussed in class, including Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Chesterton’s “The Ethics of Elfland.”  Additionally, Lewis’s development of this idea of related suffering and joy demonstrates his model of understanding proposed in “Myth Became Fact.” The scene from the Space Trilogy that Shadowlands initially called to mind for me is found in Out of the Silent Planet when Hyoi explains to Ransom the hross approach to love (83-84).   For the hross , the act of love takes up his whole life and is “full grown only when it is remembered” (84).  This joy and cherishing of a once-experienced love is reminiscent of Chesterton’s proclamation that, f...

 Yuval Noah Harari is the author of the book Sapiens: A Brief History of  Humankind. Seeing that this book is a history of humankind it covers many things, but one chapter stood out in its relation to this class:   The Law of Religion. In this chapter Harari asserts that religion played a major role in the unification of Humankind because it was a common myth around which humans could create a common system of beliefs. He likens the myth of religion to the myth of capitalism through an analogy. The analogy asserts that money would have no value unless every human subscribed to the idea that the pieces of paper or coins were worth somethings, the laws of religion work the same way. Harari discusses religion as a type of commerce in ideas and beliefs with values and ethics being the currency. What he misses in his discussion is the idea that there are truths in myths. It was Lewis' discussion in Myth Became Fact   that brought to light possible holes in Harar...

     The moment in Perelandra when Ransom describes the experience of trying the fruit was connected in class to Apophatic Theology. This brought to mind the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God which I was covering in a different class at the time. It made me wonder if just as Ransom could not describe the fruit and he could only describe what it was not like, Apophatic Theology works the same way with describing what God is not then this contradicts the Ontological Argument for God. The Ontological argument, as I have come to understand it, is that God's existence in inherent in being so if man can conceive of that than which nothing greater can be conceived than that, God, must exist. If it is taken that this is true than what is being conceived can be likened to the concept of form in Plato's Theory of Forms. Forms are lowered to being expressed through concepts because it is impossible to truly describe form. But, if you cannot even describe the concept, whi...

       In our class discussion of Out of the Silent Planet we discussed a line which had stood out to me when I had read the book on my own: "he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology".  This quote stood out to me because it seemed obviously connected to our idea of Myths contains Truths. The old astrologists were pointing out some of the same simple truths that current scientists also point out: there are stars in the sky, they move and dance around each other, and the universe is much bigger than humans. Now, however, science has taken it much further than the astrologists and perhaps has tainted the cosmos by asserting that it can be defined by laws of science. This brought me back to Gadamer, I think, who asserted that scientific facts are just observations of happenings that keep happening, not actual facts. This is what Lewis touched on in this quote. Though science has defined laws of the universe that does not means that th...

  Since studying Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in another class, I have been thinking about the art form of pastiche that he describes.  According to Jameson, pastiche is a kind of imitation similar but not exactly like parody  that has become a “well-nigh universal practice” (573).  This form involves “the random cannibalization of all the  styles of the past,” and when we discussed it in class, our professor described the roots of the word “pastiche” itself as coming from the French for “paste” because it takes parts from various styles and forms and pastes them together into something new (Jameson 574; Rodden). The most obvious application this reading from Jameson had to this class was how we’ve discussed Lewis’s mixing of various myths; however, I found several other aspects interesting to apply to our course material as well.  In his description of pastiche, Jameson describes it as “speech in a dead language” (573).  For me,...

 A couple of weeks prior my class and I had been tasked with adding onto the story of the "Chronicles of Narnia" by creating a story set in its universe. After writing our stories we each presented our creations to our classmates and got their advice and compliments on the story. While the concept of creating our own fanfiction was not a new one to me, getting to hear so many perspectives and new takes on small threads in the story was really enjoyable. It brought me back to when I was younger and I was reading more fanfiction than actual new books or stories. I had been so enamored back then and so enchanted by a couple of worlds that I craved to explore them more. Fanfiction was how I sated that craving, and now I cannot help but be brought back into the world of C.S. Lewis a bit more by hearing everyone else's stories. Yet each new story helped me think about the world in a slightly new way. All of it really got my mind working, and I could not help but head home from ...

 In Tolkien's On Fairy-Stories   he mentions the required moral element in Fairy-Stories particularly in association with Beast Fables. Rereading this section after reading The Chronicles of Narnia the story of Eustace's jaunt as a dragon came to mind. In Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Eustace, a nasty little bugger (as the English might say), was humbled and transformed into a kinder person after being trapped in the form of a Dragon. The experience of being a dragon was so transformative because he had to experience intense loneliness and shame in his form. These feelings give him a sort of crash course in valuing people and caring for them.           Lewis' story of Eustace the dragon falls in line with Tolkien's explanation of Beast Fables. Specifically, the line of Tolkien's which argues that the works of Beast Fables partly derive "from the desire of men to hold communion with other living things". This is very appropriate t...

 "There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away. Of this seriousness the medieval Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an admirable example"                                     - Tolkien "On Fairy Stories" On rereading Tolkien's On Fairy Stories I came across this excerpt which struck me because I am currently taking a class on Arthurian Legends. In the way that Philosophy seems to work, it presented itself, once again, somewhere where I hadn't expected it to be. I understand Tolkien's reference as I have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and it is true that much is made fun of in that story, but the magic isn't. Upon reflection, I've found that in all of the Arthurian texts I have read the magic is n...

      As a child I was aware of the Narnia series, just as I was aware of Harry Potter. For the series never really fell into my interest even as I saw commercial after commercial advertising the movie that was to come out. At the time I was far too enraptured in another world, the world of video games, to go out and explore it. As a new adult my first time stepping into the world of Narnia was certainly interesting, I found myself able to fall into it quite comfortably and it only took a couple nights to chew through the first book in the series. Though later I would find out that what was considered the first book in the series chronologically may not actually be the first book. Where I read "The Magician's Nephew" many other would say I should have read "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" first. While I am aware that in the series it may be possible to start with any book and have a good experience, I always tend to read in whatever order is intended. As wi...

 In this week's class we finished the biographical film on C.S. Lewis. An important quote that was discussed in class was from one of Lewis' students whose father said "We read to know we are not alone".  While this had significance for the plot of the film, it also has significance in the analysis of Lewis' writings, especially his stories in The Chronicles of Narnia .      In the timeline of the movie, this quote struck Lewis after he had written The Chronicles of Narnia so it is important to recognize that it is not the significance of the quote as an inspiration to Lewis that seemed significant to me. Rather, what stood out was that it harkened back to Walter Fisher's essay Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument , specifically his mention of humans being a species that relies on storytelling as a primary mode of communicating information. The first connection made between this concept of homo narrans and Lewis' ...

     This week in class, we revisited the idea from Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact” that we cannot know something at the same time as we are experiencing it (65).  During class, we discussed the distinction between an experience, which occurs within the self, and an encounter, which occurs amongst others, and how once we thematize something into knowledge, we don’t hold it as an experience or an encounter anymore.        Looking back, I think this connects to a moment at the very end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that I never quite understood.  In the closing pages of the book, the Professor gives the children some advice after they tell him about how they lost his coats in Narnia, and although it made sense to me why he would tell them not go around telling other people about their adventures in another world, there is another aspect of his advice that is puzzling (Lewis, Lion, Witch, Wardrobe 187-188).  The Professor also s...