“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” So says Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle towards the end of CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair, in his brave speech resisting the enchantment of the evil witch known as the Lady of the Green Kirtle.
The witch is the ruler of Underland, a grim and gloomy place several miles below the ground. No natural light or warmth can penetrate to Underland; trees and flowers and fresh air are unknown. She uses a strange magic fire in an attempt to make the story’s heroes forget the outside world, and to accept the dark and misery of her realm as the sum total of existence. In a well-crafted climax, she has almost succeeded, when the plain-speaking Puddleglum stamps out the fire and breaks the spell by stating his belief in the brighter world above.
Ours is an age of distraction and plenty, more than any other previous era.
The Narnia books are famously allegorical, and in this case Lewis’s meaning is unmistakable: as Christians we must keep our eyes fixed on heaven, against the pressures and distractions of this world, which constantly tempt us to believe that the only real things are those which we can see and touch in our normal, everyday existence. In his ingenious 1942 book The Screwtape Letters, Lewis explored these pressures and distractions in some depth, noting that humans “find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.” In chapter one of that same book, Lewis portrays a junior devil using the blandishments of normality to distract a man from divine truth: “I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an inalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” [Christianity] just couldn’t be true.”
In certain ways, Lewis was heavily influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato, who theorised a “realm of the forms” occupied by perfect and eternal versions of the objects and ideas that we experience imperfectly in the physical world. In many of his writings, Lewis emphasised the Christians aspects of this idea. He argued for a higher and purer realm of existence – heaven and God and the angels, which we can glimpse and understand via things in the normal world, but which can also be obscured by everyday material concerns and ideologies.
He [CS Lewis] argued for a higher and purer realm of existence – heaven and God and the angels, which we can glimpse and understand via things in the normal world, but which can also be obscured by everyday material concerns and ideologies.
Lewis challenged non-believers to reflect on how their experiences of beauty and morality and joy, and their deep-seated intuitions about such things, pointed beyond this world to another. This is a key theme in books such as Miracles (1947) and Mere Christianity (1952).
For those who were already believers, Lewis emphasised the vital importance of keeping our eyes on the higher, purer prize. This preoccupation is noticeable in Faith, Christianity and the Church (a posthumous essay collection published in 2000). With this emphasis, he was picking up a theme that had featured in Jesus’s preachings – notably in the parable of the sower, where Christ warns against being distracted by worldly concerns: “Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.” Saint Paul also discussed the need to persevere in Hebrews. “Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection…Think of the way he persevered…and then you will not lose heart and come to grief.”
Ours is an age of distraction and plenty, more than any other previous era. This is a huge challenge for Christians, because material security and endless choices and alternatives can make the spiritual truths and promises of the faith seem distant and ephemeral. The American evangelist Bishop Robert Barron has talked about “the buffered self”. By this he means the way in which – unlike our ancestors – modern people are able to (at least temporarily) insulate themselves from concerns about death and morality and human existence.
He is right, I think, that perhaps the single greatest difficulty for evangelisation is to break through this “buffered self”, to undo the enchantments of the fallen world, and to help people understand that there is another reality, that this vale of tears is not all there is. To return to Lewis for a moment, I suppose we are all in a kind of Underland, seeing through a glass darkly; but it is not true that heaven and beauty and eternity are mere fairy tales based on wishful thinking.
The challenge for Catholics is to embody this truth in our everyday lives.
Niall Gooch is a regular contributor to Chapter House. He also writes for UnHerd.
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