C. S. Lewis & Christological Prefigurement
Brazier, P. H. "C. S. Lewis & Christological Prefigurement." The Heythrop Journal. 48.5 (2007): 742-775. Print.
Paul Brazier writes about how Lewis's Christian beliefs inflitrate The Chronicles of Narnia in his article "C. S. Lewis & Christological Prefigurement". In this article, Brazier focuses heavily on Lewis's views of Christianity, but in section II, Christ as the Light of the World in Reality and in Mythopoeic Intimations, he centers on Lewis's Christian allegory that appears in The Chronicles of Narnia, and especially on the character of Aslan, who plays the role of supreme deity in these works. Through the character of Aslan, who encounters a death and resurrection similar to that of Christ, Lewis shows readers a hypothetical scenario of what Christ may be like in a more modern, yet fantastical world. He concludes that the mythological Christian symbolism may lead some to a deeper faith.
C. S. Lewis & Christological Prefigurement
By P. H. Brazier
I. A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF LEWIS' PROPOSITION THAT THE INCARNATION-RESURRECTION NARRATIVE IS BOTH MYTH AND HISTORY
On the evening of his conversion from Theism to Christianity C. S. Lewis is recorded as having described myths as beautiful and moving, though they were ‘… lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver …’1 His understanding of myth was to change during his life as a result of his adoption and championing through apologetics of an orthodox Christian faith centred as it is on the death and resurrection of God incarnate. Myth was, and continued to be, very important to him – primarily the Northern European myths, closely followed by Hinduism and Greek mythology. Professionally his work was in Mediæval and Renaissance literature; he therefore had a very good understanding of myth, story, and the effect such narratives have on us.2 The aim of this paper is broadly two-fold: a critical evaluation of Lewis' identification of a mythopoeic, as he termed it, element in the incarnation-resurrection narrative, and a systematic examination of the relationship between myth and event in Lewis' Christology and Pneumatology. Lewis' theories were derived from his reading of religious myths from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition: what he termed pagan myths, though it is important to remember that the term pagan is used here with no derogatory intent, nor as a term of abuse. Lewis used the term simply to refer to those peoples and cultures outside of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and revelation (Oriental, Middle Eastern, Indian and European tribes and nations, particularly in the ancient world). Initially I shall look at some definitions of myth, and then proceed to examine what Lewis actually wrote. Defining what is meant by the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative will lead us to appraise examples of prefigurement. Lewis' position will then be examined in the light of his views on natural theology (particularly noting the influence of Plato and Augustine) and his theories about imagination and inspiration, illumination and revelation (essentially from the influence of the poet, philosopher, and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge). At the heart of Lewis' understanding of story – whether real or fictitious – is a concept he adopted from the Roman Catholic scholar J. R. R. Tolkien: mythopoeia. The noun mythopoeia – the creating of myths – was developed from the late nineteenth-century by many English-speaking writers; however, it is in the work of Tolkien (both as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and his mythological work in scripting the Middle Earth sagas including The Lord of the Rings) that it is imbued with theological meaning and significance, relating to divinely gifted, prevenient inspiration.3
MythStephen Evans in his work on Christology4 argues for the historicity of the gospel account as against modern scholarship that calls into question the reliability of the church's version of the story of Jesus. Evans argues for the historical basis of Christianity, that the religious significance of this story cannot be adequately captured by the category of non-historical myth. Like many others who assert an orthodox Trinitarian account, he acknowledges that myth has been used as a means of dealing with the particular genre of the Gospels by a number of theologians. To this end he briefly examines C. S. Lewis' proposition that the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative is both myth and history: a myth which has been historically enacted without ceasing to be a myth. Before turning to C. S. Lewis in chapter three of his work, Evans briefly sets out four definitions of myth which are pertinent to this investigation:5 first, myths as pre-scientific explanations, bad explanations of phenomena in the natural world (fanciful stories to explain rainfall, the movement of the sun, etc); second, the sociological function (to reinforce the identity of a group of people and explain cohesive ritual practices); third, myths as embodying psychological truth, which may be crucial to the value of the myth (pre-scientific explanations are seen as wrong and irrelevant, but psychological truths touch a deeper level of humanity and may give insights that cannot be obtained through other means, for example, the story of Oedipus); four, such stories express in a dramatic fashion some abstract metaphysical truth, though historically false. Evans explains that these four definitions are not mutually exclusive; someone who holds that a particular myth expresses metaphysical or psychological truth may also claim it to be a pre-scientific explanation for some phenomenon. He quotes the work of Joseph Campbell as an appreciation that reflects a Jungian view, that myths can embody a psychological function as well as a metaphysical one.6 The term myth is therefore a rich depository of meanings and nuances – quite different from the way some contemporary theologians have used the term. In the twentieth century, myth was often simplistically taken to mean that something is fiction, a story with no basis in real events: a misconception, a misrepresentation of the truth. For example, John Hick in the preface to The Myth of God Incarnate asserts that the conception of Jesus ‘… as God incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity living a human life, is a mythological or poetic way of expressing his significance for us’.7 This represents a uniquely modern, enlightenment approach to Christology based upon a narrow definition of myth. Such definitions do not take into account the full richness of myth – especially from a metaphysical perspective. The term myth was essentially introduced into theology in the nineteenth century.8 By contrast Lewis is often critical of progressive Protestant theologians for failing to understand the genre of myth from a literary perspective. It must be remembered that Lewis knew story and knew myth – after a lifetime lecturing on the subject of literature at Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Mediæval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. In Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism9 he criticises Bultmann, Lock and Vidler for not understanding literary genre when they attempt to approach the Gospels as non-historical records and classify them according to literary genre. He is particularly scathing of Lock's assertion that John's Gospel is a spiritual romance.10
Lewis on MythLewis proposes a definition of myth in an essay on literary criticism published in 1961.11 He notes that there is a particular kind of story which has a value in itself – a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work. Lewis quotes the story of Orpheus in a summary of a hundred words, showing how it still has extraordinary power: ‘it strikes and strikes deep’.12 Lewis then lays out six characteristics of myth: i) they are extra literary, ii) the story does not depend upon the usual literary attractions such as suspense or surprise – there is a sense of inevitability about mythical stories; iii) human sympathy is at a minimum, the characters are like shapes moving in another world – they have a profound relevance to our lives, but we do not necessarily identify with them, ‘The story of Orpheus makes us sad; but we are sorry for all men rather than sympathetic with him’; iv) myth is always fantastic – it deals with ‘impossibilities and preternaturals’; v) the experience of listening to or reading a myth is always grave; vi) importantly we find this experience to be awe-inspiring: ‘… we feel it to be numinous; it is as if something of great moment has been communicated to us’. Therefore to Lewis, a myth is more than just a fanciful story that did not happen; however, a myth which is also an account of an historical event is something other.13
Myth Became RealityAs an eighteen year old apostate and atheistic student Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves that ‘All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man's own invention – Christ as much as Loki’.14 He proceeded to explain the origin of such ‘mythologies’, particularly Christianity – basically expounding a view culled from the work of the religionist Victorian anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. Frazer's massive twelve-volume work, The Golden Bough,15 was the product of an academic life spent travelling the world recording the religious-folk mythology of primitive tribes: he spent decades observing various customs, rituals, beliefs and myths from the standpoint of the emerging discipline of social anthropology. Frazer's position is Feuerbachian and to a degree Freudian: religion is a human projection, a response to a hostile world; Frazer is also a high-Victorian projecting cultural and racial superiority as he travelled the British Empire. Lewis' intellectual starting point is therefore that all religion is a human product, constructed from observing and relating to this hostile and unsympathetic world. At this time Lewis would have subscribed to a view of natural theology similar to that of Feuerbach that God exists only as a psychological projection and hence all theology is a human product. Lewis was therefore dismissive of natural theology because there is no God; further that all our supposed knowledge of God is merely an enlargement of ideas about human experience. As a young scholar Lewis would have concurred with Feuerbach when the latter wrote ‘… the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology – the knowledge of God is nothing else than the knowledge of man’.16 Feuerbach was a profound influence on Frazer; Frazer likewise on Lewis' intellectual development. Lewis came to adopt an opposite view of natural theology in his thirties after his conversion initially to Theism and then to Christianity. Shortly after his conversion, in 1931, he again wrote to Arthur Greeves commenting about how profound and suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp the myths of dying and reviving gods were, and how the story of Christ was simply a true myth –‘… a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened … it is God's myth where the others are men's myths’.17 He was therefore adopting something approaching a Barthian position in respect to natural theology – God's self-revelation in Christ was the only true story, the actuality. The other stories/myths were to be dismissed as the mere product of humanity striving to perceive a transcendent God – these were only ‘men's myths’. Much of the formulation of these ideas is in reaction to Frazer; hence the idea of the one true (that is, historical) myth. However, this Barthian-type position was to soften with maturity, as we shall see later. Lewis' Christological ideas and his understanding of natural theology were to undergo change and development over a thirty-year period. His understanding of Christological prefigurement and myth developed from 1931 to 1961; the evidence is in his writings.18 A paper read to an undergraduate literary society in 1940 contains the kernel of his developing ideas, particularly his understanding of the relationship between natural theology and myth.19 It is in his understanding of miracles, however, that we find the best exposition of his ideas about the mythical-historical nature of the incarnation. Lewis spoke and wrote on several occasions during the 1940s on the subject of the incarnation (the grand miracle as he called it) as well as miracles generally, culminating in the essay,Myth Became Fact20 This is the central text to what I shall call his proposition of Christological prefigurement, though Lewis never gave the proposition a definite title. Lewis opens the essay with a criticism of modern intellectuals, personified by one of his academic colleagues, who though having abandoned the Christian faith persisted in clinging to something of the form – such modern intellectuals were moved, asserted Lewis, by the mythical qualities of the story. It is the myth, Lewis asserts, that gives life. He then examines the distinction between abstract and concrete experience (which we shall come to later), and how this allows myths to express something experiential to us, which we could not grasp otherwise:
The old myth of the dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass … to a historical person crucified under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be a miracle.21
Lewis continues by showing how many derive sustenance from a story's mythical qualities even if they do not assent to its factuality and historicity. But these mythical qualities in the story of Christ are not equal to the reality:
Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied … that it carries with it into the world of facts all the properties of myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren't.22
These ideas around prefigured Christology were in part referred to and further developed in a paper read to The Socratic Club in Oxford –‘Religion Without Dogma?’– in 1946; Lewis developed his fullest exposition of the proposition a year later, however, in chapter 14 of the book Miracles.23 There are also key remarks in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, published in 1955 – chiefly explaining how he came to see the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative as the one true myth (in this case refuting Frazer).
Myth and Event – A Key to Lewis' ChristologyLewis is a classic orthodox theologian in his Christology; however, two propositions distinguish him from the mainstream in orthodoxy: he is prepared to tackle the question of narrative prefigurement, which most theologians dismiss or shy away from; also, he is prepared to write about the mythological/mythopoeic effect the incarnation-resurrection narrative has on us. There is something of a dialectic here (not a method usually associated with Lewis) in his use of myth and event: the former represents the historic event prefigured in religious stories/myths; the latter encompasses the myth derived from the event. Lewis writes of the idea, the content of the story of Jesus (the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) being prefigured in pre-Christian myths; he also writes about the effect that the story of Jesus (again the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) has on us even if we do not believe in the historical reality. There are therefore two different propositions here, not mutually exclusive, but nonetheless dealing with different notions. To proceed with an analysis of these propositions it is necessary to address two questions: ‘What is meant by the phrase I have been using thus far, the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative?’ And, ‘What exactly are these examples of prefigurement that Lewis alludes to (and what do we mean by prefigurement)?’
The Incarnation-Resurrection NarrativeMany see the phrase incarnational narrative as encompassing the whole of Christ's life on earth; Lewis refers generally to the Christian story and specifically to either the incarnation or the resurrection. But he is actually quite vague as to what constitutes the subject and object of prefigurement. This will be shown later when we examine the examples of prefigurement he cites. At its most concise the incarnation narrative, or story, is encapsulated in John 1:14a; the question then arises, what exactly is encompassed by the incarnational narrative when Lewis writes of prefigurement? At times he talks of the incarnation and the virginal conception; at other times the idea of a dying and reviving god. For the purposes of this study we shall refer to the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative as these two points in Christ's earthly life that Lewis regarded as critically fundamental to the faith and to God's salvific action with the world and humanity: first, the Virginal Conception-Incarnation and, second, the Cross-Resurrection. There are numerous allusions pointing towards the incarnation and resurrection in Jewish history and in the Old Testament. Frazer in effect ignores these; Lewis accepts them in faith. What preoccupied Lewis was the evidence of prefigurement in the ancient pagan oral traditions. It is therefore pertinent to examine some of the myths that Lewis alludes to.
Ideas of Prefigurement – IncarnationLewis cites specific pagan myths/gods: for example, Balder, Adonis, and Osiris. In this Lewis draws on three volumes of Frazer's work.24Frazer's work is central to Lewis in his pre-Theistic/Christian period. He supported the concepts and historicism inherent in Frazer's agenda. After conversion he sought to accommodate Frazer's material – he knew he could not simply dismiss it – so he revised it from a Christocentric position. Frazer recorded innumerable examples of stories/myths of what can be considered gods in human form, deified humans, and dying and reviving gods. Of great importance to both Frazer and Lewis is the Northern myth of Balder.
There are cases cited by Frazer of what he terms incarnate gods, though these are in many respects examples of individuals possessed either temporarily or permanently by a presumed divine source. Often these gods are no more than invisible magicians who work behind the veil of nature using a man or woman as means of temporality. When possessed, the host personality is nearly always in abeyance. There is then another class of incarnate god where the host is inspired – again temporarily or permanently – acquiring both divine knowledge and divine power, though this stops short of omniscience and omnipotence. Often these incarnate gods or possessed individuals assume magical powers over nature and the community and exercise awesome political powers within tribal societies: omnipotence (sociologically, anthropologically), but never omnipresence. In the case of a more organised and mature religion, Hinduism, there are prolific examples of human gods. For example, the belief in Chinchvad, near Poona in Western India, that since the seventeenth-century AD there has been an incarnation of the elephant-god Gunputty. The piety, abstinence, mortification and prayer of a Brahman of Poona was such that the god promised a portion of his holy spirit to abide with him and each of seven generations thereafter – so that the light of the god should be transmitted to a dark world.25 There are, it can be argued, countless examples of deification of an individual, or possession either wholly or partly, temporarily or permanently, by spirits or divine powers or gods, but is this the same as the Christian incarnation? Is there anything resembling the incarnation in form or typology?26 Avatars in Hinduism represent the descent of a god to earth in incarnate form. This is often an incarnation or embodiment, or a manifestation. For example, Krishna was the eighth avatar of Vishnu, incarnated to help the five brothers regain their kingdom. Sometimes these gods appear in human form. Avatar (descent in Hinduism) was usually to counteract some evil in this world. However, ‘descending’, ‘appearing’ or ‘abiding’ is not ontologically synonymous with the nature of incarnate being in Jesus of Nazareth. There are similarities but the two are not synonymous: being made flesh with all that is implied in being human – the apparent self-emptying of God – is a different ontological concept altogether. According to a kenotic Christology God empties himself and is incarnated, humbled and vulnerable in the form of a human baby. Possession or deification imparts divine properties; the Christian incarnation divests! That is, although Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine, we can assert that kenosis divests; likewise the adoption of specifically human limitations constitutes disempowerment rather than empowerment. Macquarrie writes that ‘… any revelation of God must be a veiled revelation, for God cannot be revealed directly in a finite earthly medium’.27 Therefore there is a measure of ambiguity even in the revelation of Christ. Barth writes: ‘God is always God even in his humiliation. The divine being does not suffer any change, any diminution … God cannot cease to be God’.28 Humility and weakness are as much a part of God as are power and transcendence. Incarnation in the Hindu, as well as Oceanic, traditions empowers and gives virtual messianic, dictatorial powers over tribal communities; by comparison the Christian incarnation involves self-restraint: power and authority are marked by humility and forgiveness. The idea of an avatar appearing in human form is to a degree Docetic. Once God is incarnate, not just appearing human or abiding, but born as a human, then there is risk – this idea would seem to have absolutely no precedent in mythology and religion. Examples of incarnational prefigurement regard the indwelling of the divine as empowering; despite the divestment that God undergoes. The Gospel writers witness to a glory which is absent in prefigurement (John 1:14b). Is it fair to Lewis' Christology to speak of kenosis and divestment? – yes. In many of his writings he comments on God's restraint and divestment, likewise humiliation in taking on the human frame.29 For example, Lewis cites the literary motif of the ruler who disguises himself to go amongst his people, as one of them. Kierkegaard took this further when he extends the analogy to the folk tale of the king who divests himself of his royal regalia to don the clothes of an ordinary citizen to woo the woman he loves, and then having won her heart reveals himself as her Lord and king.30 This is reminiscent of the courtship of the Hebrew people in the Old Testament, but God does not hide, he is revealed as Yahweh throughout, the one true God, the lord who made heaven and earth (though it is important to remember the Barthian principle that this unveiling also involves a veiling: God is revealed on God's terms only and in freedom – revelation as a vulnerable human baby). The idea of the self-emptying of God in the Christian incarnation is beyond human imagination and comprehension – it is sheer madness from a human perspective. If we accept that humility and weakness are as much a part of God as power and transcendence, however, we can see how the Christian incarnation transcends the stories/myths quoted by Frazer. Lewis does write in his book Miracles about how the incarnation is prefigured in nature – in general revelation – in the sense that there is a descending in the cycle of life: a seed falls to the ground and so forth.31 This is, however, more of an analogy than a prefigurement, and there is still no ontological parallel with the self-emptying and self-restraint seen in the Christian incarnation.
As can be seen from the example quoted in the above paragraph, Kierkegaard has written on the question of Christological prefigurement. Whatever the differences between Lewis and Kierkegaard, I propose that there is no actual parallel to the Christian incarnation in Frazer's evidence specifically, or in the work of ethnographers or social anthropologists generally, or even in Lewis' writings. This is another way of reconciling Lewis and Kierkegaard when the latter asserts in the guise of his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, that
Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted to be the single individual's point of departure for his eternal consciousness … No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (which is for memory) has ever had this idea – of which in this connection one can say with all multiple meanings that it did not arise in any human heart.32
It is further proposed that there is also no evidence in any of Lewis' writings, correspondence, or papers that I have examined that he had thought through the implications of incarnational prefigurement to this degree. There may be analogies, pointers, but there is no parallel, ontologically, epistemologically or, more important, soteriologically with the Christian incarnation: none of the examples in Frazer of incarnate gods generally33 or of a Hindu avatar specifically can atone and reconcile for original sin, for the Fall. What Lewis does is point to analogies or figurative similarities. Why these are there will be considered later when we examine Lewis' concept of imagination. Let us move on to the idea of a dying and reviving god.
Ideas of Prefigurement – ResurrectionGenerally speaking there is greater evidence of prefigurement in the examples of dying and reviving (not necessarily resurrected) gods. Lewis was a classicist and knew his Greek myths – for example the story of Adonis, a beautiful youth beloved by the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, slain by a wild boar while hunting. Following Aphrodite's pleas the god Zeus restored him so he should spend the winter months with Persephone in Hades and the summer months with Aphrodite. The story was considered symbolic of the natural cycle of death and rebirth. Both Lewis and Frazer place great emphasis on the myth of Balder.34 The god of light and joy in Norse mythology (son of Odin and Frigga, king and queen of the gods) Balder – or Baldhr – was regarded as beautiful, compassionate, and graceful compared to the other gods. Frigga, having dreamed that Balder's life was threatened, extracted an oath from the forces and objects in nature that they would not harm him, but overlooked the mistletoe. The gods, thinking Balder safe, rained blows and objects at him. Loki maliciously placed a twig of mistletoe in the hands of the blind Hoder, god of darkness, and directed his aim against Balder. Balder fell, mortally wounded, pierced to the heart. After his death Odin sent another son, the messenger Hermod, to the underworld to plead for his return. Balder's release was conditional on everything in the world weeping for him. Everything wept except one old woman in a cave, and so Balder could not return to life. Balder's characteristics are in many ways similar to those of Christ – love, joy, light, beauty, compassion; there are also similarities with the logos, the Word. Furthermore, similarities can be seen with the suffering Christ, though more with the Hebrew concept of the scapegoat. Balder, however, does not take on death voluntarily – he is tricked by Loki, unaware that he is not immune to mistletoe. Jesus wrestled with his fate in the Garden of Gethsemane but accepted what was to befall him. What is more, there is the potential for Balder being revived or restored, but this falls short of resurrection: it does not happen. There is a similar potentiality with the Egyptian god Osiris: he is tricked into death, like Balder, by an evil brother. Because of the love and lamentations for Osiris, the sun-god Ra initiates the restoration of the broken and fragmented body of the murdered god – Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings, Osiris is revived and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other world. Again similarities, but does this constitute a parallel? Furthermore, neither in the story of Balder nor Osiris (nor the many other stories of dying and reviving gods) is there an explicit reference to the resurrection of anincarnate god. Such a story is beyond human comprehension or invention (part of Kierkegaard's paradox). Lewis and Kierkegaard are looking at different elements of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative – Kierkegaard focuses on the detail, Lewis looking at generalisations. Kierkegaard holds to the uniqueness of the incarnational narrative (the Word became flesh) and in a specific sense he is right – a critical evaluation of the supposed parallels in pagan and Hindu mythology confirm Kierkegaard's reservations. Lewis was talking in terms of generalisations. He uses the term ‘prefigurement’ to indicate foreshadowing. To be more specific prefigurement indicates a similarity figuratively, or by type; that is, to be like metaphysically, psychologically, and for that matter sociologically, but not in actuality. In one sense dreams prefigure reality; in another sense the whole of the Old Testament prefigures Christ. This raises the question, to what extent do these pagan myths prefigure Christ? Is this an example of natural theology, or general revelation, or echoes of a specific revelation? There is the analogy with death and resurrection in the natural world. Is this an example of general revelation – that is, the idea of seeds dying to bring forth new crops? There are myths the world over of corn gods, but it is difficult to justify the idea of mythological parallels to the incarnation of God or the death and resurrection of Christ. These parallels do not hold when systematically analysed, epistemologically, ontologically, or soteriologically; but there are prefigurements, echoes – indicative, characteristically, of type and form, relating to the one story that was rooted historically in an actuality.
Lewis and Natural Theology, Revelation and ImaginationLewis places great emphasis on prefigurement in the sense that I have just outlined: that these pagan Christs are a foreshadowing, an alluding to, that they relate figuratively to the Incarnation-Resurrection. Lewis' mature beliefs about natural theology generally, and on revelation, inspiration, and imagination specifically, will be examined so as to ascertain the value he placed on prefigurement.
After his conversion, and in contradiction to the Feuerbachian-Freudian atheism already noted, Lewis assigned a value to natural theology in keeping with his churchmanship, central Anglican with leanings towards the (Anglo) Catholic. Lewis read and was influenced by the Greek philosophers but also Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. Although Aquinas had formulated the distinction between natural and revealed theology (a distinction hardened by theologians in response to the enlightenment), Lewis subscribed to the older Augustinian view that there is no unaided knowledge of God. Lewis was therefore profoundly influenced by Augustine in the value he gave to natural theology, also in the deep respect he held for Platonic idealism. We thus find the post-conversion Barthian-type rejection softening as he absorbs this other, older approach to natural theology. For example, Augustine writing to Deogratius comments,
Therefore, from the beginning of the human race, whosoever believed in Him, and in any way knew Him, and lived in a pious and just manner according to His precepts, was undoubtedly saved by Him, in whatever time and place he may have lived.35
Thence comes Lewis' respect for natural theology and natural law. Augustine continued,
For as we believe in Him both as dwelling with the Father and as having come in the flesh, so the men of the former ages believed in Him both as dwelling with the Father and as destined to come in the flesh … Wherefore the true religion, although formerly set forth and practiced under other names and with other symbolical rites than it now has, and formerly more obscurely revealed and known to fewer persons than now in the time of clearer light and wider diffusion, is one and the same in both periods.36
Therefore, the true religion was perceived in part, or ‘more obscurely revealed’prior to the specific revelation of Christ; this is the position Lewis came to hold. The question arises, what form did these intimations take? Or, more pertinently, what is the means whereby such ideas can feature in the thought of men and women?’ To answer this, it is necessary to examine the place of imagination generally in theology, and in particular, to focus on Lewis’ understanding of imagination and how it relates to revelation, inspiration, and illumination.
Imagination is rooted in creativity – where do ideas come from? Imagination has had a troubled standing in Western philosophy and theology. In the Reformed tradition imagination was considered suspect. Calvin wrote ‘God rejects without exception all shapes and pictures, and other symbols by which the superstitious believe they can bring him near to them. These images defile and insult the majesty of God’.37 In the Reformed tradition this suspicion of images influenced not only architecture and decoration but also created a highly conceptualised form of articulation which sought to reduce image-type thinking amongst theologians. Lewis' religious roots were in the Reformed tradition, Ulster Presbyterianism, yet he did not follow this tradition. When he embraced Christianity it was as an Anglican – pertinently it is his professional work in literature rather than this Anglican tradition that influences his ideas about imagination. In sharp contrast to the negative view of imagination in the Reformed tradition there exists a very positive tradition – for example, the Romantic idealists such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Friedrich Schelling who regarded a form of imagination derived from Kant's aesthetic idealism as important. As poet, philosopher, and theologian Coleridge distinguished ‘primary imagination’, from ‘secondary imagination’ and/or ‘fancy’. He wrote:
The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready-made from the law of association.38
The ideas in Coleridge's account of primary imagination (relating to the imago Dei in so far as through imagination, men and women are made in the image of God, reproducing the mind of God in miniature) were a profound influence on Lewis.39 He cites them obliquely as instrumental to his intellectual and religious development on a number of occasions in his spiritual autobiography.40 George MacDonald, whom Lewis regarded as a profound influence on his understanding of myth, saga, story, wrote a full exposition on Coleridge's ideas in an essay published in 1895.41 This is almost certainly the point of contact Lewis had initially with these ideas. For MacDonald, the imagination is the medium by which we enquire into God's creation. Imagination therefore occupies a central place in enquiry, in hypothesising, in creating mental-images (for example, mental model-making and conceptualisation as practised by scientists and historians, but also by theologians).42 Methodologically, from the perspective of the philosophy of theology, David Kelsey writes, ‘At the root of any theological position, there is an imaginative act in which a theologian tries to catch up in a single metaphorical judgment or model the full complexity of God's presence’.43 In this respect, it may be valid to consider that those who composed (or imagined) the stories of incarnation or dying and reviving gods, myths of prefigurement, are methodologically operating in a similar way to contemporary theologians. It has been argued that a theologian of whatever persuasion (for example, Catholic or Calvinistic) undertakes an act of imagination. S/he will select from the knowledge base in the culture and tradition s/he operates within those structures which are to form the system behind a theological position. By comparison, Seerveld, writing from the viewpoint of a biblical, Reformed tradition, distinguishes on the one hand between imagining which is perceptual error and on the other hand imagining that is an oracle of truth.44 Lewis wrote, ‘I think that all things reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least’.45 Further, ‘that imagination is distinct from thought; thought may be sound while accompanying images are false’.46 Lewis acknowledges that the mind is illuminated by the divine and that this leads to a degree of understanding – theological activity is not solely the result of human striving and searching. The imagination can, under certain circumstances, be an oracle of truth where general cognitive activities fail.
For Lewis, therefore, there is still the possibility of prevenient grace allowing inspiration and intimation, though as we shall see, such revelatory reception is still subject to the Fall: Lewis talks of the pagan imagination being baptized to a degree, though such minds continued to be corrupt after the event, misinterpreting and misusing what was given – they became ‘corrupt in their imaginations … one road leads home and a thousand lead into the wilderness’.47 Generally speaking, from a Reformed position, the imagination is indelibly corrupted by original sin. Calvin, as we saw, dismissed images or mental pictures/models, the product of human imagination, where humanity believed it could bring God near.48 Lewis would not necessarily have disagreed with this. What he did assert was that God used this fallen human imagination, images and mental pictures/models, to communicate some sort of intimation of God's salvific actions: the prefiguring images/myths were for Lewis pneumatologically given, not humanly invented.
II. CHRIST AS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IN REALITY AND IN MYTHOPOEIC INTIMATIONS
So if we accept that many theologians of whatever persuasion may use ‘secondary imagination’ (or Coleridge's ‘fancy’) to create conceptual models relating, in this case, to Christological theories; likewise if we accept that the imagination can under certain circumstances be an oracle of truth, that it may give some understanding or intimation of a revelatory nature relating to God's salvific redemptive action in Jesus Christ amongst prophets and mystics (a word that would need serious qualification), subject always to the taint and limits imposed on the mind by the Fall, and further that all is subject to the specific self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ and that all valid natural theology is reliant upon grace, then we can cautiously postulate that there is validity in Lewis' general proposition of Christological prefigurement. That is, that throughout many cultures, societies and religions there have been intimations relating to the specific self-revelation of God in Christ, transpositions of the divine theme of redemption, fragments of the truth that point to Christ whether pre- or post-Incarnation-Resurrection (the myth of Osiris is pre-Incarnation-Resurrection and hence a prefigurement; many Hindu avatars are both pre- and post-Incarnation-Resurrection, and are hence both prefigurements and echoes). In narrative form these intimations can have a power similar to the actual Gospel narrative; however, the fullness of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection is unique and has not, could not, as Kierkegaard asserted, be prefigured or replicated.
So if it is accepted that there is a degree of prefigurement relating to the story of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, though there are no direct or indirect parallels ontologically, epistemologically and soteriologically; if it is also accepted that Lewis had a broad respect for natural theology in keeping with Augustine, and that his appreciation saw natural theology not merely as intellectual/philosophical gropings for an understanding of God, but rather as bound up with the revelation in Christ (because a distinction should not be made between general and specific revelation, but rather the degree to which God reveals himself in a multitude of instances), then it can be accepted that the imagination should not be seen as intrinsically flawed and evil, but can under certain circumstances be an oracle through which God gives some understanding of a revelatory nature. We can now proceed to three questions: first, how do these prefigured ideas come to be in the pagan myths and how do these intimations relate to Lewis' understanding of Christ as the light of the world; second, how does the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative act/operate on us as a myth, whether spoken or read? And finally, is there internal evidence for a mythopoeic interpretation within the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative? Along the way we need to examine the perlocutionary effect these stories have and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit; also Lewis' neo-Platonic assertion that where there is light, there is Christ – that as the light of the world, Jesus Christ illumines the minds of those outside cognitive knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection. Finally, we will examine Lewis' own mythopoeic creation, his ‘supposal’: Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia: how much is Aslan an accurate intimation or echo of the divine truth of Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected for our redemption?
Splintered Fragments of the True Light: How do these Prefigured Ideas come to be in Pagan Myths?Although as an eighteen-year old atheistic apostate Lewis viewed all mythology and scripture as a human creation, Lewis' position changed as his faith and his theology developed. By the time of his mature writings he believed that such myths, stories, and ideas (prefigurement and echoes of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) were inspired by God; God was the source and ground of the meaning and intention behind the story of Balder and Osiris, or the intimations of incarnation in the Hindu avatars. In this sense he draws on Tolkien's concept of mythopoeia and on Coleridge's definition of imagination. Lewis did not, as we have seen, subscribe to a wholly Reformed position with regard to natural theology and revelation. Lewis agreed with Augustine, however, that there is no unaided knowledge of God; this is close to a Reformed position, but Lewis now gave credit to natural theology, and to the imagination that many in the Reformed tradition would not. Furthermore, he believed that there is value, even intimations of a revelatory nature, in other religious experience, although any value in such general revelation is in relation to and qualified by the specific self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ (again a point of confluence with Augustine). Lewis explicitly ascribes mythopoeia to God: God is the creator and author of these myths. Lewis was deeply influenced here by Tolkien's theory of sub-creation49– that it is from God that people draw their ultimate ideals, especially some of their imaginative inventions which, if they originate with God, must reflect something of the divine truth – or as Tolkien put it, a ‘splintered fragment of the true light’.50 To Tolkien all ‘storytellers’ are ‘sub-creators’ under God the ‘prime-creator’, and hence ‘pagan myths are never just lies – there is always something of the truth in them … God [was] expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of His eternal truth …’51 Lewis argues in ‘Myth Became Fact’ that our only response to God acting mythopoeically is for us to be mythopathic, sympathetic, and empathetic to these intimations: ‘If God chooses to be mythopoeic – and is not the sky itself a myth? – shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact’.52 As we have seen, Lewis often refers to Coleridge's concept of imagination; human perception of God acting mythopoeically would appear to be an example of Coleridge's ‘secondary imagination’– like the ‘primary imagination’ but only in degree, operating as an echo of the ‘primary imagination’ in the conscious mind. Such intimations of the Incarnation-Resurrection, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are a step removed from the actuality of the Gospel reality and hence are prefigurements or echoes resulting from the illumination of the logos– the true light that enlightens all, which was to come into the world (John 1:9). In a paper read to The Oxford Socratic Club in 1944 Lewis wrote,
The Divine light, we are told, ‘lighteneth every man’. We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story – the theme of incarnation, death and rebirth. And the differences between the pagan Christs (Balder, Osiris, etc.) and the Christ Himself is much what we should expect to find.53
Therefore, in none of the examples of prefigurement-echoes do we find an actual self-emptying incarnation of God or a dying and actualresurrection of God incarnate. The incarnation narrative (as expressed in John 1:14a) – is rooted in historical actuality. This can only happen once; any prefigurement-echo is a pointer, a glimpse, and must stop short of the reality. The actuality is not a human invention, nor can such prefigurements parallel the Christian incarnation – the paradox, as Kierkegaard put it. The light that illuminated the pagans, the Greeks, and the Hindus may be considered in this context to be the same light that is referred to in the prologue to John's Gospel. Lewis goes as far as to suggest that ideas of God's saving purposes were not only foretold in the Hebrew religion, but that images or mythical pictures were given within the North European pagan myths, in the ancient Egyptian religion, and in Hinduism, to name but three of the instances that Lewis alludes to. In The Pilgrim's Regress he wrote using allegory, suggesting that God gave ‘the shepherds’ (the Hebrew people) ideas and rules and set their feet on the road, but that he gave images to the pagans. He also asserts that the mythology of the pagans contained a divine call; however, they mistook the images for what they were not and became ‘corrupt in their imaginations’. Hence ‘one road leads home and a thousand lead into the wilderness’.54 The degree to which the imagination can be an oracle of truth is debatable: Calvin, as we saw, was dismissive of the imagination. Broadly speaking, the Reformed tradition regards both the imagination and natural theology as suspect at best and of little consequence – emphasis is placed rather on sin and human fallenness. Lewis, however, does address the question of sin and fallenness. He writes both in his autobiography and in his theological writings on the notion of a baptized imagination.55 In its highest form, this is where the imagination (essentially a form of mental activity held to be distinct from cognitive or rational processes, a free and creative ordering of the contents of the mind) is governed by the Holy Spirit; because of original sin, an unbaptized imagination fails to perceive the intrinsic value and meaning in stories and myths from a God-ward, and hence true, perspective. The hearers (and these stories were nearly always part of an oral tradition) may not ‘know’ the details of when the virgin conceived, when her Son died on a cross or rose from the dead, but something of the profound effect of this true story would have worked on them – and on us – and not just at a psychological level; it may be that their/our very being is reordered to a degree and reoriented towards the one true God, despite the maze and confusion of religious ideas. Lewis would have concurred with the Reformed position that the imagination is fallen and tainted by original sin, but he would have argued that it is not irredeemable in this life. He does not tie the baptism of the imagination to an explicit liturgical practice; the Spirit blows where it wills (Genesis 1:2b and John 3:8). Lewis sees a baptized imagination as the key to comprehending ultimate reality: this knowledge of reality is apprehended by acquaintance with and participation in the divine logos. A person comprehending ultimate reality, a reality illuminated by the logos (in the sense of an immediate, intuitive, and imaginative capacity) has perception of God to the extent that such acquaintance and perception is considered by Lewis to be revelatory; however, the rational interpretation of such an experience may be subject to distortion and communication of the experience may be flawed. Revelation of this kind is mediated through human faculties: it is human to err. Hence Lewis explains in The Pilgrim's Regress that those in receipt of the Northern European myths misinterpreted and misused the images they were given. Lewis assumes that the pagan imagination (individually or collectively) was to a degree baptized when it received/perceived the images; however, we must presume that the imagination of such an individual, and those subsequently hearing the human record of these intimations, were, relatively speaking, flawed. Lewis does not consider whether epistemological baptism is permanent this side of eternity; human epistemic limitations would seem to militate against such a possibility, as does the fact that we are ever subject to the vagaries of sin –simul iustus et peccator.
Is Lewis therefore conceiving of the universal resurrected Christ, the logos, working on people's minds regardless of whether they knew what had happened or was to happen in Palestine two thousand years ago? Such illumination, the work of the Spirit, moves and operates where and how it will, and we cannot utterly dismiss its salvific effect on – in the case of Lewis' prefigurement theories – the North European pagan tribes who were subject to these myths (the salvation outside of knowledge in Matthew 25?). But, none of these prefigurements actually replicate what will/did happen on the Cross. There is, therefore, something of a universal Platonic form to Lewis' understanding of the resurrected Christ. Tolkien, as we saw, referred to such intimations as splintered fragments of the true light; for Lewis, where there is enlightenment, there is Christ: as the light of the world, Christ illumines the minds of those outside the cognitive knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection. Karl Barth worked on the same principle, but in a more systematic way than Lewis. In the fourth volume of his Church Dogmatics,56 he does not assert Jesus Christ as light and truth from the one light and truth that is God, he asserts that Jesus Christ simply is this light and truth (the one light and truth that is God). He is the light of the world; Jesus is the divine light flooding the world with his light. These other lights must be part or related to this one true light; they are not independent. As with Lewis, this does move Barth in a universalistic direction: if Jesus Christ is the light of the world then there is a degree to which this light can be recognised anywhere – in the secular world, and not only in the religious. Barth writes:
Are these truths outside the one? Yes, for the creature has its being and existence outside God. But as lights of the creature these truths are refractions (in this connection there is a real place for the term) of the one light and appearances (this term is also justified at this point) of the one truth. If they have force, value, validity, these are not independent. Primarily and finally, they are not their own. They are merely those which are lent them by the shining of the one light of the one truth. These are lights and truths of the theatrum of the gloria Dei.
… But as this light rises and shines, it is reflected in the being and existence of the cosmos which is not created accidentally, but with a view to this action and therefore to this revelation.57
These refractions (Barth uses Brechungen) of the one light and truth are appearances (Barth uses Erscheinungen) of God's self-declaration, the self-revelation of God. Lewis and Barth are referring to truths that come from Christ – refractions for Barth, intimations for Lewis, splintered fragments of the true light for Tolkien. They are saying that where Christ is not known or recognised, or cognitive knowledge of the event is impossible, the Christ's truth and light has to break in. The Incarnation-Resurrection is the one real event in this; it is part of the history of this world. Hence for Barth these truths are refractions, because the one light is an expression of the one truth. Apart from Christ there is no light and no truth; but divine light-truth is often distinct from human light-truth, and we may filter this true light though our fallenness (also we must heed to Paul's warning about dark forces parading themselves as the light – 2Corinthians 4 & 14). As we have seen, Lewis asserted that those receiving or hearing these intimations mistook the images for what they were not and became corrupt in their imaginations – one road led home and a thousand lead into the wilderness.58 Did this sublapsarian confusion lead to a multiplicity of gods and religious theories? – eventually to a degree of apophatic denial? This leads into the question of how the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative operates on us when we hear it mythopathically.
How does the Incarnation-Resurrection Narrative Act/Operate on us as a Myth, whether Spoken or Read?In his essay ‘Myth Became Fact’ Lewis deals with the question of how and why the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative acts upon us both mythopoeically and as the record of an actuality: an historical event. Lewis explains that the human intellect is incurably abstract, while the only realities we experience are concrete, ‘… this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending pleasure, pain or personality’. Lewis shows that when we begin to intellectualise abstractly, the concrete realities are reduced to the level of mere instances or examples:
We are no longer dealing with them but that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma – either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside of it … But when else can you really know these things? ‘If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain’. But once it stops what do I know about pain?59
Lewis cites myth as a partial solution to this dilemma. In listening to and being carried by a myth, he asserts that we come nearest to experiencing as concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. While we receive a myth as story, we experience the principle concretely, but as soon as we translate, we are left with abstraction. To Lewis it is not truth that flows into us from the myth but reality; he notes how ‘truth is always about something, but reality is that about which [Lewis' emphases] truth is … every myth is the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level’.60 Therefore the Gospel story generally, and the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative specifically, operate on us mythopoeically precisely because they convey to us the reality that they represent: whether one believes or not in the reality (the historical actuality of the incarnation and resurrection), the story acts upon us like a myth – many people today will comment about how nice it would be if the story of Jesus were true. The reality is touching them, not just the abstract truth which they opt to reject. Lewis writes further:
Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact … I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.61
There is of course a heavy dose of Platonic idealism in this, and we must not forget the influence of classicism and the theology of the Patristic era on Lewis; he wrote about how the story of the incarnation ‘comes down from the heaven of legend and the imagination’62 to us to become reality. Is Lewis talking about a Platonic form? In any case, whether assent is given or not, the story/myth works on us concretely – the reality touches us, though we must acknowledge that for some it may not. The Incarnation-Resurrection narrative acting on us mythopoeically would seem, therefore, to have a perlocutionary effect. Following Lewis' proposition through, we do not just think abstractly about this narrative and draw conclusions; it acts upon us in a perlocutionary way: in perceiving the reality, the words do something, as in causing someone to blush, or when someone suitably authorised declares a couple to be man and wife. For most people this effect cannot be avoided; what is conveyed is monumental. This is related to the doctrine of illumination – how the Spirit illumines our minds and hence the text with understanding – how the Spirit enables us to accept the text in what it claims. This was so for the tribal warriors who listened after a feast in some great Northern hall to the story of Balder (though we saw earlier how the story fell short of actual god-like resurrection); the story had a perlocutionary effect upon them (intimations on a deeper level than the conscious mind of God's salvific intentions and actions in relation to humankind) similar to the way the incarnation-resurrection narrative was spoken and received as an oral tradition by the apostles and disciples in Jerusalem, Damascus, and Antioch in the immediate months and years after the resurrection: listen to what God has done for you! This leads to questions about the nature of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative.
Is there Internal evidence for a Mythopoeic Interpretation within the Incarnation-Resurrection Narrative?If a mythopathic view of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative is to be seen as valid, then the question arises as to whether the narrative supports such a view. There is not scope within this paper to analyse both Old and New Testaments to reach an answer, especially in view of the relation between many of the Old Testament stories and myths from other Middle Eastern societies; however, a brief examination of Lewis' ideas on this subject is possible. In a chapter on the Incarnation-Resurrection in Miracles63 Lewis addresses the problem as he sees it. He writes that although the story of Jesus has remarkable parallels with the principle of descending and re-ascending within nature myths, there is no suggestion in the Gospels of a self-awareness of this parallel by Jesus or his disciples. In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. This is a familiar pattern in nature – all life must descend (i.e. a seed) to re-ascend. Cultures all over the world have death and resurrection myths woven into their perception and understanding of the natural world; many such myths are elevated to the status of ‘corn kings’– the king must die in the ground as a seed to re-ascend, to grow again, to rule again. Lewis writes,
The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key.64
Many at the time could have seen Christ as just another corn-king. Yet although Jesus was addressing an agrarian society, and although the metaphor of a seed falling and dying to rise again is used in his sayings as well as in other parts of the New Testament,65 there is no conscious parallel drawn between this observable fact of creation and the reality of God descending to re-ascend, taking a fallen creation with him. Lewis writes, ‘The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts [Lewis' emphasis] the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs … It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that it disbelieved in sea-serpents’.66 Lewis addresses this problem by asserting that the Christians are not simply claiming that God was incarnate in Jesus, but that the one true God whom the Hebrews worshipped as Yahweh had descended. On the one hand this is the God of creation – of nature. On the other hand this is not a nature-god. This is the God for whom the earth is his foot stool, not his vesture –‘Yahweh is neither the soul of nature nor her enemy …’67 We can therefore understand why Christ is at once so like the corn-king and so silent about him. He is like the corn-king because the corn-king is a portrait of Him. Elements of nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teachings of Jesus and from Hebrew history, in particular the Covenant, because of the unique calling of the Hebrew people to testify to the one true God, author and lord of creation, not merely a part of creation:
In them you have from the very outset got in behind nature-religion and behind nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear, that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of nature-gods; not because the nature-gods were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likenesses to the thing itself.68
Hence there is no internal evidence within the Gospels; likewise, there is no direct parallel between the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative and these echoes and prefigurements which are merely shadows, because to Lewis the Christ event is the reality beyond the shadows breaking in to redeem: thence Lewis at his most Platonic. Further, we find that the value he gives to prefigurement, and for that matter natural theology and natural or general revelation is entirely subordinate to the reality of the Christ event, which in many ways transcends religion.
A Temporal Paradox?There is an issue/question that we alluded to: some of these prefigurements occur in ancient Egyptian myths, or in North European pagan societies and religion prior to the event of the Incarnation-Resurrection in Palestine two-thousand years ago; others after – for example, in India, perhaps only a few hundred years ago, though they may have been received-composed in ignorance of the Christ event. There is something of a paradox here, which raises the question of time: we must see the Incarnation-Resurrection as being at the centre of time; therefore any pneumatologically inspired intimations, echoes and/or refractions about or related to the Christ event are to be seen as derivative from and reliant for meaning upon this central event. Indeed, they must all be seen pertinently as echoes from this single, cataclysmic event. Conventionally we see time in our reality, our universe, starting with the big bang, with creation ex nihilo, and leading teleologically to the eschaton. However Christologically we must see time starting and ending in our reality with the Incarnation-Resurrection; therefore all mythopoeic creations that point to or are narrative echoes of the truth of the Incarnation-Resurrection relate to this central event, whether they occur before or after the reality of the Incarnation-Resurrection according to the chronologically linear perception of time. Christologically, time must be seen as circular – everything in our reality, everything that has lived, is alive, or will live is a creation ex nihilo related to and radiating out like the ripples on a pool from this central point in our reality: pertinently this point is focused down onto the moment of the death of Christ on the Cross. Temporally the effect of the incarnation-resurrection can be identified like the point of disturbance from a stone touching the surface of a pool, but the shock waves radiate in all directions – rippling the surface of the water, but also radiating into the depths and fanning out as shock waves through the air; this is how the incarnation-resurrection effects our spacio-temporal reality, because the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us and we crucified it, and it rose again from the dead … Generally speaking, all of these pneumatological mythopoeic intimations, echoes, and/or refractions that point to or are related to God's Incarnation-Resurrection are essentially formed in cognitive unawareness, inspired and composed in a lack of knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection, but profoundly affected by the event nonetheless.
Lewis' ‘Supposal’Lewis went beyond an academic Christological speculation about intimations, echoes, or refractions of the Gospel in the world's religions and mythologies; he wrote his own Christian myth –The Chronicles of Narnia.69 Lewis' aim was to present the love, light, and truth of God's turn towards creation, as represented in Gospel. He did this because he believed it had been buried, even extinguished to a degree, by Victorian and Edwardian Pietism, by obligation and moralising, and by adult superiority towards children. Lewis wrote:
I thought 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 about 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. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. 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? I thought one could.70
Lewis' initial inspiration was with images:
All my seven Narnia books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood … then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.71
We have noted already Lewis' assertion that God gave images to the pagans, as compared to the law and revelation to the Hebrews.72Lewis' more formal aim was to explore what he termed a ‘supposal’: what if Christ became incarnate in the flesh, the physical reality of another world, as part of another sentient life – not another world within our universe but an entirely different universe, another reality? Lewis decried the label ‘allegory’, concentrating on this term ‘supposal’– a ‘what if’ supposition.73 In writing to a parent in 1958 Lewis asserted,
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all.74
Unlike the prefigurement myths which were in effect created and heard outside of cognitive knowledge about or awareness of the Incarnation-Resurrection, Aslan is a conscious attempt at Christian education within and for a society that knew about Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice but which Lewis believed had lost the plot, due to Pietism and moralising. Although over 100 million copies have been sold (which gives a readership of upwards half a billion) since their original publication in the early 1950s, and in spite of having been translated into most of the world's main languages, because of the nature of a post-Christian society in Britain, it is a fair assumption to say that most of the readers of The Chronicles of Narnia in the early twenty-first century may not have heard of the Gospel reality – in other words, the same target audience that heard the prefigurement myths we have been considering.75
Lewis' ‘supposal’ is something of a fanciful conjecture, a ‘what if …’; he is not necessary asserting and exploring the possibility of multiple incarnations, though he did not eliminate that possibility.76 Lewis argues that the possibility is open for theophanic incarnations to other life forms in other worlds or universes. His understanding of multiple incarnations is derived from Aquinas and then presented in allegorical form in his science-fiction writings.77 Aslan is not meant to be a separate incarnation from Jesus Christ, however; the two would not vie for precedence in the eschaton– they are rather one and the same. They differ only in form, the form taken – the form of a man or the form of a lion, – in each case, a form appropriate to its created environment. These are matters beyond our present concern. The Narnian stories are like the pagan myths for Lewis; they do not exist in their own right to point to their own internal reality and logic – they exist to point to the single historic event in our reality. So how does Aslan re-present Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity, as God incarnate? The important question is not about multiple incarnations, but rather do we thereby come to a deeper, more profound understanding of the Incarnation-Resurrection through Lewis' Christological portrait of God incarnate, crucified and resurrected for our redemption:
Well, I think in his religious books you tend to get a rather hard view of God, now the conception of Aslan, which you have in the children's’ stories seems to me quite different and seems to me to come from a far deeper level in Lewis' character. Aslan is the deity; it is an extraordinarily original achievement. He has, Aslan has, divine qualities of awe, power and authority, yet he exudes love and is himself somehow intensely lovable, so lovable that it is possible for children to want to embrace him, to put their arms about his neck and kiss him. I think that this is perhaps Lewis', yes, highest religious achievement.78
Aslan–Lewis' Mythopoeic Sub-CreationLewis' Aslan is written in the knowledge of the Gospel narrative and is constructed to elucidate, to parallel didactically though not ontologically, the economy of God's salvation. Written into this are existential meetings between Aslan and individuals or even communities. These meetings are reminiscent of Nicodemus' encounter with Jesus in John's gospel: these people-creatures can turn one way or another: they can turn to Aslan or away. There are naturally many encounters with Narnians who believe in Aslan; however, there are other encounters between people-creatures who have not heard of Aslan, or hold diametrically opposite religious beliefs, or are explicitly hostile to Aslan, having been given a false picture of him. These encounters illustrate to a degree Lewis' belief about the intimations given to the pagans that we were considering, and how God's salvific actions through Christ relate to, in this instance, the North European pagan tribes. We can consider two examples – Shasta and Emeth.
Shasta (from The Horse and His Boy) is a boy who runs away from his adoptive father (a fisherman in Calormen) to escape slavery.79 He flees to Narnia with the aid of a Narnian talking horse in the company of Aravis, a Calormen high-born princess. Shasta's religious education in Calormen has been in the cult of Tash – reminiscent of North European pagan religions but also akin to the Middle Eastern religions characteristic of the mighty nations that surrounded and preyed on the ancient Hebrews. In the Temple in Tashban the golden statue of Tash is in the form of a giant bird of prey with multiple arms/limbs. Shasta has been taught that Narnia is a land of evil magic ruled by a sorcerer in the malevolent form of a lion (Aslan). After many heroic adventures, alone and crossing the fog-bound mountains into Narnia he becomes aware of a presence by his side. At first he wonders if it is a ghost, a ghoul, or some monstrous creature. As time passes it does not attack him, and he is more and more concerned; he can hear it moving alongside him. He can sense it sigh and can feel its warm breath on his arm. He eventually plucks up the courage to speak to it, to enquire: ‘One who has waited long for you to speak, answers the Thing’. Shasta shares his troubles about a cruel childhood; the thing comforts him and explains that it was he all along who had guided Shasta and Aravis in their escape, and protected him on many occasions. When he presses the thing to explain why he treated Aravis cruelly (at their first encounter Aslan draws his claws across her back in reparation for the severe flogging the slave received as a result of being drugged by Aravis during the escape), the voice answers,
‘I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own’.
‘Who are you?’ asked Shasta.
‘Myself’, said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook … and again ‘Myself’, whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.
Shasta was no longer afraid … But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.
The mist was turning from black to grey and from grey to white … the whiteness around him became a shining whiteness; his eyes began to blink. He could see the mane and ears and head of his horse quite easily now. A golden light fell on them from the left. He thought it was the sun.
He turned and saw, pacing beside him, taller than the horse, a Lion. It was from the Lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful.
… after one glance at the Lion's face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn't say any thing but then he didn't want to say anything, and he knew he needn't say anything.
The High King above all kings stooped towards him. Its mane, and some strange and solemn perfume that hung about the mane, was all round him. It touched his forehead with its tongue. He lifted his face and their eyes met. Then instantly the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared. He was alone with the horse on a grassy hillside under a blue sky. And there were birds singing.80
Lewis described The Horse and His Boy as being about ‘the calling and conversion of a heathen’.81 Shasta's religious education has corrupted him from a true understanding of Aslan; yet when he eventually meets Aslan, religious concepts and words become irrelevant – he senses and perceives the beauty and love of God incarnate, the fiery brightness and swirling glory, and knows that all he must do is respond in love and gratitude, obedience and commitment. Is Lewis asserting that many pagans will not only have led lives under the grace, protection and influence of Christ, but also, preveniently speaking, had become people who were ready and able to respond to Christ should he choose to reveal himself to them?
We can elucidate by examining a second example: Emeth from The Last Battle.82 Set in Lewis' apocalyptic, eschatologically charged end-of-time, Emeth (Hebrew for faithful, true) is a Calormen warrior who along with an army has invaded Narnia. After death – his death and the destruction of the entire world that was Narnia and the surrounding lands/countries (including Calormen) – Emeth comes face-to-face with Aslan. What strikes Emeth is the size, power and awesomeness of Aslan, but equally his beauty, glory and truth:
But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, ‘Son, thou art welcome’. But I said, ‘Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash’. He answered, ‘Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me’.
…‘Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one’? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, ‘It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted’.
… But I said also (for the truth constrained me), ‘Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days’. ‘Beloved’, said the Glorious One, ‘Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek’.
Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs and caused me to stand upon my feet … then he turned him about in a storm and flurry of gold and was gone suddenly.
And since then … I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved.83
At the general resurrection and judgement all come face-to-face with Aslan and as they look at his face; they either love him, or loath him, they either turn one way or the other. Those who love Aslan and turn to him are not uniquely the Narnians – his followers; there are many creatures who geographically and culturally have never heard of Aslan, or more pertinently have never known him pneumatologically. These creatures turn one way or the other: towards Aslan and into the new heaven and earth, or into the darkness – the decision is Aslan's and Aslan's alone. After this Narnian eschaton there are a group of rebellious renegade dwarves who have lived in Narnia and know about Aslan but are cynical and sceptical; despite being amongst the saved, the redeemed, when they are approached by Aslan in the new heaven and earth they fear him and perceive him as a monster, as a threat.84 They are oblivious to the goodness around them, perceiving kindness as cruelty and the glories of this new creation as dark, dank and rotten. ‘There is no black hole, save in your own fancy’ cries Tirian the last king of Narnia to them.85 Aslan comments to Lucy, ‘You see they will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out’.86Crucially these dwarves lack faith – primarily, faith in Aslan; but their lives, their values, and their behaviour betray this lack of general faith. By contrast Emeth's life, his desires, his actions, all that he was when alive, is evidence of faith in Aslan even though he was culturally and geographically isolated from the Narnia ‘religion’ centred on Aslan (in the same way that those who composed and heard the pagan myths that for Lewis and Tolkien prefigured, in literary content to a degree, Christ's atoning sacrifice, were isolated from the reality that took place in Palestine 2000 years ago). Lewis' use of account, that is, when Aslan declares to Emeth ‘I account as service done to me’, is comparable to Paul's use of reckoned in the context of Abraham's righteousness before God.87 Pertinently, whereas Aslan declares to Tash – the demonic satanic god at the centre of Calormen religion –‘Begone, monster, and take your lawful prey to your own place [i.e. hell]’,88 it is the goodness (something of a Platonic norm or form, in intent?) inherent in Emeth's faith and desire that link him to Aslan, not to Tash. Otherwise Tash would claim him for his own: ‘no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him’.89It is therefore our lives and intentions that betray or confirm our allegiance, not necessarily our religious declarations: the sovereignty andaseity of God in Christ will decide. These passages are Lewis explicitly trying to spell out to his readers the implications of Matthew 25 for non-Christians. In this context Lewis wrote: ‘The truth is God has not told us what his arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him’.90
This does not detract from the uniqueness of Christ; if anything it denies a syncretistic approach to the world's religions. Lewis is presenting his understanding of the eternally electing God who seeks the redemption of all creation, who seeks to be reconciled to his creatures. Aslan's sacrifice (in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) represents the overwhelming love of the absolute supreme, transcendent God, who comes in infinite humility, meekness and modesty in Jesus Christ, gives himself to humanity in unconditional freedom and grace, despite the venomous hatred that humanity/creation heaped on him on the cross/stone table. There are numerous illustrations given by Lewis of encounters between creatures-humans and Aslan where the one thing the creature must do is repent of his/her sins, acknowledging in love the lordship of God incarnate: regarding her brother Edmund (for whom Aslan allows himself to be sacrificed on the stone table because of Edmund's treachery), Lucy comments to her sister, ‘Does he know what Aslan did for him, does he know what the arrangement with the witch really was?’91 As Lewis asserted, it is not necessarily only those who know him (in the manner of cognitive knowledge) who can be saved by him.92 Do we truly know him? Do we fully understand what Christ did for us? We think we do, but is our knowledge any more definite, any more certain or complete than Emeth's or Shasta's? It is only in the eschaton that we will know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
III. CONCLUSION
Lewis' initial justification for these prefiguring myths was in reaction to Frazer's work, because of the value he had given Frazer's agenda and conclusions as a young atheist and apostate. As we have seen, however, Lewis' Christology soon developed a pneumatological justification and role for these myths beyond the context of Frazer's work. Therefore, what does this tell us about God's salvific actions towards humanity – the intention to bring about redemption potentially for all? Lewis is setting out as a soteriological principle that whether we are religious or not – i.e., Christian or not – our salvation lies not in our actions-beliefs, but in what the Lord has done for us. The most we can do is acknowledge, repent and allow the Lord's Spirit to change us, reconcile and redeem us. In the case of those who have consciously heard the Gospel narrative, the story of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection should operate on us in a perlocutionary way: awareness of the narrative is important because of the event it represents. It is because of the importance of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative that the prefiguring myths should be seen as having a relative value and significance. What of these prefiguring myths? In the case of Emeth and Shasta (who for Lewis are comparable with the pagans and heathens outside of the Judaeo-Christian revelation), this was operating on a subliminal level. Such myths point towards something of the reality of the Incarnation-Resurrection, and may likewise operate in a perlocutionary manner on a subliminal level. However important these pneumatological mythopoeic echoes, intimations, and refractions appear to be, their function is to point towards the real event: Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity crucified and resurrected for our salvation. If you have access to knowledge of the real story, the real event, then why bother with myths? If because of cultural, geographic, or temporal isolation these intimations come to people who can never know the true story, then the myths have a perlocutionary effect on individuals/societies (subject to the degree of reception or rejection, which is governed by our fallen state –simul iustus et peccator) in accordance with the will of the Father, and may or may not work towards God's loving purposes which are the potential salvation and transformation of all humankind.
Footnotes
On the evening of his conversion from Theism to Christianity C. S. Lewis is recorded as having described myths as beautiful and moving, though they were ‘… lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver …’1 His understanding of myth was to change during his life as a result of his adoption and championing through apologetics of an orthodox Christian faith centred as it is on the death and resurrection of God incarnate. Myth was, and continued to be, very important to him – primarily the Northern European myths, closely followed by Hinduism and Greek mythology. Professionally his work was in Mediæval and Renaissance literature; he therefore had a very good understanding of myth, story, and the effect such narratives have on us.2 The aim of this paper is broadly two-fold: a critical evaluation of Lewis' identification of a mythopoeic, as he termed it, element in the incarnation-resurrection narrative, and a systematic examination of the relationship between myth and event in Lewis' Christology and Pneumatology. Lewis' theories were derived from his reading of religious myths from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition: what he termed pagan myths, though it is important to remember that the term pagan is used here with no derogatory intent, nor as a term of abuse. Lewis used the term simply to refer to those peoples and cultures outside of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and revelation (Oriental, Middle Eastern, Indian and European tribes and nations, particularly in the ancient world). Initially I shall look at some definitions of myth, and then proceed to examine what Lewis actually wrote. Defining what is meant by the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative will lead us to appraise examples of prefigurement. Lewis' position will then be examined in the light of his views on natural theology (particularly noting the influence of Plato and Augustine) and his theories about imagination and inspiration, illumination and revelation (essentially from the influence of the poet, philosopher, and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge). At the heart of Lewis' understanding of story – whether real or fictitious – is a concept he adopted from the Roman Catholic scholar J. R. R. Tolkien: mythopoeia. The noun mythopoeia – the creating of myths – was developed from the late nineteenth-century by many English-speaking writers; however, it is in the work of Tolkien (both as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and his mythological work in scripting the Middle Earth sagas including The Lord of the Rings) that it is imbued with theological meaning and significance, relating to divinely gifted, prevenient inspiration.3
MythStephen Evans in his work on Christology4 argues for the historicity of the gospel account as against modern scholarship that calls into question the reliability of the church's version of the story of Jesus. Evans argues for the historical basis of Christianity, that the religious significance of this story cannot be adequately captured by the category of non-historical myth. Like many others who assert an orthodox Trinitarian account, he acknowledges that myth has been used as a means of dealing with the particular genre of the Gospels by a number of theologians. To this end he briefly examines C. S. Lewis' proposition that the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative is both myth and history: a myth which has been historically enacted without ceasing to be a myth. Before turning to C. S. Lewis in chapter three of his work, Evans briefly sets out four definitions of myth which are pertinent to this investigation:5 first, myths as pre-scientific explanations, bad explanations of phenomena in the natural world (fanciful stories to explain rainfall, the movement of the sun, etc); second, the sociological function (to reinforce the identity of a group of people and explain cohesive ritual practices); third, myths as embodying psychological truth, which may be crucial to the value of the myth (pre-scientific explanations are seen as wrong and irrelevant, but psychological truths touch a deeper level of humanity and may give insights that cannot be obtained through other means, for example, the story of Oedipus); four, such stories express in a dramatic fashion some abstract metaphysical truth, though historically false. Evans explains that these four definitions are not mutually exclusive; someone who holds that a particular myth expresses metaphysical or psychological truth may also claim it to be a pre-scientific explanation for some phenomenon. He quotes the work of Joseph Campbell as an appreciation that reflects a Jungian view, that myths can embody a psychological function as well as a metaphysical one.6 The term myth is therefore a rich depository of meanings and nuances – quite different from the way some contemporary theologians have used the term. In the twentieth century, myth was often simplistically taken to mean that something is fiction, a story with no basis in real events: a misconception, a misrepresentation of the truth. For example, John Hick in the preface to The Myth of God Incarnate asserts that the conception of Jesus ‘… as God incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity living a human life, is a mythological or poetic way of expressing his significance for us’.7 This represents a uniquely modern, enlightenment approach to Christology based upon a narrow definition of myth. Such definitions do not take into account the full richness of myth – especially from a metaphysical perspective. The term myth was essentially introduced into theology in the nineteenth century.8 By contrast Lewis is often critical of progressive Protestant theologians for failing to understand the genre of myth from a literary perspective. It must be remembered that Lewis knew story and knew myth – after a lifetime lecturing on the subject of literature at Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Mediæval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. In Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism9 he criticises Bultmann, Lock and Vidler for not understanding literary genre when they attempt to approach the Gospels as non-historical records and classify them according to literary genre. He is particularly scathing of Lock's assertion that John's Gospel is a spiritual romance.10
Lewis on MythLewis proposes a definition of myth in an essay on literary criticism published in 1961.11 He notes that there is a particular kind of story which has a value in itself – a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work. Lewis quotes the story of Orpheus in a summary of a hundred words, showing how it still has extraordinary power: ‘it strikes and strikes deep’.12 Lewis then lays out six characteristics of myth: i) they are extra literary, ii) the story does not depend upon the usual literary attractions such as suspense or surprise – there is a sense of inevitability about mythical stories; iii) human sympathy is at a minimum, the characters are like shapes moving in another world – they have a profound relevance to our lives, but we do not necessarily identify with them, ‘The story of Orpheus makes us sad; but we are sorry for all men rather than sympathetic with him’; iv) myth is always fantastic – it deals with ‘impossibilities and preternaturals’; v) the experience of listening to or reading a myth is always grave; vi) importantly we find this experience to be awe-inspiring: ‘… we feel it to be numinous; it is as if something of great moment has been communicated to us’. Therefore to Lewis, a myth is more than just a fanciful story that did not happen; however, a myth which is also an account of an historical event is something other.13
Myth Became RealityAs an eighteen year old apostate and atheistic student Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves that ‘All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man's own invention – Christ as much as Loki’.14 He proceeded to explain the origin of such ‘mythologies’, particularly Christianity – basically expounding a view culled from the work of the religionist Victorian anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. Frazer's massive twelve-volume work, The Golden Bough,15 was the product of an academic life spent travelling the world recording the religious-folk mythology of primitive tribes: he spent decades observing various customs, rituals, beliefs and myths from the standpoint of the emerging discipline of social anthropology. Frazer's position is Feuerbachian and to a degree Freudian: religion is a human projection, a response to a hostile world; Frazer is also a high-Victorian projecting cultural and racial superiority as he travelled the British Empire. Lewis' intellectual starting point is therefore that all religion is a human product, constructed from observing and relating to this hostile and unsympathetic world. At this time Lewis would have subscribed to a view of natural theology similar to that of Feuerbach that God exists only as a psychological projection and hence all theology is a human product. Lewis was therefore dismissive of natural theology because there is no God; further that all our supposed knowledge of God is merely an enlargement of ideas about human experience. As a young scholar Lewis would have concurred with Feuerbach when the latter wrote ‘… the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology – the knowledge of God is nothing else than the knowledge of man’.16 Feuerbach was a profound influence on Frazer; Frazer likewise on Lewis' intellectual development. Lewis came to adopt an opposite view of natural theology in his thirties after his conversion initially to Theism and then to Christianity. Shortly after his conversion, in 1931, he again wrote to Arthur Greeves commenting about how profound and suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp the myths of dying and reviving gods were, and how the story of Christ was simply a true myth –‘… a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened … it is God's myth where the others are men's myths’.17 He was therefore adopting something approaching a Barthian position in respect to natural theology – God's self-revelation in Christ was the only true story, the actuality. The other stories/myths were to be dismissed as the mere product of humanity striving to perceive a transcendent God – these were only ‘men's myths’. Much of the formulation of these ideas is in reaction to Frazer; hence the idea of the one true (that is, historical) myth. However, this Barthian-type position was to soften with maturity, as we shall see later. Lewis' Christological ideas and his understanding of natural theology were to undergo change and development over a thirty-year period. His understanding of Christological prefigurement and myth developed from 1931 to 1961; the evidence is in his writings.18 A paper read to an undergraduate literary society in 1940 contains the kernel of his developing ideas, particularly his understanding of the relationship between natural theology and myth.19 It is in his understanding of miracles, however, that we find the best exposition of his ideas about the mythical-historical nature of the incarnation. Lewis spoke and wrote on several occasions during the 1940s on the subject of the incarnation (the grand miracle as he called it) as well as miracles generally, culminating in the essay,Myth Became Fact20 This is the central text to what I shall call his proposition of Christological prefigurement, though Lewis never gave the proposition a definite title. Lewis opens the essay with a criticism of modern intellectuals, personified by one of his academic colleagues, who though having abandoned the Christian faith persisted in clinging to something of the form – such modern intellectuals were moved, asserted Lewis, by the mythical qualities of the story. It is the myth, Lewis asserts, that gives life. He then examines the distinction between abstract and concrete experience (which we shall come to later), and how this allows myths to express something experiential to us, which we could not grasp otherwise:
The old myth of the dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass … to a historical person crucified under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be a miracle.21
Lewis continues by showing how many derive sustenance from a story's mythical qualities even if they do not assent to its factuality and historicity. But these mythical qualities in the story of Christ are not equal to the reality:
Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied … that it carries with it into the world of facts all the properties of myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren't.22
These ideas around prefigured Christology were in part referred to and further developed in a paper read to The Socratic Club in Oxford –‘Religion Without Dogma?’– in 1946; Lewis developed his fullest exposition of the proposition a year later, however, in chapter 14 of the book Miracles.23 There are also key remarks in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, published in 1955 – chiefly explaining how he came to see the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative as the one true myth (in this case refuting Frazer).
Myth and Event – A Key to Lewis' ChristologyLewis is a classic orthodox theologian in his Christology; however, two propositions distinguish him from the mainstream in orthodoxy: he is prepared to tackle the question of narrative prefigurement, which most theologians dismiss or shy away from; also, he is prepared to write about the mythological/mythopoeic effect the incarnation-resurrection narrative has on us. There is something of a dialectic here (not a method usually associated with Lewis) in his use of myth and event: the former represents the historic event prefigured in religious stories/myths; the latter encompasses the myth derived from the event. Lewis writes of the idea, the content of the story of Jesus (the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) being prefigured in pre-Christian myths; he also writes about the effect that the story of Jesus (again the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) has on us even if we do not believe in the historical reality. There are therefore two different propositions here, not mutually exclusive, but nonetheless dealing with different notions. To proceed with an analysis of these propositions it is necessary to address two questions: ‘What is meant by the phrase I have been using thus far, the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative?’ And, ‘What exactly are these examples of prefigurement that Lewis alludes to (and what do we mean by prefigurement)?’
The Incarnation-Resurrection NarrativeMany see the phrase incarnational narrative as encompassing the whole of Christ's life on earth; Lewis refers generally to the Christian story and specifically to either the incarnation or the resurrection. But he is actually quite vague as to what constitutes the subject and object of prefigurement. This will be shown later when we examine the examples of prefigurement he cites. At its most concise the incarnation narrative, or story, is encapsulated in John 1:14a; the question then arises, what exactly is encompassed by the incarnational narrative when Lewis writes of prefigurement? At times he talks of the incarnation and the virginal conception; at other times the idea of a dying and reviving god. For the purposes of this study we shall refer to the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative as these two points in Christ's earthly life that Lewis regarded as critically fundamental to the faith and to God's salvific action with the world and humanity: first, the Virginal Conception-Incarnation and, second, the Cross-Resurrection. There are numerous allusions pointing towards the incarnation and resurrection in Jewish history and in the Old Testament. Frazer in effect ignores these; Lewis accepts them in faith. What preoccupied Lewis was the evidence of prefigurement in the ancient pagan oral traditions. It is therefore pertinent to examine some of the myths that Lewis alludes to.
Ideas of Prefigurement – IncarnationLewis cites specific pagan myths/gods: for example, Balder, Adonis, and Osiris. In this Lewis draws on three volumes of Frazer's work.24Frazer's work is central to Lewis in his pre-Theistic/Christian period. He supported the concepts and historicism inherent in Frazer's agenda. After conversion he sought to accommodate Frazer's material – he knew he could not simply dismiss it – so he revised it from a Christocentric position. Frazer recorded innumerable examples of stories/myths of what can be considered gods in human form, deified humans, and dying and reviving gods. Of great importance to both Frazer and Lewis is the Northern myth of Balder.
There are cases cited by Frazer of what he terms incarnate gods, though these are in many respects examples of individuals possessed either temporarily or permanently by a presumed divine source. Often these gods are no more than invisible magicians who work behind the veil of nature using a man or woman as means of temporality. When possessed, the host personality is nearly always in abeyance. There is then another class of incarnate god where the host is inspired – again temporarily or permanently – acquiring both divine knowledge and divine power, though this stops short of omniscience and omnipotence. Often these incarnate gods or possessed individuals assume magical powers over nature and the community and exercise awesome political powers within tribal societies: omnipotence (sociologically, anthropologically), but never omnipresence. In the case of a more organised and mature religion, Hinduism, there are prolific examples of human gods. For example, the belief in Chinchvad, near Poona in Western India, that since the seventeenth-century AD there has been an incarnation of the elephant-god Gunputty. The piety, abstinence, mortification and prayer of a Brahman of Poona was such that the god promised a portion of his holy spirit to abide with him and each of seven generations thereafter – so that the light of the god should be transmitted to a dark world.25 There are, it can be argued, countless examples of deification of an individual, or possession either wholly or partly, temporarily or permanently, by spirits or divine powers or gods, but is this the same as the Christian incarnation? Is there anything resembling the incarnation in form or typology?26 Avatars in Hinduism represent the descent of a god to earth in incarnate form. This is often an incarnation or embodiment, or a manifestation. For example, Krishna was the eighth avatar of Vishnu, incarnated to help the five brothers regain their kingdom. Sometimes these gods appear in human form. Avatar (descent in Hinduism) was usually to counteract some evil in this world. However, ‘descending’, ‘appearing’ or ‘abiding’ is not ontologically synonymous with the nature of incarnate being in Jesus of Nazareth. There are similarities but the two are not synonymous: being made flesh with all that is implied in being human – the apparent self-emptying of God – is a different ontological concept altogether. According to a kenotic Christology God empties himself and is incarnated, humbled and vulnerable in the form of a human baby. Possession or deification imparts divine properties; the Christian incarnation divests! That is, although Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine, we can assert that kenosis divests; likewise the adoption of specifically human limitations constitutes disempowerment rather than empowerment. Macquarrie writes that ‘… any revelation of God must be a veiled revelation, for God cannot be revealed directly in a finite earthly medium’.27 Therefore there is a measure of ambiguity even in the revelation of Christ. Barth writes: ‘God is always God even in his humiliation. The divine being does not suffer any change, any diminution … God cannot cease to be God’.28 Humility and weakness are as much a part of God as are power and transcendence. Incarnation in the Hindu, as well as Oceanic, traditions empowers and gives virtual messianic, dictatorial powers over tribal communities; by comparison the Christian incarnation involves self-restraint: power and authority are marked by humility and forgiveness. The idea of an avatar appearing in human form is to a degree Docetic. Once God is incarnate, not just appearing human or abiding, but born as a human, then there is risk – this idea would seem to have absolutely no precedent in mythology and religion. Examples of incarnational prefigurement regard the indwelling of the divine as empowering; despite the divestment that God undergoes. The Gospel writers witness to a glory which is absent in prefigurement (John 1:14b). Is it fair to Lewis' Christology to speak of kenosis and divestment? – yes. In many of his writings he comments on God's restraint and divestment, likewise humiliation in taking on the human frame.29 For example, Lewis cites the literary motif of the ruler who disguises himself to go amongst his people, as one of them. Kierkegaard took this further when he extends the analogy to the folk tale of the king who divests himself of his royal regalia to don the clothes of an ordinary citizen to woo the woman he loves, and then having won her heart reveals himself as her Lord and king.30 This is reminiscent of the courtship of the Hebrew people in the Old Testament, but God does not hide, he is revealed as Yahweh throughout, the one true God, the lord who made heaven and earth (though it is important to remember the Barthian principle that this unveiling also involves a veiling: God is revealed on God's terms only and in freedom – revelation as a vulnerable human baby). The idea of the self-emptying of God in the Christian incarnation is beyond human imagination and comprehension – it is sheer madness from a human perspective. If we accept that humility and weakness are as much a part of God as power and transcendence, however, we can see how the Christian incarnation transcends the stories/myths quoted by Frazer. Lewis does write in his book Miracles about how the incarnation is prefigured in nature – in general revelation – in the sense that there is a descending in the cycle of life: a seed falls to the ground and so forth.31 This is, however, more of an analogy than a prefigurement, and there is still no ontological parallel with the self-emptying and self-restraint seen in the Christian incarnation.
As can be seen from the example quoted in the above paragraph, Kierkegaard has written on the question of Christological prefigurement. Whatever the differences between Lewis and Kierkegaard, I propose that there is no actual parallel to the Christian incarnation in Frazer's evidence specifically, or in the work of ethnographers or social anthropologists generally, or even in Lewis' writings. This is another way of reconciling Lewis and Kierkegaard when the latter asserts in the guise of his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, that
Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted to be the single individual's point of departure for his eternal consciousness … No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (which is for memory) has ever had this idea – of which in this connection one can say with all multiple meanings that it did not arise in any human heart.32
It is further proposed that there is also no evidence in any of Lewis' writings, correspondence, or papers that I have examined that he had thought through the implications of incarnational prefigurement to this degree. There may be analogies, pointers, but there is no parallel, ontologically, epistemologically or, more important, soteriologically with the Christian incarnation: none of the examples in Frazer of incarnate gods generally33 or of a Hindu avatar specifically can atone and reconcile for original sin, for the Fall. What Lewis does is point to analogies or figurative similarities. Why these are there will be considered later when we examine Lewis' concept of imagination. Let us move on to the idea of a dying and reviving god.
Ideas of Prefigurement – ResurrectionGenerally speaking there is greater evidence of prefigurement in the examples of dying and reviving (not necessarily resurrected) gods. Lewis was a classicist and knew his Greek myths – for example the story of Adonis, a beautiful youth beloved by the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, slain by a wild boar while hunting. Following Aphrodite's pleas the god Zeus restored him so he should spend the winter months with Persephone in Hades and the summer months with Aphrodite. The story was considered symbolic of the natural cycle of death and rebirth. Both Lewis and Frazer place great emphasis on the myth of Balder.34 The god of light and joy in Norse mythology (son of Odin and Frigga, king and queen of the gods) Balder – or Baldhr – was regarded as beautiful, compassionate, and graceful compared to the other gods. Frigga, having dreamed that Balder's life was threatened, extracted an oath from the forces and objects in nature that they would not harm him, but overlooked the mistletoe. The gods, thinking Balder safe, rained blows and objects at him. Loki maliciously placed a twig of mistletoe in the hands of the blind Hoder, god of darkness, and directed his aim against Balder. Balder fell, mortally wounded, pierced to the heart. After his death Odin sent another son, the messenger Hermod, to the underworld to plead for his return. Balder's release was conditional on everything in the world weeping for him. Everything wept except one old woman in a cave, and so Balder could not return to life. Balder's characteristics are in many ways similar to those of Christ – love, joy, light, beauty, compassion; there are also similarities with the logos, the Word. Furthermore, similarities can be seen with the suffering Christ, though more with the Hebrew concept of the scapegoat. Balder, however, does not take on death voluntarily – he is tricked by Loki, unaware that he is not immune to mistletoe. Jesus wrestled with his fate in the Garden of Gethsemane but accepted what was to befall him. What is more, there is the potential for Balder being revived or restored, but this falls short of resurrection: it does not happen. There is a similar potentiality with the Egyptian god Osiris: he is tricked into death, like Balder, by an evil brother. Because of the love and lamentations for Osiris, the sun-god Ra initiates the restoration of the broken and fragmented body of the murdered god – Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings, Osiris is revived and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other world. Again similarities, but does this constitute a parallel? Furthermore, neither in the story of Balder nor Osiris (nor the many other stories of dying and reviving gods) is there an explicit reference to the resurrection of anincarnate god. Such a story is beyond human comprehension or invention (part of Kierkegaard's paradox). Lewis and Kierkegaard are looking at different elements of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative – Kierkegaard focuses on the detail, Lewis looking at generalisations. Kierkegaard holds to the uniqueness of the incarnational narrative (the Word became flesh) and in a specific sense he is right – a critical evaluation of the supposed parallels in pagan and Hindu mythology confirm Kierkegaard's reservations. Lewis was talking in terms of generalisations. He uses the term ‘prefigurement’ to indicate foreshadowing. To be more specific prefigurement indicates a similarity figuratively, or by type; that is, to be like metaphysically, psychologically, and for that matter sociologically, but not in actuality. In one sense dreams prefigure reality; in another sense the whole of the Old Testament prefigures Christ. This raises the question, to what extent do these pagan myths prefigure Christ? Is this an example of natural theology, or general revelation, or echoes of a specific revelation? There is the analogy with death and resurrection in the natural world. Is this an example of general revelation – that is, the idea of seeds dying to bring forth new crops? There are myths the world over of corn gods, but it is difficult to justify the idea of mythological parallels to the incarnation of God or the death and resurrection of Christ. These parallels do not hold when systematically analysed, epistemologically, ontologically, or soteriologically; but there are prefigurements, echoes – indicative, characteristically, of type and form, relating to the one story that was rooted historically in an actuality.
Lewis and Natural Theology, Revelation and ImaginationLewis places great emphasis on prefigurement in the sense that I have just outlined: that these pagan Christs are a foreshadowing, an alluding to, that they relate figuratively to the Incarnation-Resurrection. Lewis' mature beliefs about natural theology generally, and on revelation, inspiration, and imagination specifically, will be examined so as to ascertain the value he placed on prefigurement.
After his conversion, and in contradiction to the Feuerbachian-Freudian atheism already noted, Lewis assigned a value to natural theology in keeping with his churchmanship, central Anglican with leanings towards the (Anglo) Catholic. Lewis read and was influenced by the Greek philosophers but also Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. Although Aquinas had formulated the distinction between natural and revealed theology (a distinction hardened by theologians in response to the enlightenment), Lewis subscribed to the older Augustinian view that there is no unaided knowledge of God. Lewis was therefore profoundly influenced by Augustine in the value he gave to natural theology, also in the deep respect he held for Platonic idealism. We thus find the post-conversion Barthian-type rejection softening as he absorbs this other, older approach to natural theology. For example, Augustine writing to Deogratius comments,
Therefore, from the beginning of the human race, whosoever believed in Him, and in any way knew Him, and lived in a pious and just manner according to His precepts, was undoubtedly saved by Him, in whatever time and place he may have lived.35
Thence comes Lewis' respect for natural theology and natural law. Augustine continued,
For as we believe in Him both as dwelling with the Father and as having come in the flesh, so the men of the former ages believed in Him both as dwelling with the Father and as destined to come in the flesh … Wherefore the true religion, although formerly set forth and practiced under other names and with other symbolical rites than it now has, and formerly more obscurely revealed and known to fewer persons than now in the time of clearer light and wider diffusion, is one and the same in both periods.36
Therefore, the true religion was perceived in part, or ‘more obscurely revealed’prior to the specific revelation of Christ; this is the position Lewis came to hold. The question arises, what form did these intimations take? Or, more pertinently, what is the means whereby such ideas can feature in the thought of men and women?’ To answer this, it is necessary to examine the place of imagination generally in theology, and in particular, to focus on Lewis’ understanding of imagination and how it relates to revelation, inspiration, and illumination.
Imagination is rooted in creativity – where do ideas come from? Imagination has had a troubled standing in Western philosophy and theology. In the Reformed tradition imagination was considered suspect. Calvin wrote ‘God rejects without exception all shapes and pictures, and other symbols by which the superstitious believe they can bring him near to them. These images defile and insult the majesty of God’.37 In the Reformed tradition this suspicion of images influenced not only architecture and decoration but also created a highly conceptualised form of articulation which sought to reduce image-type thinking amongst theologians. Lewis' religious roots were in the Reformed tradition, Ulster Presbyterianism, yet he did not follow this tradition. When he embraced Christianity it was as an Anglican – pertinently it is his professional work in literature rather than this Anglican tradition that influences his ideas about imagination. In sharp contrast to the negative view of imagination in the Reformed tradition there exists a very positive tradition – for example, the Romantic idealists such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Friedrich Schelling who regarded a form of imagination derived from Kant's aesthetic idealism as important. As poet, philosopher, and theologian Coleridge distinguished ‘primary imagination’, from ‘secondary imagination’ and/or ‘fancy’. He wrote:
The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready-made from the law of association.38
The ideas in Coleridge's account of primary imagination (relating to the imago Dei in so far as through imagination, men and women are made in the image of God, reproducing the mind of God in miniature) were a profound influence on Lewis.39 He cites them obliquely as instrumental to his intellectual and religious development on a number of occasions in his spiritual autobiography.40 George MacDonald, whom Lewis regarded as a profound influence on his understanding of myth, saga, story, wrote a full exposition on Coleridge's ideas in an essay published in 1895.41 This is almost certainly the point of contact Lewis had initially with these ideas. For MacDonald, the imagination is the medium by which we enquire into God's creation. Imagination therefore occupies a central place in enquiry, in hypothesising, in creating mental-images (for example, mental model-making and conceptualisation as practised by scientists and historians, but also by theologians).42 Methodologically, from the perspective of the philosophy of theology, David Kelsey writes, ‘At the root of any theological position, there is an imaginative act in which a theologian tries to catch up in a single metaphorical judgment or model the full complexity of God's presence’.43 In this respect, it may be valid to consider that those who composed (or imagined) the stories of incarnation or dying and reviving gods, myths of prefigurement, are methodologically operating in a similar way to contemporary theologians. It has been argued that a theologian of whatever persuasion (for example, Catholic or Calvinistic) undertakes an act of imagination. S/he will select from the knowledge base in the culture and tradition s/he operates within those structures which are to form the system behind a theological position. By comparison, Seerveld, writing from the viewpoint of a biblical, Reformed tradition, distinguishes on the one hand between imagining which is perceptual error and on the other hand imagining that is an oracle of truth.44 Lewis wrote, ‘I think that all things reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least’.45 Further, ‘that imagination is distinct from thought; thought may be sound while accompanying images are false’.46 Lewis acknowledges that the mind is illuminated by the divine and that this leads to a degree of understanding – theological activity is not solely the result of human striving and searching. The imagination can, under certain circumstances, be an oracle of truth where general cognitive activities fail.
For Lewis, therefore, there is still the possibility of prevenient grace allowing inspiration and intimation, though as we shall see, such revelatory reception is still subject to the Fall: Lewis talks of the pagan imagination being baptized to a degree, though such minds continued to be corrupt after the event, misinterpreting and misusing what was given – they became ‘corrupt in their imaginations … one road leads home and a thousand lead into the wilderness’.47 Generally speaking, from a Reformed position, the imagination is indelibly corrupted by original sin. Calvin, as we saw, dismissed images or mental pictures/models, the product of human imagination, where humanity believed it could bring God near.48 Lewis would not necessarily have disagreed with this. What he did assert was that God used this fallen human imagination, images and mental pictures/models, to communicate some sort of intimation of God's salvific actions: the prefiguring images/myths were for Lewis pneumatologically given, not humanly invented.
II. CHRIST AS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IN REALITY AND IN MYTHOPOEIC INTIMATIONS
So if we accept that many theologians of whatever persuasion may use ‘secondary imagination’ (or Coleridge's ‘fancy’) to create conceptual models relating, in this case, to Christological theories; likewise if we accept that the imagination can under certain circumstances be an oracle of truth, that it may give some understanding or intimation of a revelatory nature relating to God's salvific redemptive action in Jesus Christ amongst prophets and mystics (a word that would need serious qualification), subject always to the taint and limits imposed on the mind by the Fall, and further that all is subject to the specific self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ and that all valid natural theology is reliant upon grace, then we can cautiously postulate that there is validity in Lewis' general proposition of Christological prefigurement. That is, that throughout many cultures, societies and religions there have been intimations relating to the specific self-revelation of God in Christ, transpositions of the divine theme of redemption, fragments of the truth that point to Christ whether pre- or post-Incarnation-Resurrection (the myth of Osiris is pre-Incarnation-Resurrection and hence a prefigurement; many Hindu avatars are both pre- and post-Incarnation-Resurrection, and are hence both prefigurements and echoes). In narrative form these intimations can have a power similar to the actual Gospel narrative; however, the fullness of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection is unique and has not, could not, as Kierkegaard asserted, be prefigured or replicated.
So if it is accepted that there is a degree of prefigurement relating to the story of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, though there are no direct or indirect parallels ontologically, epistemologically and soteriologically; if it is also accepted that Lewis had a broad respect for natural theology in keeping with Augustine, and that his appreciation saw natural theology not merely as intellectual/philosophical gropings for an understanding of God, but rather as bound up with the revelation in Christ (because a distinction should not be made between general and specific revelation, but rather the degree to which God reveals himself in a multitude of instances), then it can be accepted that the imagination should not be seen as intrinsically flawed and evil, but can under certain circumstances be an oracle through which God gives some understanding of a revelatory nature. We can now proceed to three questions: first, how do these prefigured ideas come to be in the pagan myths and how do these intimations relate to Lewis' understanding of Christ as the light of the world; second, how does the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative act/operate on us as a myth, whether spoken or read? And finally, is there internal evidence for a mythopoeic interpretation within the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative? Along the way we need to examine the perlocutionary effect these stories have and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit; also Lewis' neo-Platonic assertion that where there is light, there is Christ – that as the light of the world, Jesus Christ illumines the minds of those outside cognitive knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection. Finally, we will examine Lewis' own mythopoeic creation, his ‘supposal’: Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia: how much is Aslan an accurate intimation or echo of the divine truth of Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected for our redemption?
Splintered Fragments of the True Light: How do these Prefigured Ideas come to be in Pagan Myths?Although as an eighteen-year old atheistic apostate Lewis viewed all mythology and scripture as a human creation, Lewis' position changed as his faith and his theology developed. By the time of his mature writings he believed that such myths, stories, and ideas (prefigurement and echoes of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative) were inspired by God; God was the source and ground of the meaning and intention behind the story of Balder and Osiris, or the intimations of incarnation in the Hindu avatars. In this sense he draws on Tolkien's concept of mythopoeia and on Coleridge's definition of imagination. Lewis did not, as we have seen, subscribe to a wholly Reformed position with regard to natural theology and revelation. Lewis agreed with Augustine, however, that there is no unaided knowledge of God; this is close to a Reformed position, but Lewis now gave credit to natural theology, and to the imagination that many in the Reformed tradition would not. Furthermore, he believed that there is value, even intimations of a revelatory nature, in other religious experience, although any value in such general revelation is in relation to and qualified by the specific self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ (again a point of confluence with Augustine). Lewis explicitly ascribes mythopoeia to God: God is the creator and author of these myths. Lewis was deeply influenced here by Tolkien's theory of sub-creation49– that it is from God that people draw their ultimate ideals, especially some of their imaginative inventions which, if they originate with God, must reflect something of the divine truth – or as Tolkien put it, a ‘splintered fragment of the true light’.50 To Tolkien all ‘storytellers’ are ‘sub-creators’ under God the ‘prime-creator’, and hence ‘pagan myths are never just lies – there is always something of the truth in them … God [was] expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of His eternal truth …’51 Lewis argues in ‘Myth Became Fact’ that our only response to God acting mythopoeically is for us to be mythopathic, sympathetic, and empathetic to these intimations: ‘If God chooses to be mythopoeic – and is not the sky itself a myth? – shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact’.52 As we have seen, Lewis often refers to Coleridge's concept of imagination; human perception of God acting mythopoeically would appear to be an example of Coleridge's ‘secondary imagination’– like the ‘primary imagination’ but only in degree, operating as an echo of the ‘primary imagination’ in the conscious mind. Such intimations of the Incarnation-Resurrection, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are a step removed from the actuality of the Gospel reality and hence are prefigurements or echoes resulting from the illumination of the logos– the true light that enlightens all, which was to come into the world (John 1:9). In a paper read to The Oxford Socratic Club in 1944 Lewis wrote,
The Divine light, we are told, ‘lighteneth every man’. We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story – the theme of incarnation, death and rebirth. And the differences between the pagan Christs (Balder, Osiris, etc.) and the Christ Himself is much what we should expect to find.53
Therefore, in none of the examples of prefigurement-echoes do we find an actual self-emptying incarnation of God or a dying and actualresurrection of God incarnate. The incarnation narrative (as expressed in John 1:14a) – is rooted in historical actuality. This can only happen once; any prefigurement-echo is a pointer, a glimpse, and must stop short of the reality. The actuality is not a human invention, nor can such prefigurements parallel the Christian incarnation – the paradox, as Kierkegaard put it. The light that illuminated the pagans, the Greeks, and the Hindus may be considered in this context to be the same light that is referred to in the prologue to John's Gospel. Lewis goes as far as to suggest that ideas of God's saving purposes were not only foretold in the Hebrew religion, but that images or mythical pictures were given within the North European pagan myths, in the ancient Egyptian religion, and in Hinduism, to name but three of the instances that Lewis alludes to. In The Pilgrim's Regress he wrote using allegory, suggesting that God gave ‘the shepherds’ (the Hebrew people) ideas and rules and set their feet on the road, but that he gave images to the pagans. He also asserts that the mythology of the pagans contained a divine call; however, they mistook the images for what they were not and became ‘corrupt in their imaginations’. Hence ‘one road leads home and a thousand lead into the wilderness’.54 The degree to which the imagination can be an oracle of truth is debatable: Calvin, as we saw, was dismissive of the imagination. Broadly speaking, the Reformed tradition regards both the imagination and natural theology as suspect at best and of little consequence – emphasis is placed rather on sin and human fallenness. Lewis, however, does address the question of sin and fallenness. He writes both in his autobiography and in his theological writings on the notion of a baptized imagination.55 In its highest form, this is where the imagination (essentially a form of mental activity held to be distinct from cognitive or rational processes, a free and creative ordering of the contents of the mind) is governed by the Holy Spirit; because of original sin, an unbaptized imagination fails to perceive the intrinsic value and meaning in stories and myths from a God-ward, and hence true, perspective. The hearers (and these stories were nearly always part of an oral tradition) may not ‘know’ the details of when the virgin conceived, when her Son died on a cross or rose from the dead, but something of the profound effect of this true story would have worked on them – and on us – and not just at a psychological level; it may be that their/our very being is reordered to a degree and reoriented towards the one true God, despite the maze and confusion of religious ideas. Lewis would have concurred with the Reformed position that the imagination is fallen and tainted by original sin, but he would have argued that it is not irredeemable in this life. He does not tie the baptism of the imagination to an explicit liturgical practice; the Spirit blows where it wills (Genesis 1:2b and John 3:8). Lewis sees a baptized imagination as the key to comprehending ultimate reality: this knowledge of reality is apprehended by acquaintance with and participation in the divine logos. A person comprehending ultimate reality, a reality illuminated by the logos (in the sense of an immediate, intuitive, and imaginative capacity) has perception of God to the extent that such acquaintance and perception is considered by Lewis to be revelatory; however, the rational interpretation of such an experience may be subject to distortion and communication of the experience may be flawed. Revelation of this kind is mediated through human faculties: it is human to err. Hence Lewis explains in The Pilgrim's Regress that those in receipt of the Northern European myths misinterpreted and misused the images they were given. Lewis assumes that the pagan imagination (individually or collectively) was to a degree baptized when it received/perceived the images; however, we must presume that the imagination of such an individual, and those subsequently hearing the human record of these intimations, were, relatively speaking, flawed. Lewis does not consider whether epistemological baptism is permanent this side of eternity; human epistemic limitations would seem to militate against such a possibility, as does the fact that we are ever subject to the vagaries of sin –simul iustus et peccator.
Is Lewis therefore conceiving of the universal resurrected Christ, the logos, working on people's minds regardless of whether they knew what had happened or was to happen in Palestine two thousand years ago? Such illumination, the work of the Spirit, moves and operates where and how it will, and we cannot utterly dismiss its salvific effect on – in the case of Lewis' prefigurement theories – the North European pagan tribes who were subject to these myths (the salvation outside of knowledge in Matthew 25?). But, none of these prefigurements actually replicate what will/did happen on the Cross. There is, therefore, something of a universal Platonic form to Lewis' understanding of the resurrected Christ. Tolkien, as we saw, referred to such intimations as splintered fragments of the true light; for Lewis, where there is enlightenment, there is Christ: as the light of the world, Christ illumines the minds of those outside the cognitive knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection. Karl Barth worked on the same principle, but in a more systematic way than Lewis. In the fourth volume of his Church Dogmatics,56 he does not assert Jesus Christ as light and truth from the one light and truth that is God, he asserts that Jesus Christ simply is this light and truth (the one light and truth that is God). He is the light of the world; Jesus is the divine light flooding the world with his light. These other lights must be part or related to this one true light; they are not independent. As with Lewis, this does move Barth in a universalistic direction: if Jesus Christ is the light of the world then there is a degree to which this light can be recognised anywhere – in the secular world, and not only in the religious. Barth writes:
Are these truths outside the one? Yes, for the creature has its being and existence outside God. But as lights of the creature these truths are refractions (in this connection there is a real place for the term) of the one light and appearances (this term is also justified at this point) of the one truth. If they have force, value, validity, these are not independent. Primarily and finally, they are not their own. They are merely those which are lent them by the shining of the one light of the one truth. These are lights and truths of the theatrum of the gloria Dei.
… But as this light rises and shines, it is reflected in the being and existence of the cosmos which is not created accidentally, but with a view to this action and therefore to this revelation.57
These refractions (Barth uses Brechungen) of the one light and truth are appearances (Barth uses Erscheinungen) of God's self-declaration, the self-revelation of God. Lewis and Barth are referring to truths that come from Christ – refractions for Barth, intimations for Lewis, splintered fragments of the true light for Tolkien. They are saying that where Christ is not known or recognised, or cognitive knowledge of the event is impossible, the Christ's truth and light has to break in. The Incarnation-Resurrection is the one real event in this; it is part of the history of this world. Hence for Barth these truths are refractions, because the one light is an expression of the one truth. Apart from Christ there is no light and no truth; but divine light-truth is often distinct from human light-truth, and we may filter this true light though our fallenness (also we must heed to Paul's warning about dark forces parading themselves as the light – 2Corinthians 4 & 14). As we have seen, Lewis asserted that those receiving or hearing these intimations mistook the images for what they were not and became corrupt in their imaginations – one road led home and a thousand lead into the wilderness.58 Did this sublapsarian confusion lead to a multiplicity of gods and religious theories? – eventually to a degree of apophatic denial? This leads into the question of how the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative operates on us when we hear it mythopathically.
How does the Incarnation-Resurrection Narrative Act/Operate on us as a Myth, whether Spoken or Read?In his essay ‘Myth Became Fact’ Lewis deals with the question of how and why the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative acts upon us both mythopoeically and as the record of an actuality: an historical event. Lewis explains that the human intellect is incurably abstract, while the only realities we experience are concrete, ‘… this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending pleasure, pain or personality’. Lewis shows that when we begin to intellectualise abstractly, the concrete realities are reduced to the level of mere instances or examples:
We are no longer dealing with them but that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma – either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside of it … But when else can you really know these things? ‘If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain’. But once it stops what do I know about pain?59
Lewis cites myth as a partial solution to this dilemma. In listening to and being carried by a myth, he asserts that we come nearest to experiencing as concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. While we receive a myth as story, we experience the principle concretely, but as soon as we translate, we are left with abstraction. To Lewis it is not truth that flows into us from the myth but reality; he notes how ‘truth is always about something, but reality is that about which [Lewis' emphases] truth is … every myth is the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level’.60 Therefore the Gospel story generally, and the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative specifically, operate on us mythopoeically precisely because they convey to us the reality that they represent: whether one believes or not in the reality (the historical actuality of the incarnation and resurrection), the story acts upon us like a myth – many people today will comment about how nice it would be if the story of Jesus were true. The reality is touching them, not just the abstract truth which they opt to reject. Lewis writes further:
Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact … I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.61
There is of course a heavy dose of Platonic idealism in this, and we must not forget the influence of classicism and the theology of the Patristic era on Lewis; he wrote about how the story of the incarnation ‘comes down from the heaven of legend and the imagination’62 to us to become reality. Is Lewis talking about a Platonic form? In any case, whether assent is given or not, the story/myth works on us concretely – the reality touches us, though we must acknowledge that for some it may not. The Incarnation-Resurrection narrative acting on us mythopoeically would seem, therefore, to have a perlocutionary effect. Following Lewis' proposition through, we do not just think abstractly about this narrative and draw conclusions; it acts upon us in a perlocutionary way: in perceiving the reality, the words do something, as in causing someone to blush, or when someone suitably authorised declares a couple to be man and wife. For most people this effect cannot be avoided; what is conveyed is monumental. This is related to the doctrine of illumination – how the Spirit illumines our minds and hence the text with understanding – how the Spirit enables us to accept the text in what it claims. This was so for the tribal warriors who listened after a feast in some great Northern hall to the story of Balder (though we saw earlier how the story fell short of actual god-like resurrection); the story had a perlocutionary effect upon them (intimations on a deeper level than the conscious mind of God's salvific intentions and actions in relation to humankind) similar to the way the incarnation-resurrection narrative was spoken and received as an oral tradition by the apostles and disciples in Jerusalem, Damascus, and Antioch in the immediate months and years after the resurrection: listen to what God has done for you! This leads to questions about the nature of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative.
Is there Internal evidence for a Mythopoeic Interpretation within the Incarnation-Resurrection Narrative?If a mythopathic view of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative is to be seen as valid, then the question arises as to whether the narrative supports such a view. There is not scope within this paper to analyse both Old and New Testaments to reach an answer, especially in view of the relation between many of the Old Testament stories and myths from other Middle Eastern societies; however, a brief examination of Lewis' ideas on this subject is possible. In a chapter on the Incarnation-Resurrection in Miracles63 Lewis addresses the problem as he sees it. He writes that although the story of Jesus has remarkable parallels with the principle of descending and re-ascending within nature myths, there is no suggestion in the Gospels of a self-awareness of this parallel by Jesus or his disciples. In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. This is a familiar pattern in nature – all life must descend (i.e. a seed) to re-ascend. Cultures all over the world have death and resurrection myths woven into their perception and understanding of the natural world; many such myths are elevated to the status of ‘corn kings’– the king must die in the ground as a seed to re-ascend, to grow again, to rule again. Lewis writes,
The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key.64
Many at the time could have seen Christ as just another corn-king. Yet although Jesus was addressing an agrarian society, and although the metaphor of a seed falling and dying to rise again is used in his sayings as well as in other parts of the New Testament,65 there is no conscious parallel drawn between this observable fact of creation and the reality of God descending to re-ascend, taking a fallen creation with him. Lewis writes, ‘The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts [Lewis' emphasis] the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs … It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that it disbelieved in sea-serpents’.66 Lewis addresses this problem by asserting that the Christians are not simply claiming that God was incarnate in Jesus, but that the one true God whom the Hebrews worshipped as Yahweh had descended. On the one hand this is the God of creation – of nature. On the other hand this is not a nature-god. This is the God for whom the earth is his foot stool, not his vesture –‘Yahweh is neither the soul of nature nor her enemy …’67 We can therefore understand why Christ is at once so like the corn-king and so silent about him. He is like the corn-king because the corn-king is a portrait of Him. Elements of nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teachings of Jesus and from Hebrew history, in particular the Covenant, because of the unique calling of the Hebrew people to testify to the one true God, author and lord of creation, not merely a part of creation:
In them you have from the very outset got in behind nature-religion and behind nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear, that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of nature-gods; not because the nature-gods were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likenesses to the thing itself.68
Hence there is no internal evidence within the Gospels; likewise, there is no direct parallel between the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative and these echoes and prefigurements which are merely shadows, because to Lewis the Christ event is the reality beyond the shadows breaking in to redeem: thence Lewis at his most Platonic. Further, we find that the value he gives to prefigurement, and for that matter natural theology and natural or general revelation is entirely subordinate to the reality of the Christ event, which in many ways transcends religion.
A Temporal Paradox?There is an issue/question that we alluded to: some of these prefigurements occur in ancient Egyptian myths, or in North European pagan societies and religion prior to the event of the Incarnation-Resurrection in Palestine two-thousand years ago; others after – for example, in India, perhaps only a few hundred years ago, though they may have been received-composed in ignorance of the Christ event. There is something of a paradox here, which raises the question of time: we must see the Incarnation-Resurrection as being at the centre of time; therefore any pneumatologically inspired intimations, echoes and/or refractions about or related to the Christ event are to be seen as derivative from and reliant for meaning upon this central event. Indeed, they must all be seen pertinently as echoes from this single, cataclysmic event. Conventionally we see time in our reality, our universe, starting with the big bang, with creation ex nihilo, and leading teleologically to the eschaton. However Christologically we must see time starting and ending in our reality with the Incarnation-Resurrection; therefore all mythopoeic creations that point to or are narrative echoes of the truth of the Incarnation-Resurrection relate to this central event, whether they occur before or after the reality of the Incarnation-Resurrection according to the chronologically linear perception of time. Christologically, time must be seen as circular – everything in our reality, everything that has lived, is alive, or will live is a creation ex nihilo related to and radiating out like the ripples on a pool from this central point in our reality: pertinently this point is focused down onto the moment of the death of Christ on the Cross. Temporally the effect of the incarnation-resurrection can be identified like the point of disturbance from a stone touching the surface of a pool, but the shock waves radiate in all directions – rippling the surface of the water, but also radiating into the depths and fanning out as shock waves through the air; this is how the incarnation-resurrection effects our spacio-temporal reality, because the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us and we crucified it, and it rose again from the dead … Generally speaking, all of these pneumatological mythopoeic intimations, echoes, and/or refractions that point to or are related to God's Incarnation-Resurrection are essentially formed in cognitive unawareness, inspired and composed in a lack of knowledge of the historic actuality of the Incarnation-Resurrection, but profoundly affected by the event nonetheless.
Lewis' ‘Supposal’Lewis went beyond an academic Christological speculation about intimations, echoes, or refractions of the Gospel in the world's religions and mythologies; he wrote his own Christian myth –The Chronicles of Narnia.69 Lewis' aim was to present the love, light, and truth of God's turn towards creation, as represented in Gospel. He did this because he believed it had been buried, even extinguished to a degree, by Victorian and Edwardian Pietism, by obligation and moralising, and by adult superiority towards children. Lewis wrote:
I thought 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 about 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. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. 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? I thought one could.70
Lewis' initial inspiration was with images:
All my seven Narnia books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood … then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.71
We have noted already Lewis' assertion that God gave images to the pagans, as compared to the law and revelation to the Hebrews.72Lewis' more formal aim was to explore what he termed a ‘supposal’: what if Christ became incarnate in the flesh, the physical reality of another world, as part of another sentient life – not another world within our universe but an entirely different universe, another reality? Lewis decried the label ‘allegory’, concentrating on this term ‘supposal’– a ‘what if’ supposition.73 In writing to a parent in 1958 Lewis asserted,
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all.74
Unlike the prefigurement myths which were in effect created and heard outside of cognitive knowledge about or awareness of the Incarnation-Resurrection, Aslan is a conscious attempt at Christian education within and for a society that knew about Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice but which Lewis believed had lost the plot, due to Pietism and moralising. Although over 100 million copies have been sold (which gives a readership of upwards half a billion) since their original publication in the early 1950s, and in spite of having been translated into most of the world's main languages, because of the nature of a post-Christian society in Britain, it is a fair assumption to say that most of the readers of The Chronicles of Narnia in the early twenty-first century may not have heard of the Gospel reality – in other words, the same target audience that heard the prefigurement myths we have been considering.75
Lewis' ‘supposal’ is something of a fanciful conjecture, a ‘what if …’; he is not necessary asserting and exploring the possibility of multiple incarnations, though he did not eliminate that possibility.76 Lewis argues that the possibility is open for theophanic incarnations to other life forms in other worlds or universes. His understanding of multiple incarnations is derived from Aquinas and then presented in allegorical form in his science-fiction writings.77 Aslan is not meant to be a separate incarnation from Jesus Christ, however; the two would not vie for precedence in the eschaton– they are rather one and the same. They differ only in form, the form taken – the form of a man or the form of a lion, – in each case, a form appropriate to its created environment. These are matters beyond our present concern. The Narnian stories are like the pagan myths for Lewis; they do not exist in their own right to point to their own internal reality and logic – they exist to point to the single historic event in our reality. So how does Aslan re-present Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity, as God incarnate? The important question is not about multiple incarnations, but rather do we thereby come to a deeper, more profound understanding of the Incarnation-Resurrection through Lewis' Christological portrait of God incarnate, crucified and resurrected for our redemption:
Well, I think in his religious books you tend to get a rather hard view of God, now the conception of Aslan, which you have in the children's’ stories seems to me quite different and seems to me to come from a far deeper level in Lewis' character. Aslan is the deity; it is an extraordinarily original achievement. He has, Aslan has, divine qualities of awe, power and authority, yet he exudes love and is himself somehow intensely lovable, so lovable that it is possible for children to want to embrace him, to put their arms about his neck and kiss him. I think that this is perhaps Lewis', yes, highest religious achievement.78
Aslan–Lewis' Mythopoeic Sub-CreationLewis' Aslan is written in the knowledge of the Gospel narrative and is constructed to elucidate, to parallel didactically though not ontologically, the economy of God's salvation. Written into this are existential meetings between Aslan and individuals or even communities. These meetings are reminiscent of Nicodemus' encounter with Jesus in John's gospel: these people-creatures can turn one way or another: they can turn to Aslan or away. There are naturally many encounters with Narnians who believe in Aslan; however, there are other encounters between people-creatures who have not heard of Aslan, or hold diametrically opposite religious beliefs, or are explicitly hostile to Aslan, having been given a false picture of him. These encounters illustrate to a degree Lewis' belief about the intimations given to the pagans that we were considering, and how God's salvific actions through Christ relate to, in this instance, the North European pagan tribes. We can consider two examples – Shasta and Emeth.
Shasta (from The Horse and His Boy) is a boy who runs away from his adoptive father (a fisherman in Calormen) to escape slavery.79 He flees to Narnia with the aid of a Narnian talking horse in the company of Aravis, a Calormen high-born princess. Shasta's religious education in Calormen has been in the cult of Tash – reminiscent of North European pagan religions but also akin to the Middle Eastern religions characteristic of the mighty nations that surrounded and preyed on the ancient Hebrews. In the Temple in Tashban the golden statue of Tash is in the form of a giant bird of prey with multiple arms/limbs. Shasta has been taught that Narnia is a land of evil magic ruled by a sorcerer in the malevolent form of a lion (Aslan). After many heroic adventures, alone and crossing the fog-bound mountains into Narnia he becomes aware of a presence by his side. At first he wonders if it is a ghost, a ghoul, or some monstrous creature. As time passes it does not attack him, and he is more and more concerned; he can hear it moving alongside him. He can sense it sigh and can feel its warm breath on his arm. He eventually plucks up the courage to speak to it, to enquire: ‘One who has waited long for you to speak, answers the Thing’. Shasta shares his troubles about a cruel childhood; the thing comforts him and explains that it was he all along who had guided Shasta and Aravis in their escape, and protected him on many occasions. When he presses the thing to explain why he treated Aravis cruelly (at their first encounter Aslan draws his claws across her back in reparation for the severe flogging the slave received as a result of being drugged by Aravis during the escape), the voice answers,
‘I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own’.
‘Who are you?’ asked Shasta.
‘Myself’, said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook … and again ‘Myself’, whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.
Shasta was no longer afraid … But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.
The mist was turning from black to grey and from grey to white … the whiteness around him became a shining whiteness; his eyes began to blink. He could see the mane and ears and head of his horse quite easily now. A golden light fell on them from the left. He thought it was the sun.
He turned and saw, pacing beside him, taller than the horse, a Lion. It was from the Lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful.
… after one glance at the Lion's face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn't say any thing but then he didn't want to say anything, and he knew he needn't say anything.
The High King above all kings stooped towards him. Its mane, and some strange and solemn perfume that hung about the mane, was all round him. It touched his forehead with its tongue. He lifted his face and their eyes met. Then instantly the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared. He was alone with the horse on a grassy hillside under a blue sky. And there were birds singing.80
Lewis described The Horse and His Boy as being about ‘the calling and conversion of a heathen’.81 Shasta's religious education has corrupted him from a true understanding of Aslan; yet when he eventually meets Aslan, religious concepts and words become irrelevant – he senses and perceives the beauty and love of God incarnate, the fiery brightness and swirling glory, and knows that all he must do is respond in love and gratitude, obedience and commitment. Is Lewis asserting that many pagans will not only have led lives under the grace, protection and influence of Christ, but also, preveniently speaking, had become people who were ready and able to respond to Christ should he choose to reveal himself to them?
We can elucidate by examining a second example: Emeth from The Last Battle.82 Set in Lewis' apocalyptic, eschatologically charged end-of-time, Emeth (Hebrew for faithful, true) is a Calormen warrior who along with an army has invaded Narnia. After death – his death and the destruction of the entire world that was Narnia and the surrounding lands/countries (including Calormen) – Emeth comes face-to-face with Aslan. What strikes Emeth is the size, power and awesomeness of Aslan, but equally his beauty, glory and truth:
But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, ‘Son, thou art welcome’. But I said, ‘Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash’. He answered, ‘Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me’.
…‘Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one’? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, ‘It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted’.
… But I said also (for the truth constrained me), ‘Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days’. ‘Beloved’, said the Glorious One, ‘Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek’.
Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs and caused me to stand upon my feet … then he turned him about in a storm and flurry of gold and was gone suddenly.
And since then … I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved.83
At the general resurrection and judgement all come face-to-face with Aslan and as they look at his face; they either love him, or loath him, they either turn one way or the other. Those who love Aslan and turn to him are not uniquely the Narnians – his followers; there are many creatures who geographically and culturally have never heard of Aslan, or more pertinently have never known him pneumatologically. These creatures turn one way or the other: towards Aslan and into the new heaven and earth, or into the darkness – the decision is Aslan's and Aslan's alone. After this Narnian eschaton there are a group of rebellious renegade dwarves who have lived in Narnia and know about Aslan but are cynical and sceptical; despite being amongst the saved, the redeemed, when they are approached by Aslan in the new heaven and earth they fear him and perceive him as a monster, as a threat.84 They are oblivious to the goodness around them, perceiving kindness as cruelty and the glories of this new creation as dark, dank and rotten. ‘There is no black hole, save in your own fancy’ cries Tirian the last king of Narnia to them.85 Aslan comments to Lucy, ‘You see they will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out’.86Crucially these dwarves lack faith – primarily, faith in Aslan; but their lives, their values, and their behaviour betray this lack of general faith. By contrast Emeth's life, his desires, his actions, all that he was when alive, is evidence of faith in Aslan even though he was culturally and geographically isolated from the Narnia ‘religion’ centred on Aslan (in the same way that those who composed and heard the pagan myths that for Lewis and Tolkien prefigured, in literary content to a degree, Christ's atoning sacrifice, were isolated from the reality that took place in Palestine 2000 years ago). Lewis' use of account, that is, when Aslan declares to Emeth ‘I account as service done to me’, is comparable to Paul's use of reckoned in the context of Abraham's righteousness before God.87 Pertinently, whereas Aslan declares to Tash – the demonic satanic god at the centre of Calormen religion –‘Begone, monster, and take your lawful prey to your own place [i.e. hell]’,88 it is the goodness (something of a Platonic norm or form, in intent?) inherent in Emeth's faith and desire that link him to Aslan, not to Tash. Otherwise Tash would claim him for his own: ‘no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him’.89It is therefore our lives and intentions that betray or confirm our allegiance, not necessarily our religious declarations: the sovereignty andaseity of God in Christ will decide. These passages are Lewis explicitly trying to spell out to his readers the implications of Matthew 25 for non-Christians. In this context Lewis wrote: ‘The truth is God has not told us what his arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him’.90
This does not detract from the uniqueness of Christ; if anything it denies a syncretistic approach to the world's religions. Lewis is presenting his understanding of the eternally electing God who seeks the redemption of all creation, who seeks to be reconciled to his creatures. Aslan's sacrifice (in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) represents the overwhelming love of the absolute supreme, transcendent God, who comes in infinite humility, meekness and modesty in Jesus Christ, gives himself to humanity in unconditional freedom and grace, despite the venomous hatred that humanity/creation heaped on him on the cross/stone table. There are numerous illustrations given by Lewis of encounters between creatures-humans and Aslan where the one thing the creature must do is repent of his/her sins, acknowledging in love the lordship of God incarnate: regarding her brother Edmund (for whom Aslan allows himself to be sacrificed on the stone table because of Edmund's treachery), Lucy comments to her sister, ‘Does he know what Aslan did for him, does he know what the arrangement with the witch really was?’91 As Lewis asserted, it is not necessarily only those who know him (in the manner of cognitive knowledge) who can be saved by him.92 Do we truly know him? Do we fully understand what Christ did for us? We think we do, but is our knowledge any more definite, any more certain or complete than Emeth's or Shasta's? It is only in the eschaton that we will know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
III. CONCLUSION
Lewis' initial justification for these prefiguring myths was in reaction to Frazer's work, because of the value he had given Frazer's agenda and conclusions as a young atheist and apostate. As we have seen, however, Lewis' Christology soon developed a pneumatological justification and role for these myths beyond the context of Frazer's work. Therefore, what does this tell us about God's salvific actions towards humanity – the intention to bring about redemption potentially for all? Lewis is setting out as a soteriological principle that whether we are religious or not – i.e., Christian or not – our salvation lies not in our actions-beliefs, but in what the Lord has done for us. The most we can do is acknowledge, repent and allow the Lord's Spirit to change us, reconcile and redeem us. In the case of those who have consciously heard the Gospel narrative, the story of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection should operate on us in a perlocutionary way: awareness of the narrative is important because of the event it represents. It is because of the importance of the Incarnation-Resurrection narrative that the prefiguring myths should be seen as having a relative value and significance. What of these prefiguring myths? In the case of Emeth and Shasta (who for Lewis are comparable with the pagans and heathens outside of the Judaeo-Christian revelation), this was operating on a subliminal level. Such myths point towards something of the reality of the Incarnation-Resurrection, and may likewise operate in a perlocutionary manner on a subliminal level. However important these pneumatological mythopoeic echoes, intimations, and refractions appear to be, their function is to point towards the real event: Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity crucified and resurrected for our salvation. If you have access to knowledge of the real story, the real event, then why bother with myths? If because of cultural, geographic, or temporal isolation these intimations come to people who can never know the true story, then the myths have a perlocutionary effect on individuals/societies (subject to the degree of reception or rejection, which is governed by our fallen state –simul iustus et peccator) in accordance with the will of the Father, and may or may not work towards God's loving purposes which are the potential salvation and transformation of all humankind.
Footnotes
- 1 Quoted by Tolkien in his poem ‘Mythopoeia’, reflecting Lewis' position up to the point of his conversion: see, Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, ‘Mythopoeia’, in Tree and Leaf (edited by Christopher Tolkien), London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. See also footnote 4. See also, ‘Letter to Arthur Greeves from the Kilns 18 October 1931’, in, W.H. Lewis, (editor) Letters of CS Lewis (revised edition edited & enlarged by Walter Hooper), London: Harcourt brace & Co., 1993. See also: Lewis, Clive Staples, They Stand Together: the Letters of CS Lewis to Arthur Greeves 1914–1963, (edited by Walter Hooper), New York: Macmillan, 1979.
- 2 In particular, see: Lewis, Clive Staples, Studies in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, London: Cambridge University Press, 1966; also, Lewis, Clive Staples, The Discarded Image, London: Cambridge University Press, 1964. For a good introduction to Lewis's use of story see: Huttar, Charles A. & Schakel, Peter J., Word and Story in CS Lewis, Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press 1991.
- 3 Mythopoeia, mythopoesis, is derived from the Greek (to make); in Platonic Greek, , the term is essentially restricted in use to British academics and writers circa 1870–1960. The adjective mythopoetical, from the Greek , is from the 1950s. Myth is derived from the Greek : in New Testament Greek, a myth, fanciful story; in Homeric Greek, a tale, story, narrative, a legend or fable.
- 4 Evans, C. Stephen, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: the Incarnational Narrative as History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. See also: Evans C. Stephen, ‘The Incarnational Narrative as Myth and History’, in, Christian Scholar's Review, 23: no 4 1994, pp. 387–407; also: Evans, C. Stephen, ‘Mis-using religious language: something about Kierkegaard and the myth of God incarnate’, Religious Studies 15 June 1979, pp. 139–157.
- 5 Evans (1996): Chap. 3 Why the Events Matter: 1. History, Meaning & Myth, pp. 49–51.
- 6 See: Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968; also, Campbell, Joseph, ‘Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art’, in, Joseph Campbell (editor), Myths, Dreams and Religion, New York: EP Dutton & Co., 1970, pp. 138–175.
- 7 Hick, John, ‘Preface’, in, The Myth of God Incarnate, edited by John Hick, London: SCM Press, 1977, p. ix. See also: Hick, John,The Metaphor of God Incarnate, London: SCM Press, 1993.
- 8 Wiles, Maurice, ‘Myth in Theology’ in Hick (1977), p. 149.
- 9 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism’ (paper read at Westcott House, Cambridge, 11th May 1959), published in Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967 (n.b. in later editions the title of this paper is changed to ‘Fern-Seed & Elephants’). See also: Christensen, Michael J., CS Lewis on Scripture, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980; see also, Harries, Richard CS Lewis: the Man and his God, London: Fount, 1987.
- 10 See: Lock, Walter The Gospel According to St John–A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, including the Apocrypha (edited by Charles Gore, Henry Leighton Goudge, Alfred Guillame), London: SPCK, 1928; also: Vidler, Alec, Windsor Sermons, London: SCM Press, 1958.
- 11 Lewis, Clive Staples, An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961: see chp. 5 ‘On Myth’, p. 40f.
- 12 Lewis ‘On Myth’ (1961), p. 41.
- 13 Jonathon Miller, scientist, doctor, media celebrity and self-confessed atheist, has commented of his own piety towards the Christian story: ‘If there is a God then he could have thought of no more powerful, creative and imaginative way of expressing his presence than through his incarnation in Christ, an ‘ordinary’ man’. Quoted in Appleyard, Bryan ‘The True Face of Art’, in, The Sunday Times, London: 13 February 2000.
- 14 Lewis, Clive Stapes, ‘Letter to Arthur Greeves from Great Bookham 12 October 1916’, in, Letters of CS Lewis (1993).
- 15 Frazer, James George, Sir, The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, London: Macmillan, 1911–1915. Initially published in two volumes in 1890, the work then grew to the final 12 volume 3rd edition published 1911–15: volume 1–2, part I,The Magic Art; volume 3, part II, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul; volume 4, part III, The Dying God; volume 5–6, part IV, Adonis, Attis, Osiris Studies in the History of Oriental Religion; volume 7–8, part V, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild; volume 9, part VI, The Scapegoat; volume 10–11, part VII, Balder the Beautiful the Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul; volume 12, Bibliography and General Index. See also: Frazer, Sir James George, The Golden Bough, (abridged edition), London: Macmillan & Co., 1922.
- 16 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Das Wesen des Christentums, (Gesammelte Werke, edited W. Schuffenhauer, vol. 5) Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1973, p. 121 & 207.
- 17 ‘Letter to Arthur Greeves from the Kilns 18 October 1931’, in, Letters of CS Lewis (1993).
- 18 The progressive development of Lewis' understanding is shown in the following works:1931:‘Letter to Arthur Greeves from The Kilns 18 October 1931’, in, Letters of CS Lewis (1993)1933:The Pilgrim's Regress, London: J. M. Dent, 19331940:‘The Kappa Element in Romance’ paper written in 1940, later published as ‘On Stories’, in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, London: Oxford University Press, 19471942:‘Miracles’—preached in St Jude on the Hill Church, London, and appeared in St Jude's Gazette, number 73, October 1942, p. 4–7; a shorter version published in The Guardian, 2 October 1942, was later published in Lewis, Clive Staples, Undeceptions: essays on Theology and Ethics (edited by Walter Hooper), London: Geoffrey Bles, 19711944:‘Myth Becamce Fact’ first appeared in World Dominion Vol. XXII, September–October 1944, pp. 267–270; later published in Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics, (1971)1944:‘Is Theology Poetry?’, read as a paper to the Socratic Club in Oxford and first appeared in print in The Socratic Digest 1944; published in Lewis, Clive Staples, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London: Fontana Books, 19651945:‘The Grand Miracle’ was preached in St Jude on the Hill Church, London, and appeared in The Guardian, 27 April 1945; published in Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1971)1946:‘Religion Without Dogma?’: a paper read to the Socratic Club on 20th May 1946 in answer to a paper of Professor H. H. Price, ‘The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism’, delivered on 20 October 1944. Both were later published in The Phoenix Quarterly (Vol. 1, No. 1 Autumn 1946), p. xx. ‘Religion without Dogma’ was then published in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics(1971); amendments and responses from the floor are in the minute's book of The Socratic Club, published, along with the paper in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Compelling Reason, London: Fount Books, 19961947:‘The Grand Miracle’, an expansion on the kernel of material initially presented in 1942 at St Jude on the Hill Church, published in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Miracles (chp 14), London: Geoffrey Bles, 19471955: Lewis, Clive Staples, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955 (Lewis' spiritual autobiography written during the early 1950s)1959:‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism’ (paper read at Westcott House, Cambridge, 11th May 1959); published in Christian Reflections (1967)1961:‘On Myth’, published in An Experiment on Criticism, (1961)
- 19 Lewis, ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’ (1940).
- 20 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944).
- 21 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944).
- 22 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944).
- 23 Lewis, Miracles (1947).
- 24 Frazer, The Golden Bough (1911–15), volume 4, part III: The Dying God; Frazer, The Golden Bough (1911–15), volume 9, part VI: The Scapegoat; Frazer, The Golden Bough (1911–15), volume 10–11, part VII, Balder the Beautiful the Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul.
- 25 Frazer (1922), p. 121.
- 26 This issue has been dealt with by Scott, David & Selvanayagam, Israel (editors), Re-visioning India's Religious Traditions: Essays in Honour of Eric Lott, Delhi: Published for United Theological College, Bangalore by I.S.P.C.K., 1996; see also, Ward, Keith, God, Faith & The New Millennium: Christian Belief in an Age of Science, Oxford: Oneworld, 1998.
- 27 Macquarrie, John, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, London: SCM, 1990.
- 28 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics IV/1, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–69, §59 The Obedience of the Son of God, p. 179f.
- 29 Lewis, ‘The Grand Miracle’, in, Miracles (chp. 14), 1947.
- 30 Kierkegaard, Søren, Philosophical Fragments (trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, see chp. 2.
- 31 Lewis, Miracles (1947), chp. 14, pp. 117–8.
- 32 Kierkegaard (1985), pp. 35–36, examined in Evans (1996), pp. 53–56.
- 33 Frazer (1922), chp. VII, pp. 109–127.
- 34 Frazer, part VII: Balder The Beautiful Vol I & Vol II (1913); also Frazer, (1922).
- 35 Augustine, ‘Letter no 102 to Deogratius …’, 409 CE, in, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (translated by Revd JG Cunningham)Letters of Saint Augustine, in, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 1, p. 820; part of: Roberts, Alexander; Donaldson, James; Schaff, Philip; Wace, Henry, The Early Church Fathers: Ante-Nicene Fathers–Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325; The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church-First and Second Series (38-Volume Set), William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1979.
- 36 Augustine, ‘Letter no 102 to Deogratius …’, 409 CE, in Cunningham (1979), p. 820.
- 37 Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995, 1:xi.1.
- 38 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria: or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (edited with an introduction by George Watson), Everyman's library 11, London: Dent, 1956, p. 175, see also p. 77. See also: Barfield, Owen, What Coleridge Thought, London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
- 39 For Lewis on imagination see, Schakel, Peter J., Reason and Imagination in CS Lewis: A Study of ‘Till We Have Faces’, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984; also Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism’, in, Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. See also: Swinburne, Richard, The Concept of Miracle, London: Macmillan, 1970; also, Swinburne, Richard, Revelation: from Metaphor to Analogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- 40 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1998 edition, p. 10; pp. 10–11; pp. 25–26; p. 63; p. 130; p. 132; p. 140; p. 153; p. 158; p. 164.
- 41 MacDonald, George, ‘The Imagination’, in, A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare (enlarged edition), London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1895 (written in 1867). See also: Barfield, Owen, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press Paperback 1973.
- 42 For the role of imagination in historical thinking see, for example, ideas indicative of the time when CS Lewis was at the peak of his creative writing, Collinwood, R.G., The Idea of History, London: Clarendon Press, Oxford 1946; or, Kroner, Richard, The Religious Function of Imagination, The Bedell lectures delivered at Kenyon College, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941. In the field of philosophy of science, see: Black, Max, Models and Metaphors. Studies in language and philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962; also, indicative of the understanding around the time of Lewis' intellectual formation, see: Lewes, George Henry, Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1904.
- 43 Kelsey, David H., The Use of Scripture in Recent Theology, London: SCM Press, 1975, p. 163.
- 44 See: Seerveld, Calvin, ‘Imaginativity’, in, Faith and Philosophy 4, Jan 1987, pp. 43–58.
- 45 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955, p. 167.
- 46 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘God in the Dock’, in, Lumen Vitae Vol.3 (September 1948); sentiments also expressed in Miracles (1947) and ‘The Weight of Glory’ (an address first delivered at St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, 13th September 1941, published in Lewis, Clive Staples, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1965). ‘God in the Dock’, was later published in Lewis, Clive Staples, God in the Dock–Essays on Theology, edited Hooper, Walter, London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1979.
- 47 Lewis, Clive Staples, The Pilgrim's Regress, London: J. M. Dent, 1933, Book VIII, Chapter 8, p. 193.
- 48 Calvin (1995), 1:xi.1.
- 49 See, Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, London: Oxford University Press, 1947.
- 50 See, Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’ (1947); see also, Tolkien's poem ‘Mythopoeia’, in Tree and Leaf (edited by Christopher Tolkien), London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. For a summary of these ideas on Lewis see, Carpenter, Humphrey, The Inklings–CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978, pp. 42–45.
- 51 Carpenter (1978).
- 52 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’, first appeared in World Dominion Vol. XXII, September-October 1944, pp. 267–270; later published in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Undeceptions: essays on Theology and Ethics (edited by Walter Hooper), London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971.
- 53 Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry’, read as a paper to the Socratic Club in Oxford and first appeared in print in The Socratic Digest1944; published in Lewis, Clive Staples, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London: Fontana Books, 1965.
- 54 Lewis, Clive Staples, The Pilgrim's Regress, London: J. M. Dent, 1933, Book VIII, Chapter 8, p. 193.
- 55 For instance: Lewis, Clive Staples, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955; also ‘Preface’, in, Lewis, Clive Staples (editor), George MacDonald: An Anthology, London: Geoffrey Bless, 1946; ‘Is Theology Poetry’ (1944); also, Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress, (1933), Book X, esp. Chapter 2.
- 56 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics Vol IV/3i: The Doctrine of Reconciliation Part 3i–Jesus Christ, the True Witness, (editors G. W. Bromiley, T. F. Torrance), Edinburgh: T & T Clark 1961, §69 The Glory of the Mediator, sub-section 2. The Light of Life, p. 151f.
- 57 Barth, CD IV/3i, §69.2, p. 152 &153 (Deutsch: §69. Die Herrlichkeit des Mittlers, 2. Das Licht des Lebens, p. 173 und 174).
- 58 Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress, (1933), Book VIII, Chapter 8.
- 59 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944), p. 34.
- 60 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944), p. 35.
- 61 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944), p. 36.
- 62 Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’ (1944), p. 36.
- 63 ‘The Grand Miracle’, an expansion on the kernel of material initially presented in 1942 at St Jude on the Hill Church, published in, Lewis, Clive Staples, Miracles (chp. 14), London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947, pp. 113–138.
- 64 Lewis, Miracles (1947), chp. 14, p. 118.
- 65 For example, Matthew 13; Matthew 25; Mark 4; Luke 8; Luke 13; Luke 17; 1Corinthians 15; 2Corinthians 9:10; 1Peter 1; 1John 3.
- 66 Lewis, Miracles (1947), chp. 14, p. 119.
- 67 Lewis, Miracles (1947), chp. 14, p. 121.
- 68 Lewis, Miracles (1947), chp. 14, p. 121.
- 69 Lewis, Clive Staples, The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950–56.
- 70 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to be Said’, in, Walter Hooper (editor), Of Other Worlds–Essays and Stories, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966.
- 71 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘It All Began with a Picture …’, in, Of Other Worlds (1966).
- 72 Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress, p. 193.
- 73 Walter Hooper has collated the material gleaned from various letters, essays where Lewis explains his aims, and what he meant by ‘supposal’: Hooper, Walter, CS Lewis A Companion & Guide, London: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 423–26.
- 74 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘Letter to Mrs Hook 29 December 1958’, in, W.H. Lewis, (editor) Letters of CS Lewis (revised edition edited & enlarged by Walter Hooper), London: Harcourt brace & Co., 1993.
- 75 The potency and veracity of Lewis' creation of Aslan is attested to by the level of criticism emanating from secular self-confessed atheistic sources such as the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee (for example her review of the film, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe; see: ‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion’, in, The Guardian, Monday 5th December 2005) and the novelist Phillip Pullman.
- 76 Brian Hebblethwaite has approached the idea of multiple incarnations citing C.S. Lewis as an example of the Thomist belief that although multiple incarnations are theoretically possible, there has never been more than one incarnation of the Word of God to rational humanity. See: Hebblethwaite, Brian, ‘Impossibility of multiple incarnations’, in, Theology, 104 no 821 SeptOct 2001, pp.323–334; also, Kevern, Peter, ‘Limping principles: a reply to Brian Hebblewaite on the impossibility of multiple incarnations’,Theology, 105 no 827 SeptOct 2002, pp. 342–347. In a related field of see: Fisher, Christopher L. and Fergusson, David, ‘Karl Rahner and the Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Question’, The Heythrop Journal, Vol. 47, no 2, April 2006, pp. 275–290; alsoBonting, S.L., ‘Theological Implications of Possible Extraterrestrial Life’, Zygon, Vol. 38, no. 3, September 2003, pp. 587–602.
- 77 Lewis began to explore this in one of his science-fiction books: Perelandra, London: Bodley Head, 1943.
- 78 Comments from Beyond Personality–A memoir of CS Lewis, a documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Sunday 18thDecember 1988, compiled by Ann Bonsor.
- 79 Lewis, Clive Staples, The Horse & His Boy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954.
- 80 Lewis, The Horse & His Boy (1954), chp. 11, p. 127f.
- 81 Lewis, Clive Staples, ‘Letter to Anne 5th March 1961’, quoted in Hooper, Walter, CS Lewis A Companion and Guide London: Harper & Collins, 1996, pp. 425–6.
- 82 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), chp. 15.
- 83 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), chp. 11, p. 152f.
- 84 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), chp. 13, p. 135f.
- 85 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), p. 138.
- 86 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), p. 140.
- 87 ‘… Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned [, from , to charge to one's account, to keep a record of] to him as righteousness. Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned [, from count, reckon, calculate, take into account, credit] as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned [] as righteousness. So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons [] righteousness apart from works’, Romans 4:3–6.
- 88 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), p. 125.
- 89 Lewis, The Last Battle (1956), p. 154.
- 90 Lewis, Clive Staple, Mere Christianity, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952, p. 53.
- 91 Lewis, Clive Staple, The Lion the Witch & The Wardrobe, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950, p. 163.
- 92 Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), p. 53.