As we gear up for Narnia-mania<\/a>, I was not surprised to see in The New Yorker<\/i>, \nIt seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it \n[....]\n<\/p>\n Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion \n[....]\n<\/p>\n \nIt is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this As we gear up for Narnia-mania, I was not surprised to see in The New Yorker, PRISONER OF NARNIA by ADAM GOPNIK (How C. S. Lewis escaped.). Here are some choice quotes: It seemed like an odd kind of conversion … Continue reading
\nPRISONER OF NARNIA by ADAM GOPNIK<\/a> (How C. S. Lewis escaped.). Here are some choice quotes:\n<\/p>\n
\nstill does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich
\nromantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is
\nnot exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we
\nmake up about the world are an important part of the life of that
\nworld—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to
\nbelieve in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a
\ncontroversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point
\nof all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal
\nhistory as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith
\nas the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why
\nthis faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth
\nof Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things
\nhe did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like
\nsomeone who is crazy, he must be right. (He liked this argument so much
\nthat he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia books; either Lucy
\nis lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what she claimed
\nto see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path
\namong others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest
\nreach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by
\nthe funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also
\nhappens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by
\nevery institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he
\nworks in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as
\nGladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith
\nwasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the
\nelements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan
\nmythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian
\nsources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern.
\nEven Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much
\nresented.<\/p>\n
\nof the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is,
\nspecifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the
\nChristian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had,
\nsay, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of
\nNarnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying
\nthe mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean
\nanimals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner
\nas possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples
\nand devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that<\/span>
\nwould be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the
\ntop of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with
\ntemporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then
\nreborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.<\/p>\n
\nstory, becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of
\nsalvation through love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had
\ntwo kids for him to help take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems
\nto have happened. Lewis, to the dismay of his friends, went from being
\na private prig and common-room hearty to being a mensch—a C. of E.
\nmensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer, a few years later,
\nhe was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief Portrayed,” one of
\nthe finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without abandoning his
\nGod, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous
\nbromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable?
\nQuite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less
\njoblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather
\nthan a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal
\nfaith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"