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In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the Narnia series, Eustace, a factual-minded, thoroughly modern boy, meets a fallen star named Ramandu. On hearing that Ramandu is a star, Eustace says, "In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." Ramandu replies, "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."

This distinction between scientia (knowledge, the makeup of things) and sapientia (wisdom, the significance of things) informed all of Lewis's writings, especially his fiction. Except for a brief period as an undergraduate when he tried to adopt modernist skepticism, Lewis spent his life pursuing wisdom. The pursuit led him to the philosophy of Plato and Wordsworth, but he also practiced the common sense Christianity of Samuel Johnson. Even though Lewis was a Platonist, he did not often talk of the visible world as a mere shadow of the real. In Letters to Malcolm, he says, "In fact we should never ask of anything 'Is it real?,' for everything is real." We may think of our world as a stage set, but it is a real stage set. Because he thought everything was real, Lewis could create imaginary worlds with gusto.

In his worlds, missing reality is the prime error. It happens in two ways: either to focus completely on facts and miss significance, or to become self-centered and miss the real beauty of creation. In Lewis's stories, the good people either possess or acquire the ability to touch reality, while the bad people are entangled in illusion. Like the inhabitants of Dante's hell, they lack the good of the intellect.

Lewis's fiction was based on his approach to reality from the beginning, but it became more profound as he followed his imagination. In The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), a satirical allegory dashed off in the heat of his adult acceptance of Christianity, the pilgrim John travels, confused, through the intellectual milieu of the early 1930s. But after he is baptized, he retraces his steps and sees the illusions of modernism. In The Great Divorce (1946), angels, saints, and the environment of heaven are real. They are so solid and heavy that the tourists from hell are mere ghosts in comparison, and the very grass hurts their feet. They are offered the chance to become real, but they prefer to cling to their whiny, self-centered illusions. In The Screwtape Letters (1942), Screwtape, a senior devil in the Lowerarchy of hell, writes to his nephew Wormwood, a field tempter, to teach him how to lead his client away from reality. But Wormwood's temptation efforts are ineffectual; his client dies in an air raid and meets "Them" [the angels] with joy and recognition.

In 1938, Lewis began to publish his space trilogy. All three novels picture the solar system not in terms of what it is made of, but in terms of what it means—not cold, empty space, but golden warmth so full of angelic powers that the planets seem like relative emptiness. These novels show Lewis's growing desire to use popular fiction to turn his readers' hearts toward what is real. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom, the hero, says, "What we need for the moment is … a body of people familiarized with certain ideas."

By the time Lewis wrote Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945), he had realized that "certain ideas" were not as important as the training of feelings. In 1943 he delivered the Riddell Lectures, later published as The Abolition of Man. In it he explains that in literature and the other arts, the child must be guided to feel pleasure in works that are delightful and well made and to "hate the ugly" with "a just distaste." He must learn to "give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart."

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